To Julia, with love

Wishing a culinary wizard a fond farewell

By Jill Strauss

The fortieth-anniversary edition of Master the Art of French Cookin (Knopf; $40) will be available at bookstores this week.

BON APPéTIT: Julia Child noshes with long-time cooking partner Jacques Pepin.

Last week I stalked Julia Child. I was not alone. I was joined by a group of like-minded devotees who huddled together like hungry wolves. We licked our chops and watched our prey, knowing that if we were patient and stayed focused, we would all get our turn. It’s not as bad as it sounds. We groupies, who paid $75 a ticket, were promised that some time during Boston University’s Good-bye Bash for Julia, she would allow photographs and sign copies of her books. Thus, I followed her around with my fully loaded pocket camera and my butter-stained copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking: Volume I. My resolve was strong because I didn’t think I’d ever see this celebrity in the flesh again. At the age of 89, The Savior of American Cuisine, who taught us there was more to life than TV dinners and Spam, was giving up her Massachusetts home and heading back to her native California to a retirement community near Santa Barbara.

“You should get her to sign the newly released edition of Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” Sam Hayward, executive chef of Fore Street advised me when I told him I was planning to attend Boston University’s good-bye party for Julia. “I’m going to buy several copies when it comes out. I think my kids should read it,” he told me. I could understand his passion for the two-volume set since, at the age of 25, Hayward switched from a musical to a culinary career largely because of the tome. Although he spent years training to be a musician, in his spare time Hayward taught himself to cook by practicing the techniques and exhaustively tested recipes of Julia and her French co-authors Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle. One day, one of Hayward’s music students noticed Volume I was open on his kitchen table “and he said, ‘I see that you like to cook. How would you like to chuck all of this and come cook at the Shoals Marine Lab?’ ” says Hayward. “And that’s how my first cooking job fell in my lap.”

“The first baguette I ever learned to make was based on Julia’s recipe,” Alison Prey, co-owner of Standard Baking Company, told me when I called to get her take on Julia’s influence. Prey apprenticed years ago at Clear Flour Bakery, one of the first bakeries in Massachusetts to produce baguettes thanks to the recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking: Volume II. As Prey talked about the difficulty of finding a good recipe — let alone a good French bread — back in the ’80’s, I flashed back to a dinner party at my Boston apartment on New Year’s Eve, 1983.

To impress my friends I prepared an entrée from Volume I: “Boeuf Bourguignon,” a fabulous tried and true stew. A crusty baguette should have accompanied the meal, but I didn’t have the patience or the courage to bake French bread in my old electric oven. I did, however, make a strawberry sponge cake enclosed by a glittering spun sugar dome from From Julia Child’s Kitchen. Although the dessert wasn’t difficult to concoct, it looked as impressive as its name: “Gâteau dans la cage.” As the serving instructions suggested, I tapped the dome to break it and shards of crispy caramel fell into white puffs of crème Chantilly. Everyone loved the drama, the contrasting texture, and the taste. “Bon appétit!” I said, mimicking The French Chef. Then we clinked our glasses of champagne and devoured the pièce de la resistance.

But it’s not her recipes or her TV shows that Clark Frasier, co-owner of Arrows Restaurant in Ogunquit, treasures most about Julia. He remembered attending a lunch demo given by The Highlands Inn in Carmel, California. A local celebrity was assisting Julia as she made puff pastry with apples and he handed her salt instead of sugar. “After she sprinkled the salt all over,” says Frasier, “she tasted it and said, ‘Oooh, this is salt! Well, it really doesn’t matter.’ and she pulled out one that had been made previously . . . She never got flustered, she never treated cooking as a perfect science. You know, there’s an awful lot of arrogance in this business and Julia exhibits a complete lack of that.” After listening to so many stories, I was pumped to meet this American icon. I wish I could have lured some Maine chefs to leave their kitchens and accompany me, but once I arrived at the scene I doubted if my ears could have stood the sound of more people talking.

The first floor of Boston University’s Metropolitan College is as big as a football field and on this occasion it is filled with long tables of food representing 88 Boston restaurants. Chefs and sous chefs at their stations busily dish out delicacies and conversation to 1000 grazing gourmets. Rebecca Alssid, Director of Special Programs at Metropolitan College, who sits beside Julia and Jacques Pepin on a podium in the center of the room, rises and bangs two heavy copper pots together to get the hoard’s attention. We are all expecting Alssid, who first invited Julia to teach at Metropolitan College 18 years ago and has been her trusted friend ever since, or Pepin, Julia’s classically trained cooking companion, to say something profound about the queen we have come to honor. But both Alssid and Pepin keep their compliments shockingly short.

Perhaps Julia has demanded they curtail their remarks. Given her well-known disdain for pomp and circumstance, it is possible that she feels the red and white banner in back of her on the podium says it all: “Boston Loves You, Julia. And We Will Miss You. Ce N’est Qu’un Au Revoir.”

Julia does take the microphone also, but only for a few moments and only to remind those who have attended to support local restaurants and to be proud of Alssid and BU’s Master of Liberal Arts in Gastronomy Program (the only one in the country, due in part to Julia’s advocacy).

She is six feet two inches tall and dressed in an elegant velvet pantsuit, but tonight Julia seems less daunting. She wrestles with her walker and slowly makes her way through the crowd. Everyone basks in her presence and it is clear that, despite her age, Julia is still as dazzling and fun as a spun sugar dome.

Finally, our star sits down at a table to sign books. One elderly woman stands in line thumbing through her 1965 edition of The French Chef Cookbook, the book that accompanied Julia’s first public television series. A young man clutches a 2000 edition of Julia Child’s Kitchen Wisdom close to his chest. As I stand in line, I wonder what I will say to her. How do you thank a legend for 40 years of extraordinary teaching?

“Maine will miss you, too, Julia,” I tell her as she signs my book. I mention some of the stories that Maine chefs have told me and that they send their love.

“Isn’t that nice,” she replies smiling at me. “Please give them my love.”

Although the fortieth anniversary edition of Mastering the Art of French Cooking is being reissued and should be available at bookstores this week, I doubt I will buy it. Instead I will hold on to my old copy now that it contains Julia’s signature. Later on when I open it again to prepare a special meal, I will remember a warm October evening when a buoyant Julia brightened our lives by reaching out to shake an admirer’s hand, hugging a family member who kissed her cheek, and flirting with a chef who invited her to try his latest creation.

Jill Strauss can be reached at straussj@adelphia.net.