Barr Nancy Verde - Backstage with Julia: my years with Julia Child

Backstage with Julia

My Years With Julia Child

Nancy Verde Barr

Also by Nancy Verde Barr

Cookbooks

We Called It Macaroni: An American Heritage of Southern Italian Cooking

In Julias Kitchen with Master Chefs (with Julia Child)

Make It Italian: The Taste and Technique of Italian Home Cooking

Fiction

Last Bite: A Novel of Culinary Romance

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Copyright 2007 by Nancy Verde Barr. All rights reserved

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Barr, Nancy Verde.

Backstage with Julia : my years with Julia Child / Nancy Verde Barr.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-471-78737-2 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-470-27637-2 (paper)

ISBN 978-1-118-06016-2 (ebook)

ISBN 978-1-118-06017-9 (ebook)

1. Child, Julia. 2. CooksUnited StatesBiography. 3. Barr, Nancy VerdeFriends and associates. I. Title.

TX649.C47B37 2007

641.5092dc22

[B]

2007001696

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Interior Design: Lee Goldstein

To the memory of Julia, without whom...

Chapter 1

You live but once, you might as well be amusing.

Gabrielle ("Coco") Chanel, French couturier

"It's an honor to have you on board, Mrs. Childs," announced the handsome flight attendant neatly clad in midnight-blue slacks, white shirt, and logoed tie. Bending over our seats, he whispered conspiratorially with a Texas drawl as broad as the state itself, "I'm such a huge fan. I have all your cookbooks."

Julia smiled demurely, tilted her head in acknowledgment, and said, "Thank you," without mentioning the erroneous addition of an s to her name. In the thirteen years that I had been working with her, the faulty pronunciation happened with curious regularity, and some years before, I'd remarked how odd I thought it that so many people put an s at the end of her name.

"Not really," she responded. "Before I was known at all there was a popular New York eatery called Childs. People knew of it and it helped them remember my name."

On that March day in 1993, three decades of public fascination with Child, the French Chef, had eclipsed whatever fame Childs the eatery had once enjoyed. That eclipse began the moment in 1963 when, from the display kitchen of the Boston Gas Company, she trilled her first WGBH-TV "Bon apptit." Cooking enthusiasts became dedicated fans, and even viewers who would never make friends with their stoves tuned in religiously to catch the antics of this Lucille Balllike character with a rolling pin. I watched allwas it 134?episodes of The French Chef for the cooking, but I reveled in her humor. Spontaneous humorsuch as the time she pulled a bouquet garni out of a bubbling stock and said of the used bundle of herbs, "It looks like a dead mouse," and the time she announced, to cover for a bell that inadvertently rang during taping, "That must be the plumber!" Unable to resist, she licked a rich chocolate batter from her spatula and told us with a smile, "That's not part of the recipe." I laughed out loud when the long, slim baguette of French bread she planned to slice for onion soup slumped lazily in the middle when she held it up, so she declared it pathetically lacking in character and flung it dismissively over her shoulder.

She peppered her instructions for proper, classic techniques with frequent, amusing soupons of sound: blump, blump, blump as she quickly sliced through mushrooms, whomp when she smashed her knife down on a clove of garlic, and a throaty, crackling sound when she broke off the claw of a lobster. In a distinctive voice that became one of the most recognizedand most imitatedvoices in the country, she told us to be prepared to "shoot the wad" on buying the best ingredients and "go whole hog" in fearlessly cooking them. The combination of her off-the-cuff, madcap quirkiness and her deeply serious commitment to things culinary made watching her addictive. She catapulted to fame. When, in 1966, Time magazine featured her as its cover story, dubbing her "Our Lady of the Ladle," they wrote that her shows "have made her a cult from coast to coast and put her on a first-name basis with her fans."

Her name, sans the s , was unlikely to be forgotten.

"Want something to read?" Julia asked, reaching into her carry-on and pulling out an impressive stack of current magazines.

I held up the spy novel she had loaned me. "No, thanks. I'm just at the good part." Julia and I shared a passion for thrillers, mostly the ones that involved espionage. I could trace mine back to the Hardy Boys mysteries that I discovered when I was eight. Julia honed hers during World War II, when she worked with the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. She had just loaned me The Spy Wore Red , and although she insisted that during the war she had only typed and filed, I knew the government had cleared her for high-security work, and my overactive imagination kept plugging her into the role of undercover agent depicted by the heroine of the nonfiction book. Julia admitted that she had wanted to be a spy, but the "Oh So Secret," as she called the OSS, rejected her. "They said I was too tall," she would sigh. But of course, that's the sort of thing a spy would say.