Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [209]
The Message
JEANNETTE FERRARY
AS THE AUTHOR notes elsewhere in Out of the Kitchen: Adventures of a Food Writer, from which this piece is excerpted, there are enough recipes in the first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking “to keep a person occupied, not to mention two people, for a lifetime of dinner parties,” so she never expected to buy the second volume. And at the time (the early eighties), she had met writer Frances Mayes, who was still living in San Francisco and who had her own copy of the second volume, which she offered to lend (along with her charlotte mold) to Jeannette any time she wanted it.
Mayes and Ferrary signed up to join a cooking class taught by Simone Beck, one of the three original authors of Mastering, at her house in Provence, where they also had the opportunity to meet Julia Child at a cocktail party. “Julia greeted us with such embracing enthusiasm,” Ferrary writes, “there was no time to be awe-stricken, and no need. Meeting her felt like a reunion with someone I’d known but hadn’t quite met, a mere formality that had been overlooked until that moment.”
Of all the many interviews and articles written about Julia Child, I am partial to this story, a chapter in Out of the Kitchen (John Daniel & Company, 2004), a warm and wonderful book that deserves to be better known, and in which Ferrary shares stories of her Brooklyn childhood and recounts her beliefs and values (sometimes contradictory), all of them having to do with food.
JEANNETTE FERRARY teaches food writing at Stanford University and the University of California Berkeley, and has been a columnist for the New York Times and a book and restaurant reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle. She is also the author of M. F. K. Fisher and Me (Thomas Dunne, 1998) and is coauthor, with Louise Fiszer, of six cookbooks, including A Good Day for Soup (Chronicle, 1996) and A Good Day for Salad (Chronicle, 1999).
“YOU MADE WHAT for Julia Child’s lunch?”
I couldn’t believe my ears. The chef had been given the opportunity to prepare a box lunch for Julia Child. It was supposed to be casual and unfussy, just a little something before her afternoon appearance at Macy’s San Francisco. He packed it in a football-sized gift box tied with blue ribbons and was delivering it to the sort of backstage dressing room where Julia, her sister Dorothy, and I were waiting. I only hoped they hadn’t heard what he said. I took the boxes from him—there were three of them, one for each of us—and slid them onto a table by the door. Then I realized he was kidding; he must be kidding.
“Come on, tell me. What’s in them?”
He looked frazzled, an appropriate response for someone who had invested all his creative energies into the challenging but intimidating task of whipping up a box lunch for Julia Child. He also looked annoyed.
“I told you. Tuna fish sandwiches.”
Maybe he hadn’t realized which Julia Child he’d been asked to make lunch for. He’d slapped together a couple of sandwiches for some ordinary Julia Child, an earthling who hadn’t helped change the course of America’s eating habits in her twenty-five years—it was 1985—of cookbook writing and television cooking shows. Surely he knew not what he did—or didn’t do, as the case may be. Or perhaps the strain had been too much for him and he’d completely lost his mind. His eyes looked a bit jumpy, now that I peered more closely. Proof of his derangement surfaced almost immediately as Julia, attracted by the commotion, turned to greet him.
“Oh, hellooo, you’re the chef, aren’t you?” came the chortly