Mastering the Art of French Cooking
by E.J. Levy
A few month ago, while browsing the tables of a second-hand bookshop, I came across a pristine copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking for $7.49, and bought it. It was an odd encounter, like coming on an old photograph while rummaging a box; its cardboard cover and impressive heft familiar as childhood. Now it rests beside me on the table, its cover delicately patterned like wallpaper--white with miniature red fleurs de lis and tiny teal stars. The title and authors' names modestly scripted in a rectangular frame no larger than a recipe card--a model of feminine self-effacement.
I have no photograph of my mother cooking, but when I recall my childhood that is how I picture her, my mother, standing in the kitchen of our suburban ranch house, a blue and white terrycloth apron tied at her waist, her lovely head bent over a chorus of pots and pans, and open like a hymnal on the counter beside her, a copy of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. This unassuming book was my mother's constant companion throughout my childhood, and from the table laid with a blue cotton cloth, not yet set with flatware and plates and glasses of ice water, not yet laid with the bowls of steaming broccoli spears, boeuf bourguignon, potatoes sautéed in butter and onion, I observed her as she sought in its pages an elusive balance between the bitter and sweet.
My mother was not alone in her culinary predilection; her ardor was typical of the age. Eva Hoffman, in her elegant memoir Lost in Translation describes a picnic taken while a graduate student at Harvard in the Sixties: "We walk companionably through the woods, and then take out our wine bottles and bread and delicious concoctions made out of the Julia Child cookbook, which is de rigeur these days for all of us, bohemians, rebels, and revolutionaries."
How could a cookbook inspire such passion? Why, in an era of social conflict, should so many concur on the virtue of one book? What, in short, was its appeal?
My mother maintains that the popularity of French cooking in the Sixties was the result of two factors: post-war affluence and feminine frustration. It is true that in the wake of World War II, many Americans found themselves more affluent than ever before and more continental. Many men stationed in Europe during the war had had a taste of French culture and cuisine, and given the expanding post-war economy many more would travel there as tourists to sample that culture synonymous with taste and style. At the same time, women who had been working outside the home during the war were being pressed back into the domestic sphere. Cooking, my mother contends, especially elaborate French cooking, was not only a palpable sign of good taste and social ascension, it was she says, quite simply, one of the few things talented, intelligent women--stuck at home--could do.
Still I wonder if the explanation lies less with history than with esthetics. For the appeal of the cookbook is not unlike that of renaissance art: it offers the same promise of proportion, the same satisfying blend of disparate elements. Like painting, cooking is a refutation of entropy, an arrangement of multiple elements into a new and formal whole. Perhaps this accounts for its appeal in the Sixties, a period when the country was coming apart at the seems. The cookbook speaks to our twin desires for order and for sustenance.
Where else in modern life does one find such certitude, such clear and dependable rules? Where else does one meet with such economy and precision of detail?
Boeuf bourguignon. Vichyssoise. Salade nicoise. Boullabaise. Bernaise. Mouselline au chocolat. Years before I could spell these foods, I learned their names from my mother's lips, their smells by heart.
At the time, I took no notice of the gustatory schizophrenia that governed our meals. The extravagant French cuisine prepared on the nights my father dined with us; the Swanson TV dinners on those nights we ate alone, we three kids and my mother. Had I noticed these culinary cycles, I doubt that I would have recognized them for the strategic maneuvers they seem in retrospect, for it is clear to me now that in the intricate territorial maneuvers that for years defined my parents' marriage, cooking was my mother's principal weapon. Proof of her superiority. My father might not feel tenderness for her, but he would have to admire her skill. My mother cooked with a vengeance in those years, or perhaps I should say she cooked for revenge. In her hands, cuisine became a martial art.
Whipping egg whites by hand with her muscular forearm, rubbing down a turkey with garlic and butter and rosemary and thyme, she sublimated her enormous unfeminine ambition in extravagant hubristic cuisine. Disdainful of the Sisyphean chores of house cleaning, she threw herself into the task of feeding us in style.
There is a long tradition of food as weapon. Enslaved Africans and their descendants ground glass into the meals they served their owners, and it was common practice in early Rome to poison one's political rivals. Lucrezia Borgia, Duchess of Ferrara and patron of the arts, displayed remarkable imagination in her poisoning of guests. And surely I am not the only one for whom the popular culinary adage--the way to a man's heart is through his stomach--evokes images of medical procedures?
In college, I met a woman who had corresponded throughout her adolescence with Julia Child. It was from her that I first heard that Child had been an alcoholic and often drunk on the set. My mother, if she recognized drunkenness for what it was, nevertheless cast the story differently: she laughed about how Child, having dropped a chicken on the floor during a taping, had the aplomb to pick it up and cooked it anyhow. This delighted my mother, this imperturbability, the ability in the face of disappointment to carry on.
Poetry, Robert Hass has said, "teaches the pleasure of attention to detail," and so does the recipe. For where else does one attend so closely to the egg, to those quotidian artifacts of domestic life--the knife, the pan, the bowl?
And here, perhaps, is a clue to Child's extraordinary popularity. In a culture ridden with 30-minute recipes and fast food, Child proclaims the virtue of lingering:
"The French," Child writes with her co-authors in the foreword to Mastering the Art of French Cooking, "are seldom interested in unusual combinations or surprise presentations. With an enormous background of traditional dishes to choose from (1000 Ways to Prepare and Serve Eggs is the title of one French book on the subject) the Frenchman takes his greatest pleasure from a well-known dish impeccably cooked and served...One of the main reasons that pseudo-French cooking, with which we are all too familiar, falls far below good French cooking is just this matter of elimination of steps, combination of processes, or skimping on ingredients such as butter, cream--and time...[italics mine]"
Indeed, like a poem, "recipe language," according to the chefs, "is always a sort of short-hand in which a lot of information is packed, and [which] you will have to read carefully if you are not to miss small but important points."
There is a whiff of Dostoevsky in the preface's concluding paragraphs, in which Child and her colleagues mete out advice like Father Zosima in the Brother's Karamazov. Their words are as apt for the cook as for the writer and, all in all, serve as a sound recipe for living:
"Pay close attention to what you are doing while you work, for precision in small details can make the difference...You may be slow and clumsy at first, but with practice you will pick up speed and style....Allow yourself plenty of time...Clean up after yourself frequently to avoid confusion. Train yourself to use your hands and fingers; they are wonderful instruments...Keep your knives sharp."
