Julia Child_ A Life - Laura Shapiro [70]
But on one occasion, when it was the food lover and restaurateur George Lang who asked her the last-meal question for a magazine column, she wrote out a response in such thoughtful detail that she really did seem to be imagining life’s farewell banquet. She began with the most important element of all: “My last meal would be cooked at home with a friend or two that I like to cook with.” There would be six at table, always the number she considered just right for a dinner party, and they would start with Cotuit oysters, “accompanied by very thinly sliced homemade rye bread, lightly buttered.” Caviar and vodka next, then “some very fresh, fine, green California asparagus,” and for the main course one of her favorite duck dishes—“the one in which you roast the duck until the breast is rare and then cook the legs and wings separately en confit, with a very nice light port wine sauce.” Peas and pommes Anna would be served, and a great wine, “probably a light Burgundy or a St. Émilion.” The salad would be just lettuce and endive, with lemon and French olive oil in the dressing, and she might give it a sprinkling of walnuts. “I like salad and cheese together, but we would also have wine because the salad would have practically no acid in it,” she explained. A Burgundy might be just right, depending on the cheeses, and she specified not only the bread but the bakery—“really good French bread, probably from Les Belles Miches and some of the Santa Barbara sour dough.” For dessert, her own beloved charlotte Malakoff and a Château d’Yquem. Ripe grapes and a Comice pear, perhaps chocolate truffles with coffee, and “a fine selection of great liqueurs”—calvados, framboise, prune, and marc de Bourgogne—would round out the dinner. “At least that meal would suit me now,” she reflected, “and probably would then, at the very end, before we all slipped off the raft.”
The meal that suited her at the very end was quite a bit simpler. In 2004, Julia was living in Santa Barbara, increasingly frail after a year marked by knee surgery, a bout of postoperative complications and infections, kidney failure, more knee surgery, and a stroke. Recuperating from the knee surgery had been agonizing: it was so painful to stand up, and she was still so weak from the stroke that for the first time in her life she refused to try. Her longtime assistant, Stephanie Hersh, told the rehabilitation staff to move Julia’s wheelchair to a kitchen and ask her to chop some onions. It worked—the kitchen counter itself seem to draw her to her feet, and rehab could begin. But over the next months, her world shrank and her days became meager. She had liked going for drives and to the movies, but these became impossible; she could no longer sit at the computer and work; she slept a great deal. Friends came by for short visits, which she enjoyed; and food was a source of delight to the end. Stephanie knew Julia’s appetite very well after so many years together, and on August 11, she made a pot of onion soup, using the recipe from Mastering. The aroma of a rich onion soup was always one of Julia’s favorites—“That’s a wonderful smell and a very appetizing one,” she had declared on The French Chef, breathing in the heady fragrance of onions, butter, bouillon, and wine. She had the soup for dinner that August night, and ate with pleasure. The next day, her doctor called to report that Julia had picked up an infection and had to be hospitalized for treatment. Julia was reluctant. Would it make her better? she asked. No, he said, not really. She decided against treatment. It was time to leave: she had had all she wanted, she was grateful, and she was full. Stephanie settled her into bed for a nap, with the cat on the covers next to her, and Julia never woke up. She died early in the morning of August 13, two days before her ninety-second birthday.
In the months following Julia’s