Julia Child Rules (6 page)

I feel so enervated by the reality of this part of Julia Child’s life that I’m having a hard time finishing this section. She roused herself after a few years of golf, martinis, and nightly dinners in which she submitted to Pop’s rants against Democrats and every other child of Satan
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and snagged a job writing a fashion column for a short-lived magazine called
Coast.
Then, she briefly held a job at the West Coast branch of W & J Sloane, from which she was fired. She joined the Junior League, the
Junior League,
where she starred in various children’s plays (playing, always, the lion, the big scary beast, or the emperor).

How did the woman who became Julia Child suffer through years of such soul-crushing inertia?

It’s a little hard to feel sorry for Julia, given that by twenty-five she was pretty much set for life. What I find exciting about this
is that if Julia’s life was any indication, being set for life turns out to be excruciatingly dull. Evidently, a boatload of money is no substitute for love and a sense of purpose. I would say this is obvious, except that millions of people spend their lives trying to figure out how to get more money, when perhaps time would be better spent trying to figure out what it is that only you were born to do, like revolutionize the concept and practice of cooking in America.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. It would be decades before Janis Joplin immortalized the lyrics “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” but that was pretty much the position that Julia found herself in, turning the bend toward thirty. The one man she’d ever loved had jilted her, her beloved mother was dead, her siblings were far away, she was stuck alone with her impossibly sour father, and she had no genuine interest in anything. All her money did nothing to change this. Julia loved life most when it was busy, frenzied, and unpredictable, and yet without quite knowing how it happened, she’d become one of the Ladies Who Lunch.

Still, as restless and disheartened as she was, she didn’t make an effort to change anything. She “simmered,” waiting for something, she knew not what. She was desperate for a change but somehow knew better than to make a change simply for the sake of it.

In August 1940, at the age of twenty-eight, Julia received a marriage proposal from Harrison Chandler, the scion of the
Los Angeles Times.
Chandler was handsome, ultra-conservative,
and boring. He and Julia traveled in the same country club martini-drinking circles. From the outside he appeared to be the perfect match, and Pop, who rarely took an interest in his daughter’s life except to berate her for her left-leaning politics, was eager for her to say yes. Here was a chance for her to escape her fear of becoming an old maid, confirm her desirability as a woman, please her father, and solidify her upper-crust social standing by becoming part of one of the first families of Southern California.

She said no.

She knew she was lost, knew she was spinning her wheels, knew she couldn’t possibly imagine what the future might hold. She didn’t know if or when things were going to get better. Perhaps to convince herself that her life was going well she wrote in her diary, “I am quite content to be the way I am—and feel quite superior to many a wedded mouse. By God—I can do what I want!” And still, she didn’t do anything to change her circumstances.

With our modern dust mote–size attention spans and belief that the mark of being human is not our pair of opposable thumbs but the ability to be happy all the time, the moment we’re discontented for longer than forty-eight hours, we start casting around to see how we might remedy the situation. We know from our favorite self-help gurus that the only thing that’s permanent in life is change, so why not help life along and engineer those changes ourselves?

Maybe we need a new job, a new apartment, a new boyfriend, a new diet, a new haircut, a new gym, a new book group, or Botox. The next time this occurs to you, rather than resolving to get your act together or your ducks in a row or do something that you imagine your future self will thank you for, do nothing.

Instead, learn to be amused, and find things that give you pleasure. It feels like an old-fashioned concept—to spend time doing things that have no self-improving component, that are done simply for the pleasure of doing them.

Men have an easier time amusing themselves than women do. I’m resisting the urge to qualify this. I don’t know one woman who is as good at messing around as are all the men I know. Men joyously go out to find a pickup game of basketball. They maintain a monthly poker night without losing a wink of sleep. Men watch the game, happily waste endless hours playing Halo and Grand Theft Auto, read comic books, and build model trains. The biggest male workaholic I know still religiously maintains a quarterly weekend wine tasting/hiking date with an old friend. Do you do anything remotely like this? I don’t.

Women, when they aren’t taking care of their families or working, spend their “free” time improving themselves. They go to the gym, shop, get their nails done, or rededicate themselves to eating clean or meditating often. That most of these endeavors are aimed at improving how we look I’m going to let slide for now. My point is that finding ways to amuse ourselves can make our otherwise unsatisfactory lives, satisfactory. If only for now.

What are some amusing things to do? Golf, tennis, horseback riding, Dance Dance Revolution, and anything else where the only reason for doing it is pure enjoyment. Jigsaw puzzles. Karaoke. Nothing too crafty, because that veers into the home improvement arena. Cooking a huge, complicated meal out of
Mastering
is also a terrific idea.

I have a few dishes, recipes that are good and that I can reproduce more or less every time I make them. They are:

• Chicken enchiladas
  
• A sausage risotto recipe from the
  New York Times Magazine
  
• Côtes de Porc à la Liégeoise
  (“cheesy pork chops”) from
  The New York Times 60-Minute Gourmet,
  by Pierre Franey
  
• “My” Spaghetti, adapted from
  Eating Together: Recipes and Recollections
  , by Lillian Hellman and Peter Feibleman
  
• Some broccoli salad thing with grilled red peppers from
  The Greens Cookbook
  , first made during that week I was a vegetarian
  
• Roast chicken
  

Like every pretend chef, I’m basically an “assembler.” The French gastronome Brillat-Savarin once punished his cook for
serving him a limp, sad piece of sole, enraged that she dared to produce a meal without the faintest understanding of the science behind cooking. That clueless cook,
c’est moi.

It’s Easter and I’ve decided to make Julia’s beef bourguignon, the only recipe I make that my mother also made, the same classic dish Julie Powell, as played by Amy Adams, ruined so spectacularly in
Julie and Julia
by falling asleep on the sofa and leaving it too long in the oven.

Beef bourguignon isn’t really a spring dish, except in northern places like Portland, where it’s still cold and wet well into April. Our corner Whole Foods
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doesn’t have small onions; they only stock them for the big winter holidays. When you think of all the types of inedible greens they display so effusively year-round, it doesn’t seem like a lot to expect they would have something as basic as a small onion. I settle for frozen, feeling a flick of irritation because this is what my mother used, back when red onions were considered exotic.

Beef bourguignon was the only Julia dish my mother made that I found acceptable, but I only cook it maybe once a year because doing so makes me so sad that when I’m done I can rarely bring myself to eat it.

During my first semester of college my mother, who was only forty-six, was diagnosed with brain cancer, an astrocytoma with the shape and reach of a starfish. All that summer and fall, before her diagnosis in December, she suffered from crushing headaches and double vision. Her doctors decided it was an
underactive thyroid, then hypoglycemia, then the garden variety symptoms of menopause. Her headaches persisted, and now, thinking back, miraculously, so did her elaborate nightly meals. There is no summer longer than the one before college, where your old life has wilted but your new life is yet to bloom. In the afternoons, I watched my mother wash down three aspirin with a swig of Coors before getting something on to simmer. How on earth did she manage this, and why? It’s still a mystery to me. I’m one of those home cooks who comes down with the sniffles and consequently orders takeout for the next week.

They were able to remove part of her tumor, but only part. The prognosis was dire. My mother, according to her surgeon, woke up, looked him straight in the eye, and “asked all the hard questions.” She was given six months to live, but only managed three.

By February she had completed her prescribed rounds of radiation and chemotherapy. My parents had been steadfast in shielding me from the horror of it all. I was a mere seventeen. I’d gone away to USC, my father’s alma mater, pledged a sorority, and was dutifully having the time of my life. They insisted.

My birthday is March 2, and suddenly, uncharacteristically, my father called and summoned me home. Both he and my mother wanted me to come home on the Sunday before my birthday for dinner.

Of course I would be happy to come home for my birthday. Home meant presents, cake, and my choice of fancy dinner. In the naive way of children to whom nothing bad has ever
happened, I assumed that if my mom was cooking me birthday dinner, then she was better and was going to be okay. She couldn’t talk very well after her brain surgery, so my dad had taken my birthday dinner request.

The fanciest special-occasion food I knew was steak and baked potatoes with sour cream and chives, and that’s what I asked for. Also, a green salad with Bob’s Big Boy Bleu Cheese dressing. I knew there would also be some kind of store-bought cake from the grocery store.

But that Sunday, the moment I walked in the door, I took one whiff and knew we weren’t having steak. It was that smell I knew so well: the buttery, floury, slightly blood-infused smell of browning beef on a too-warm day. In Southern California a March birthday is sometimes an early summer birthday, and the dining room windows were open, and sun filtered through the dark pink bougainvillea that grew thick on the trellis over the patio. My mother was setting our places at the big dining room table, one utensil at a time. She wore her usual capris and a bright floral top, and an orange turban to hide what she called her “bald chicken head.” She shuffled in with a fork, set it on the table, shuffled back into the kitchen, rooted around in the silverware drawer, then shuffled back into the dining room with a knife.

I felt the sense of injustice rising up in me. It wasn’t fair! They’d called and asked what I wanted and I’d said steak and there was no steak. Instead, my mother was cooking beef bourguignon. I didn’t even dislike beef bourguignon, but it was not
steak. All these years later I can still summon the deep rage I felt that day, like any expert method actor you care to name. No steak. No baked potato with sour cream and chives. No green salad with Bob’s Big Boy Bleu Cheese dressing. And also, no cake. And soon, no mother; the person I loved most in the world was leaving me.

I followed her into the kitchen. We didn’t talk. We never talked anymore. She leaned against the counter, her redhead’s pale complexion mottled and her face slack and puffy from her meds, removing each piece of beef from the pan with the focus and precision of someone defusing a bomb.

I think she made a few simple things before she died a week later, but Julia’s beef bourguignon was the last thing she made for me.

When I made the dish last Easter, I rushed through the browning of the stew meat, ruining my favorite hoodie with splattered oil. I also wound up with an extra plate of sautéed carrots and onions. I spent my late teens and most of my young adulthood furious that my mother solicited my opinion about what I wanted for my birthday dinner, and then didn’t cook it. Then I moved into a phase where I realized I was really angry not at her menu planning but at her for dying and leaving me alone, for that is how I thought of being left with my well-meaning silent father. Now that I have lived past the age at which she died and have a daughter older than I was when she got sick, I can only imagine the sheer terror she must have felt at the
thought of dying, and of leaving me to make my way in the world without her.

Then, in a further iteration, over the course of the long Easter afternoon while I stood in front of the stove turning and basting the beef at a slow simmer, I found myself admiring her courage. Her days were numbered and she knew it, and she was going to spend her last days at the stove making something that gave her pleasure.