Laura Shapiro by Julia Child Read Free Book Online Page A

wine, and left. Toklas was so tiny, and wore such a wide-brimmed hat, that the only way Julia could see her face was to be sitting down while Toklas stood directly above her.
    Julia spent her first months studying French, walking through the streets with a map and a dictionary, and tasting, tasting, tasting. Everything she bit into was full of exhilarating flavors: the sausages, the tarts and petits fours, the snails, the Brie, “great big juicy pears,” and grapes so sweet she nearly swooned. Like most of their French and American friends in Paris, she and Paul had a maid who cooked and cleaned; but after living that way for a few months, they let her go. They hated having to show up on time for meals, and her cooking disappointed them. Julia was embarrassed to serve guests such inadequate dinners—her own could be alarming at times, but when they came off well, she took a great deal of pride in them. “Besides,” she wrote home, “it is heart-rending not to go to the markets, those lovely, intimate, delicious, mouth-watering, friendly, fascinating places. How can one know the guts of the city if one doesn’t do one’s marketing?” So they hired a cleaning woman to come in twice a week, and Julia gladly took charge of the food. At the market, she examined pigs’ heads and scrutinized fruits and vegetables, breathed in the smells of the boulangerie, carefully chose a terrine or pâté from the charcuterie, and chatted away with the shopkeepers. In France, food was a sociable enterprise: everyone had something to say about the turnips or the kidneys, and to be able to join that nationwide conversation—in French!—was Julia’s bliss.
    But as the winter passed, she found she had time on her hands. She was never bored with Paris, or the daily delights of living there, but her own lack of direction bothered her. She and Paul would have liked to raise a family, but she was now thirty-six, and the possibility of children seemed increasingly remote. Surely there was something she could do professionally that would give her life substance and purpose. How about…hat making? She did have a bit of a background in fashion, having worked for Coast magazine before the war (she forgot how much she had hated the job), and Paris was certainly the capital of such things. She embarked on a few lessons and even made a dress and hat for herself that she wore to a wedding. “Awful, awful,” she admitted later. Paul, too, was thinking about her problem, and he mentioned it one day to the librarian at the USIS, a Frenchman who knew Paris well. “What does Julia like?” asked the librarian. Art, perhaps? Music? Sports? Paul reflected for a moment, then said decisively, “She likes to eat. ” He went home with the address of the Cordon Bleu.
    Despite the distinction of its name and history, the Cordon Bleu had plunged into mismanagement by the time Julia enrolled in the fall of 1949. Pots and pans went unwashed, equipment was broken, dirt was everywhere, and classes ran short of ingredients. More irritating for Julia, she found herself taking lessons with two women who had never cooked before and needed to start at the kindergarten level. After two frustrating days, she managed to get herself transferred to a professional course. Here she found eleven ex-GIs who were training to become restaurant cooks under the GI bill, and a distinguished teaching staff of master chefs long steeped in the tastes and techniques of classic French cooking. This was more like it. They started at 7:30 in the morning, Julia and the former soldiers peeling and chopping and watching and asking questions in a top-speed flurry while producing sauces, fricassees, custards, and whatever else the teachers ordered up. “It’s a free-for-all,” Julia told her family. “Being the only woman, I am being careful to sit back a bit, but am being very cold-blooded indeed in a quiet way