Julia Child_ A Life - Laura Shapiro [49]
“You’re alone in the kitchen—who is going to see?” This incident became legendary and then apocryphal, revised so many times in the telling that the original event disappeared. Julia dropped a chicken, Julia dropped two chickens, she dropped a turkey, a twenty-five-pound turkey, a pig, a duck, and in each case blithely returned them to their platters—all fantasies, but people recalled them joyfully. They also remembered seeing Julia pour wine into a dish, then finish off the bottle herself, saying, “One of the rewards of being a cook.” Actually, she had been showing how to juice tomatoes and finished the lesson by drinking up the last bit of juice; but memory preferred wine. “Sometimes she forgets to put the seasoning in the ragout; sometimes she drops a turkey in the sink,” wrote Lewis Lapham in the Saturday Evening Post. “In New York’s Greenwich Village…a coterie of avant-garde painters and musicians gathers each week in a loft to watch The French Chef, convinced that Mrs. Child is far more diverting than any professional comedian.” A story in Time played up her “muddleheaded nonchalance”; a piece in TV Guide reported “blunders,” “grunts,” and “mutters.” “Practically every article on Julie so far has concentrated on the clown instead of the woman, the cook, the expert or the revolutionary,” Paul complained to his brother. Julia hadn’t intended to do kitchen vaudeville, but that was the image taking shape—despite the fact that efficiency and competence characterized her television cooking far more accurately than pratfalls did.
Reading the fan mail as well as the press, Julia could see that the informality and humor that came so naturally were doing just what she wanted the show to do: dispel the fog of intimidation around French cooking. Hence she was willing to play up the entertainment aspect of the program, especially in the opening moments—sorting through mounds of tangled seaweed to reveal a twenty-pound lobster, for instance, or standing over a chorus line of six raw chickens exclaiming, “Julia Child presents the chicken sisters! Miss Broiler! Miss Fryer! Miss Roaster! Miss Caponette! Miss Stewer! And old Madame Hen!” But she was of two minds about the bloopers. They were peerless teaching tools: every cook ran into mishaps, and Julia knew that to see the pommes Anna stuck helplessly to the bottom of the pan, then rescued and restored, constituted a more memorable lesson than the original would have been. “It may well happen to you,” she always told viewers as she patched and revised. But she hated making mistakes in public. Informality was one thing; ruining the food was definitely another. And she didn’t want to be known as a bumbling clown; she wanted to be known as a good, professional cook. When hapless beginners wrote to her begging for advice—which they did in such numbers that she composed a form letter to send in response—she was full of sympathy and encouragement, but never admitted having been in the same position herself. “The story of the beginner cook is often a real tale of woe, and I feel for her,” she told them. “Whenever I sew or knit it turns out a disaster. I really think the best thing is to take some cooking lessons…. Cooks are made, geniuses are born, and you can learn to cook with the right instruction—especially if you are lucky enough to be married to someone who loves good food, as that will always inspire you.” It was, of course, her own story, minus the early agony.
“Bon courage!” she bid the audience at the end of the flopped-potato-cake show. Be of good courage! “Courage!” she said again, after a visibly exhausting bout with French bread. When she demonstrated the nerve-racking process of creating a lacy caramel “cage” to go over a cake, she didn’t try to disguise the challenge: she told viewers to fail if they must, and try again. “Cooking is one