Julia Child_ A Life - Laura Shapiro [46]
The self-consciousness that fluttered through the “Boeuf Bourguignon” show quickly disappeared with experience, but Julia retained a real-world quality that television couldn’t tame. Even the food seemed to be a live, spontaneous participant. Julia welcomed it warmly and gave everything she had to the relationship—parrying with the food, letting it surprise and delight her, very nearly bantering with it. Sometimes she lifted a cleaver and made a fine show of whacking the food to pieces, as if they had both agreed beforehand that the end happily justified the means. The day she made bouillabaisse, she placed a massive fish head on the counter and kept it there by her side, one great bulging eye staring out at the camera, while she prepared the stock. Every now and then she found a reason to pick up the gigantic head and fondle it. Tasting, of course, was a recurring event in each program, each taste a cameo moment treasured by the camera. Julia’s whole countenance shut down as she lifted the spoon and focused inward, then she opened up again and, most often, looked pleased. “Mmm, that’s good.” And if there was a chance to nibble, she unabashedly nibbled. After a painstaking demonstration of how to fold the egg whites into the chocolate batter for a reine de Saba cake, she held up the spatula and announced, “We have this little bit on the edge of the spatula which is for the cook.” Avidly, she licked up the raw batter—a treat as old as cake baking—and added, “That’s part of the recipe.”
Julia never said cooking was easy, but she said many times that anybody could learn it who wanted to. Viewers following her through the steps of a recipe could see for themselves how the consistency of a batter changed as the eggs were added, could watch the chocolate melting safely over a pan of hot water, could read the confidence in her motions as she snipped the gills off a sunfish with shears, or plunged a lobster headfirst into boiling water. Nothing was left unsaid, very little was relegated to instinct. Often she tossed in salt or spices without using a measuring spoon, but she always knew the exact amounts and mentioned them. “Here’s what half a teaspoon of salt looks like,” she said once, and poured it into her hand to show people. She was teaching people to use their senses when they cooked, because she thought the senses belonged in every well-run kitchen, like good knives. There was no better instrument in the service of accuracy than an attentive cook who was watching and smelling and tasting. Monitoring the progress of a syrup for candied orange peel, she made a point of listening for the “boiling sound” coming from the mixture. You can use a thermometer here, she told viewers, “but I think it’s a good thing to see and feel how it is.”
Cooking shows had been a staple of early television, but none of them bore any resemblance to The French Chef. Most were plain-spun, local broadcasts featuring a home economist or food editor. James Beard and Dione Lucas, two of the best-known culinary authorities before Julia’s arrival on the scene, had starred in their own cooking programs, but neither of these experts was able to develop the skill or personality demanded by the screen. Their shows left no mark on the medium. By the 1960s, cooking had been relegated to the dim wastes of daytime TV, where it reveled in the simpleminded sentiments considered appropriate for housewives. Julia’s real peers were those beloved figures who made instant, indelible impressions in the first decades of television—Lucille Ball, Steve Allen, Milton Berle. Yet she stood out here, too, because what she was doing on-screen didn’t fit any existing categories. She invented