Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (5 page)

M
OTHER CARO

To the community she was Mrs. John McWilliams, Jr.—surrounded by tight corsets, antiques, and antimacassars. But to her friends, and later her adult children, she was Caro, who loved petting her dogs, playing tennis, and chatting with friends. She was no Victorian fussy-dusty who occupied her time in domestic concerns. She never taught her daughters to sew or manicure their nails. But she surrounded them with her approval, showing them how to love sports, laughter, and friends and follow one’s own whims.

Julia and her sister Dort were eager learners. While Julia was growing up her mother was a “dynamo,” to use her son’s word. “She was wonderful, full of fun and spontaneous sayings, keeping all of us (father, specifically) from being too stuffy.” Julia wrote in her diary about a “funny little wiggling [of] the top of her tongue the way only she could do it—faster than anyone I ever saw.” With vitality and humor she ran a large household, planned the meals, and entertained friends and business associates of her husband.

Yet, as a result of her early independence, Caro kept a life of her own and had her own dog, a bull terrier named Flicker. Caro sat at the head of the table to keep control of the dinner conversation, played tennis almost daily with her friends, and loved the theater. “She had an amusing petulance,” Julia remembered, “but it was more playful than serious.” Letters to her daughters when they were away at school suggest that she never missed a new theatrical production. Mrs. McWilliams had “afternoons” to receive her friends, hosted a book club (though her husband’s sister Bessie exclaimed, “Carolyn McWilliams, you read more books and know less than any woman I know!”), and helped to found the Little Town Club, where her friends could have lunch (the men never came home for lunch) and one night a week—the cooks’ night off—take their reluctant husbands to eat.

Caro was a laissez-faire mother, encouraging her children to “have fun.” When her daughter Dort dropped Latin in high school, Caro responded by saying, “Why didn’t you tell us you were overworked. There is always time to get educated.” One younger family member now observes that “Caro was an upper-class mother who did not
really
spend a lot of time rearing her children.” Yet Julia remembers:

We loved her and we did lots of things with her; she was usually there when we came home from school; she was more like a friend than a mother; I can remember as kiddies we would all lie on the couch and Mother would read to us. I remember she was reading us something like
Bob, Son of Battle
and we three were sobbing. She was very emotional. She was also very outspoken, right up front. She would be sitting at the table and would say, “Oh, hot flash, hot flash, open the window.” She was open about life and the body—plainspoken, an unpretentious New Englander. Neither style nor the latest fashion was important to her.

“Julia had the most fabulous mother,” thought Julia’s friend Gay Bradley, the daughter of a Pasadena lawyer. “I liked best that she would sit and talk to us…. We would sit on the couch when we came home in the afternoon. She had beautiful red hair, and she was so receptive to us. She always made us feel great. She was one of those women you love to know.”

T
HE FAMILY TABLE

Food meant weekly Sunday dinners
en famille
, the arrival of the milk-and-egg wagon, and learning to make fudge from Fannie Farmer’s
Boston Cooking School Cook Book
, published in 1896. Yet the kitchen, Julia would later tell Lewis Lapham, was a “dismal place” she stayed away from. Hired cooks presided there. She remembers little of what she ate, which, according to family memories, was the traditional European meat-and-potatoes diet of the day, but with the addition of citrus, avocado, and vegetables from their garden. Oriental and Mexican food was bountiful in the Los Angeles area, but at that time remained confined to the homes of its native cooks. Few restaurants existed (prohibition held serious dining at bay for more than a decade) apart from the grand hotels where social events took place.

The only cooking news that appeared in the newspapers was coverage of a food faddist’s lecture in town: Horace Fletcher, the fasting-and-bowel-regulation crank, was turning family dining into marathon slow-chewing sessions (thirty-two chews a bite!) called “Fletcherizing.” Culinary historians bemoan the trends of that period, when home economists in white were incorporating frozen foods and bad attitudes (eating was science, not pleasure) into their recipes. But most lecturers in Pasadena, by contrast, were healthful and sane from today’s perspective. Soon after Julia’s birth, her mother’s Shakespeare club hosted a talk by Dr. Margaret C. Goettler, who urged that children be given simple fruits and vegetables and be allowed one and a half hours for lunch. Meat is not necessary, she exhorted the three hundred women, and “Don’t eat fried food unless you can digest carpet tacks.” Julia’s mother listened, but trusted her own tradition when she served fried mush or, more frequently, deep-fried codfish balls on special Sunday mornings. After all, had not Yankee Senator George Frisbie Hoar risen on the U.S. Senate floor to declare that the dish belonged to those “whose theology is sound, and who believe in the five points of Calvinism”?

“All my mother knew how to cook was baking powder biscuits, codfish balls, and Welsh rarebit,” Julia would say years later. The food Julia remembers most vividly from her childhood came from her mother’s New England family: codfish balls, the kind of domesticated, ladylike white and creamed dish that was part of the New England cooking tradition during this century’s first decades. Made from dried, salted cod soaked overnight, then poached and whipped with mashed potato and egg, molded into a ball, and deep-fried, they were served with white sauce containing chopped hard-boiled egg.

Codfish Balls
One package of dried, salted cod
Cooked or leftover mashed potatoes
Two fresh eggs
Fat for deep frying
White sauce with two chopped hard-boiled eggs

Little wonder that Ogden Nash declared this New England staple “such an utter loss / That people eat it with egg sauce.” Julia remembers it as delicious.

Even though her mother was not a good cook, Julia remembers that on the cooks’ night out (Thursday), if they did not go to the dining club, her mother would make baking powder biscuits. Decades later, when a newspaper asked Julia to recall her mother’s cooking, she gave them the recipe.

Buttermilk Herb Baking Powder Biscuits
3 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons salt
4 teaspoons double-acting baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
4 ounces or 8 tablespoons chilled vegetable shortening
4 tablespoons fresh minced chives
4 tablespoons fresh minced parsley
2 eggs
1½ cups buttermilk

Into a mixture of the dry ingredients, Mrs. McWilliams cut the shortening until it was in small pieces, at which time she stirred in the herbs and then briefly blended in the wet ingredients, which had already been whipped together. (Many Yankee homes did not use the eggs.) The molded mixture was then turned onto a floured board, kneaded, and patted flat to half an inch or more and cut into rounds with a glass, its rim dipped in flour. After the biscuits came out of the 450 degree oven in ten to fifteen minutes, “they smelled so good,” said Julia, “… and I liked to put butter, real butter, on them and watch it run down the sides.”

Julia learned very young how a tomato tastes and smells. One of her favorite memories is “the vegetable wagon driven by the Chinaman who brought litchi nuts.” The Pasadena Grocery at the time advertised that their rock cod sold for fifteen cents a pound, twenty-five cents for two pounds. Nash’s department store would deliver food. Had they not had their own gardens and the year-round vegetable wagons, Pasadena women would have been more dependent on the brand-name products from the American Cereal Company, Pillsbury, Campbell’s, Heinz, and Kraft that filled the women’s magazines of Julia’s childhood. (By 1913, according to one report, “Jell-O was distributing fifteen million recipe books a year” and Heinz had increased its canned goods production fifteenfold since 1900.) Most cooks in the United States did not always have fresh fruits and vegetables, and refrigeration consisted of a small icebox, which was cooled by a block of ice delivered each week by a man in a brown leather apron carrying oversized metal tongs.

Neighbor children all thought that Mrs. McWilliams was a strong advocate of rest and nutritious food. Babe Hall, who lived across the street, remembers that they were not allowed to snack after school and sometimes they would buy food at the local market or take fruit from someone’s tree. If Julia or John ate across the street with the Halls on Saturday night, they had New England baked beans and brown bread, for the Halls were New Englanders who also served fried cod cakes on Sunday mornings.

Julia grew up during rapid changes in eating and cooking habits. During the first twenty years of the century, “scientific” eating prevailed, dominated by the U.S. Food Administration and the home economists, who talked of chemistry, calories, protein, fat, and carbohydrates. The war stimulated food production and the discovery of vitamins, as well as the growth of food growers’ associations such as the Sun Maid Raisins in the San Joaquin Valley. Despite many food historians’ laments about the eating habits of Americans during these early decades, the Pasadena newspapers reflected a continuing emphasis on natural produce, simple cooking, and outdoor living. For years, special speakers in town urged an active outdoor life and sunshine (an easy pitch in Pasadena). A man named J. C. Elliot called for his audience to “cut down your food supply, throw open your windows, sleep in the open screen porch, take your morning cold bath, avoid anger, hatred and fear, get out in the sunshine and breathe fresh, pure oxygen, if you wish to avoid a cold.” Arthur Taylor, the chef de cuisine at the Raymond Hotel, told the
Pasadena Star-News
in 1916 that his clients wanted the best of fresh produce and shunned highly seasoned dishes that “disarrange digestion.” This was the year that the paper began printing menu suggestions and recipes.

Caro had little trouble in feeding her children, though young John was thin and she urged him to take naps to grow stronger. The mantra in Pasadena may have been “remember the starving Armenians,” but she never worried or used guilt on her children, who were always hungry. Caro was too busy conducting the conversation from the head of the table, where she was always served first. “We did not talk about food.” Julia remembers, “and we ate as much as we could at every meal.” They drank water in gold-rimmed, long-stemmed glasses, not because of prohibition, but because there was no tradition of wine-drinking. Her father had cocktails, including one called an “orange lady.” When he tried to make wine in the basement, the children blew into the curved glass and the experiment did not work.

Sunday dinners could swell to tremendous proportions of noise and dishes when McWilliams relatives or friends of her grandfather visited. The Pasadena sun was an attraction for the McWilliams clan, especially Grandfather’s nephew Charles, who came every year from Dwight, Illinois, and provided Julia with her only male cousins—Alex, John, and Charlie McWilliams, who were two to six years older than Julia and attended the Thatcher Academy in Ojai while their parents lived at the Raymond Hotel in Pasadena.

Julia learned the secret of life at an early age: appetite. “I was always hungry, I had the appetite of a wolf,” she would say after living in Norway. The best cook in the family was her father’s mother, according to Julia, “a modest and retiring little woman with gray hair in a bun at the back of her neck.” Though Grandmother was always occupied caring for her older husband, Julia remembered the foods she prepared: “Grandmother McWilliams was a great cook who made wonderful donuts and some of the best broiled chicken I ever ate…. She grew up in the farming country of Illinois and her family had a French cook in the 1880s.”

M
CHALL GANG OF FOUR

The McWilliams children were more attuned to their Airedale dog, Eric the Red, and their neighborhood friends than to their cousins. By the time Julia began attending elementary school, she and John formed a gang with the Hall kids across the street: Charlie and Babe (her name was really Orian, but she was the baby of the family). Sometimes George Hall, who was older, would join in on the plays in the vast McWilliams attic. Julia wrote the plays, which she remembers as “terrible,” and they dressed in Caro McWilliams’s old clothes. John ran the curtain. Charlie remembers working the lights in the attic, which often blew the house circuits, and Mrs. McWilliams’s casual acceptance of this major inconvenience. When Babe and Julia tried to raise white rats in their half of the playhouse, they called it the McHall Rodent Farm.

Babe Hall was a short, wiry girl with as much daring and courage as her friend Julia, who was one year older—the same age as Babe’s brother Charlie. They did not like the other girls whom their parents invited over. Juke and Babe loved to “take things”—everything from the fruit on the trees at the Raymond Hotel, where Babe’s grandmother spent each winter, to nails at a construction site. They were accomplished liars, but were spanked when they were caught.

Julia early on showed a preference for group play. The McHall gang (or Delta Club) roamed the neighborhood on their bicycles, followed by Eric the Red, as far as the rolling foothills and the boulder-strewn, oak-shaded ravine—the Arroyo Seco (dry wash)—that bordered the western edge of the city. Above them loomed the new Colorado Street Bridge, completed the year Julia was born. One could still go trout fishing in the river below and the Arroyo Park had a fishing pool, archery, and golf. In addition to the Arroyo Seco, their landscape was characterized, except for bedrock outcroppings such as Monk Hill, Raymond Hill, and Devil’s Gate, by a long gradual incline toward the Los Angeles basin.