Julia Child_ A Life - Laura Shapiro [5]
CONTENTS
PREFACE
Chapter 1 Hungry
Chapter 2 Prof. Julia
Chapter 3 How to Make Things Taste the Way They Should
Chapter 4 The Performance of Me
Chapter 5 Real Male Men
Chapter 6 I Am Getting Very Tired of Kiwi Fruit
Chapter 7 She Likes to Eat
SOURCES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Chapter 1
Hungry
JULIA RARELY turned down a request for an interview, and one of the questions that came up frequently over the years was about the food she remembered from childhood. What did she eat growing up? What turned her into a cook, a gourmand, a tireless advocate of the kitchen as the most important room in the house? She never had much to say on the subject. “It was good, plain New England food, the kind my mother had back in Massachusetts,” she once told People magazine. The meat was invariably cooked until well done, she recalled; the vegetables were seasonal; in those days, of course, there was no wine. The family always employed a cook, and only on her night out would Julia’s mother step into the kitchen to make baking powder biscuits and Welsh rarebit. These were the memories Julia scraped from a dry well. The truth was, food hadn’t been important to her when she was growing up. She was not a natural epicure, one of those food lovers who seem to remember every childhood meal all the way back to that first, transcendent mouthful of strained peaches. And she certainly wasn’t a natural cook—her calamitous efforts to learn her way around a kitchen would go on for years. What she did have was a huge, unstoppable appetite. Tall and skinny, she plowed through the first several decades of her life with only one gastronomic thought—“To eat all she could hold at every meal,” as her husband put it. Food would not take on any greater significance than that until she was thirty-two years old, thousands of miles from home, and falling in love.
Julia’s mother used to say that she had raised eighteen feet of children, for each of her three—Julia, Dorothy, and John—eventually topped six feet. Julia was the oldest, a gawky youngster who liked riding her bike, acting in school plays, building treehouses, and trying to smoke cigars in the orchard. Pasadena, where she was born in 1912, was a handsome city known for its wealth and civic accomplishments; and her father, John McWilliams, was a living symbol of the city’s prosperity. A Princeton graduate and devout Republican, he managed the western landholdings and investments amassed by his own father, and later became vice president of the J. G. Boswell Company, one of California’s major landowners and developers. His personal and professional mission was to keep California booming, and he put a great deal of time into Pasadena community life. Julia was raised to admire his discipline and public spirit, which she did, but he also nurtured a set of rabidly right-wing convictions that she would come to abhor. The two of them split sharply during the 1950s, when John McWilliams became an enthusiastic supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom Julia found despicable. Her father was also vocal about his contempt for Jews, artists, intellectuals, and foreigners; and for most of her adult life Julia viewed him with enormous dismay, though she managed to keep loving him.
Her mother was a very different creature, lively and full of humor, and Julia adored her. Julia Carolyn Weston, known as Caro, grew up in a wealthy household of seven children in Dalton, Massachusetts—her father founded the Weston Paper Company and made a fortune—and Caro developed a