34. Four Encounters with Julia Child

June 25, 2022

FIRST ENCOUNTER:  January 1970, cooking meals from Julia Child's "Cooking of Provincial France".

SECOND ENCOUNTER:  January, 1971, attending the taping of the Omelet Show at WGBH.

THIRD ENCOUNTER:  1982?  In Judith Jones' office at Alfred A. Knopf

FOURTH ENCOUNTER:  showing my culinary software to Julia Child

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:49

That was Chopin's Prelude Number Four in E Minor. And now to on to the podcast. I have written this podcast after reading most of Julia Child's last book, My Life in France, published by Knupf in 2008. In my life, I met Julia four times. First in book form, second on the set of her omelet show, third time through her editor, Judith Jones at Knupf Publishing Company, and fourth in the library at Cornell University where I taught. For those of you who are not familiar with Julia Child, she revolutionized the cooking industry by making French cuisine accessible to American audience, first with her highly researched and well written books, and second with her television program, The French Chef, produced and broadcast on Boston's by Boston's WGBH. My first encounter with Julia Child was in September of 1969. At the time I was a student at Oberlin College. This is a well known liberal arts institution. It offered a 414 program, the first trimester being four months long, the second trimester only one month long, and the third being another four months long. The purpose of the second trimester called winter term was to encourage each student to find his or her passion to explore a subject in greater depth. At the time that I did my first winter term, I was suffering from tremendous pain of existence, not sure of what to make of my life. Having until then only half-heartedly dabbled in piano and chemistry, I still had no idea what to do with myself. One day while walking through the hallway of the French department, I happened upon a flyer posted outside the door of Henry Grubbs, a French professor, who suggested a project where some enterprising student would translate bien manger pour bien vive eat well to live well and he supplied the dilapidated paperback that discussed the relationship between cooking and chemistry. I decided to do that winter term project, and I have carried that book with me ever since, carefully wrapped in nineteen sixties era wax paper. It has lost both front and back covers, but fortunately the title is printed on every page. So I f remember the the name of the book. The author, I found out by looking on w Wikipedia, uh is was Edouard de Pomion. He was a physician at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, a food writer, and a radio broadcaster. I have yet to read the book, um, but um I still have it, and I will eventually read it, I think. There is no English version. Anyway, so what did I do during that month of personal studies? Instead of translating DePomion's book, I read Julia Child's The Cooking of Provincial France, Time Life Books. I probably was taken with the truly excellent color photos. This was my first contact with Julia Child in written form. Her excellent book stimulated me to actually try cooking. I prepared five meals during that month using recipes from the book. As these were the days before food processors, to make the mushroom soup, I chopped the mushrooms by hand. This took a long time. To make a meat pate, I froze the meat, sliced it, and then pounded it in a rusty brownie pan with a hammer. The pate developed a strong iron flavor, which of course made it quite healthy. During that first winter term, I advertised French dinners around campus. One meal was attended by a dozen or so elementary school students and their teacher. To do these meals, I would shop in the morning, work all afternoon, and serve dinner around 7 PM, ending as late as 11 PM as I really had no work experience that would have made it possible for me to realistically estimate preparation time. Needless to say, the elementary school students couldn't stay until the end. So they had to skip the Beuf Bourguignon and jump ahead to the dessert, which I had prepared ahead of time, and of course kids would much prefer dessert anyway. My second uh exposure to Julia Child, I met her this time in person in November 1970. By then I had already worked in two restaurants, Commander's Palace in New Orleans for all of January and part of February. Uh and then I flew to France and worked at Hotel des Bains in Aix les Bains, France, from April until late October. In the fall of 1969, I had arranged to do a five-week stint at Commander's Palace in New Orleans. But as the semester wore on, it occurred to me that I was not in the proper mental place to be an undergraduate student. So I thought I would just leave Oberlin and go to France. Well, I ended up working at Commander's Palace. I uh they let me work there even though I wasn't doing the winter term project. But I also, before doing that, I typed out uh 25 letters, I typed out letters to 25 hotels in France. And of the 25, three wrote back, two recommending that I apply the following year. But one hotel, Hotel des Bains, located in the Alpine town of Aix-les-Bains, told me to head on over. So I was very excited because I had solved a problem. I was very depressed and didn't want to be in school. I wanted to go and do something with my hands, and here I had accomplished it. I'd found a job. In late December, I took a Greyhound bus to New Orleans where I underwent a physical to determine whether my next port of call might be Saigon, not Paris. However, I failed the physical thanks to kidneys that proved inadequate for a two-year stint in the US Army, and therefore I became undraftable. I got a 4F. So with light in my heart and soul, I flew to Luxembourg and then took the train to Aix Ba. Hotel des Bins, the hotel, had about 30 rooms. During the summer season, I cooked with a young chef, Mario, who taught me some of the basics required to earn the Seap Certificat Aptitude Professional Professional Aptitude Certificate. In October, at the end of the season working with Mario, having developed a passion for all things culinary, I headed to Mejve along with the hotel's laundryman. I arrived in the evening and the next morning I took I found a job as cook's assistant to the chef of Chalet Malakoff, a vacation school for the city of Malakoff, the communist suburb of Paris. At that time, many towns had vacation schools where students and their teachers could go and do something athletic for half the day and academic the other half. In this case, it was half day skiing and half day studying. However, the season didn't start until January of 1971, so I had I had two months to kill before heading back to my job in Aix les Ba. So I flew home to South Dakota. While I was there, my parents bought me tickets to Julia Child's omelette show as a Christmas present. Really that ranks, I think, as one of the best presents ever given to any human being. Bravo, parents. So I flew to Boston and watched the filming of the show rapturously and afterwards introduced myself to Julia, her husband Paul, and the show's director Ruth Lockwood. Julia was very gracious and supportive of my objectives to become a chef by working in France. After Christmas, I returned to my second job at the Chalimalakoff in early January. I worked there for four months, January through March. Once again, I learned a lot of the same basics I learned at Hotel des Bains, but this time it was for 100 people, mostly children. Toward the end of the season, Chef Pierre asked me if I'd like to work in a one star Michelin restaurant. Pierre at that time moonlighted for a very fancy place in downtown Megev, which is a high class ski resort. Its owner, Chef Loriot, who had another restaurant, Ostellerie Bourguignon in Verdun sur le Du, a medieval town in Bourgogne. He was looking for an assistant. So I worked at Ostellerie Bourguignon from May through October of nineteen seventy one. It was the perfect third job working for a chef who had been awarded the prestigious Mayor Ouvrier de France twice during his career. For him, I had to do everything. Every morning, seven days a week, I rode my motorbike to the farm and stood by the cowl while the old woman milked I motor the old woman being the owner of the farm. I motorbiked back with the still warm milk sloshing in its container, bungee corded to the rack over the rear wheel. Back in the kitchen, the milk transf quickly was transitioned into cafe au lait for the chef, the chef's wife and the patrons who had stayed the night in one of the restaurant's five rooms. One was to bone ducks to make galantine, a charcuterie that was sliced and served cold at the beginning of the meal with aspic. A second thing that I had to do every luncheon dinner, I jumped on the work table every time someone ordered a trout. I had to fish a trout out of a 12 foot long tank that separated the kitchen and the dining room. Then I had to whack the trout on the head, eviscerate it, and pass it through vinegar to turn it blue, then simmer it and serve it with Burblan, the very sauce that Julia Child labored so long and so hard to learn. And I also made the pateon croot that was also an ad an appetizer. Since I showed an affinity and ability for desserts, I was assigned all the ice creams and sorbet for the establishment, as well as making a la minute sponge sugar crowns for each dessert that went out into the dining room. Between services, I also cleaned all the fish that went into the restaurant's legendary pochus verdunoise. This freshwater bouillabes was comprised of three local fish. Pike, which is found in North America, it's quite a vicious fish, very long with lots of bones but very delicate white flesh. And eel, which was found there in the river in Verdun sur le Doux. All of this was simmered in Bourgogne Aligotte, the local white wine, together with heads of garlic split in half, branches of dried thyme and bay leaf. At the end of the season, having worked seven days a week for three months, I was bone tired. So tired, in fact, that instead of riding my motorbike to Portugal and taking the boat across to Hollywood, Florida, an action-packed twelve-day trip through the Caribbean, instead of doing that, I sold the bike and flew back. So much for what would have been a great adventure, and I feel I always regretted that decision, but I was so tired I just didn't want to do anything. Anyway, I returned to Oberlin the following spring, the spring of 1972, and um this time uh with I was a serious student, I decided to major in biology and minor in German. The following summer uh in 1972, um I flew to Paris and worked in a restaurant called Le Petit Zenck. Uh, this restaurant is located in the 6th arrondissement. And the following summer uh in 1973, I found a job in uh Vienna in Austria. I worked at Schlurgel und Faber Bakerei as a Zuckerbaker, pastry chef. And um I took a course in Viennese culture during that summer. And then finally, in the summer of 1974, I moved to New York and got a job as the line cook specializing in fish appetizers and entrees at Cool Vatis Restaurant at 63rd in Madison. I worked there until the fall, and during that time I took two courses, which completed my degree requirements uh to get the degree at Oberlin. Uh that fall uh I quit Cool Vatis and drove to Austin, Texas, where Patricia Bauer Slate and I started what became one of Texas's best bakeries and restaurants, Swedish Hill. That is Swedish with a T, not a D. Now known as Swedish Hill, still in existence after, let's see, how long? About uh almost 50 years. So it's still in existence. You can look it up, Swedish Hill in Austin, Texas. I stayed there for four years and then moved on to uh back to New York City, where I worked 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. in a French restaurant called Laurent Restaurant, which was frequented by Salvador Dolly and Richard Burton and other glitterati. Um and then at midnight I worked in Brooklyn uh for Aclair Bakery as one of over 100 bakers in their large central bakery that supplied eight satellite stores. I worked from midnight until 6 a.m. So I was working uh very hard, two jobs, taking the subway both ways. So I got a little tired of that and found a job as a chef of 50 States Restaurant in Washington, D.C. So I moved from New York to Washington, D.C. Uh, and 50 States Restaurant um was quite they spent a huge amount of money on it. Um, there's a whole story behind that, uh, which includes a lot of politics and a lot of corruption, which is sort of like saying um corruption twice or politics twice. 50 States only lasted a few months before it was sold to a mafioso restaurateur from New York. And not wanting to get further mixed up in that kind of milieu, I moved back to New York for one month to accept the job as chef in an Italian restaurant near Bloomingdale's. However, by this time I was really disillusioned with the culinary world. And if you want to see how I might have been feeling, read Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdin for a very juicy treatment of what it was like to work as a chef in the culinary world in New York or Washington, DC. Anyway, I returned, I I only lasted a month at that restaurant, and I was just fed up with cooking. So I returned to Washington and took a bus ride to nearby University of Maryland, and I enrolled myself as a graduate student in the food science department. To pay my bills, I taught organic chemistry and analytical chemistry for two years while I worked on my degree. And I, after two years, graduated with an MS and a Master of Science in Food Science. However, one year into the program, I took a summer course in magazine writing, uh, for which I wrote an expose on the ingredients used by A. Clair Bakery when I had worked there. I submitted it to Mimi Sheraton, the food editor at the New York Times. Uh, she thought it was really good, and she ran it by the legal department at the New York Times, but they were still hurting from Watergate and other uh events, and they didn't want to cause yet more legal problems for the newspaper. So they didn't pick it up. However, I showed it to Bill Rice, who was the food editor of the Washington Post, and even though he couldn't publish it because it was about a bakery in another town, uh, he proposed that I write a troubleshooting column, which we called Answers. Not a very imaginative uh name, but it was very popular. A lot of people read it. Um, and I read I wrote that column for seven years uh for the Washington Post, as well as uh writing articles for the food section off and on. In 1982, I accepted a position as lecturer in Cornell's School of Hotel Administration. Of course, the several years of experience as Washington Post food columnist, as well as my master's degree in food science, um, added to the possibility of getting the job. I worked there until 1998. And during that time, I taught classes focusing on chemical phenomena and their links to the flavor, appearance, texture, and aromas of food. I became enamored with the concept of developing a database that would link chemistry and cooking. Ironically, I had not yet read the very book that got me started on this long road, as it uh, but the very concept of reversing the philosophical statement as above so below to as below, so above became my mantra. For example, just altering the amylo starch to amylopectin starch in a sauce would cause the sauce to go from pasty and dull to velvety and shiny. And the cooking is just full of all kinds of examples like that. So as below, so above, as at the molecular level, so at the level at the sensory level. At this time, this was um the very beginning of the personal computer revolution.

unknown 21:20

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 21:20

I became very interested in linking chemical phenomena with culinary phenomena using relational databases that could store text and images. Um two events began about the same time. Uh and one was my success with the Washington Post column. Uh, because of that success, I did several TV appearances, including uh one uh an appearance on a Baltimore TV station with uh Oprah Winfrey, who was the uh the host of the program. That was her first job. Uh and then second incident was I met Judith Jones, who was Julia Child's editor and who made Julia Child's first book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the success that it was. And she called me up, and she had seen my column, and she was interested in seeing if I would be interested in writing a book that connected science with cooking. So I flew to New York City to meet Judith Jones, and as we sat in her office at Alfred A. Knopf, high above the streets of Manhattan, Judith received a phone call from Julia. I was sitting there at her desk and she said, and after the phone was uh she hung up, she said, You wouldn't guess who just called me. And of course she'd known her for a decade by that time or more. Uh she said that was Julia Child. So anyway, of course I was impressed. Anyway, I spent several years writing the book, which I later split into two books, The Informed Cook and The Informed Baker. I end up self-publishing them because Judith Jones terminated the contract. I did get to keep the$7,000 uh month uh fee that she paid me. Uh science, it turned out, was not Judith Jones' strong suit. She could have um she couldn't really give me the advice that I needed. Um and so that was the wrong, sort of the reverse thing of what happened to Julia Child, because Julia Child was going to publish with another uh big publisher, and uh they weren't up to the task, and she um ended up publishing with Alfred A. Kunoff, and that was a great move on her part, and I did the opposite, a very bad move on my part. But I didn't know anything, and uh anyway, uh things happen, as they say. Um, years later, Harold McGee, an English professor with a science bent, uh found the right publisher for his book, which was Scribner, and he published uh On Food and Cooking in 2004, and that turned out to be uh a really fabulous book. Everybody loved that book. So, in a way, um I I could have written a book like that, but I didn't. I ended up doing other things. Um and uh the other thing that I did was software. So uh while I was going through the process of looking into writing this book and working on the book, I I embarked on a second ambitious endeavor, which was to develop a computerized database. I called it Fabulous, or Food and Beverage Undergraduate Learning on a Unix system. And I solicited a grant from Sun Microsystems, which at the time was a leader in the manuf in manufacturing computer platforms that would store thousands of color pictures as well as text and numbers. Sun gave me a computer worth$28,000, and I was able to hire a programmer. Uh I got a like$5,000 stipend to get a prototype going. And after I got the prototype going, I took it down uh to the dean's office, and he was so impressed with what I had done, uh, and it was impressive, uh, that he gave me$100,000 for the next year. And during that time, I received$300,000 worth of hard drives and workstations from Sun Microsystems, and they also paid for me to travel around the country showing off my system. Uh, so I showed it off all over the country. I, for example, I showed it to the president of the Culinary Institute of America, I showed it to alumni at a Philadelphia gathering in which the speaker before me was Carl Sagan, and uh that was interesting. And um, then I also showed it to the vice president of General Foods. Um, and finally, I showed my computerized software product to Julia Child. She was visiting our department, and uh, which was not unusual because a lot of very famous foodies uh came to Cornell to visit our department because it was full of very interesting people who were doing very interesting things. Um she acted interested, but I found out later that Julia hated computers. Anyway, um another uh out-of-the-box thinker, speaking of out-of-box thinkers, uh, was my student, uh Ming Tsai. You may have heard of him. He's he was my graduate student, and he worked on a computerized version of Gaston Le Nôtre's best dessert recipes. Um, and that's what he did for his uh project for his graduation. Uh these days, by the way, Ming Tsai has a cooking show called Simply Ming. It's been running for 17 years, and he has a restaurant in Boston called the Blue Dragon. After a couple of years working on Fabulous, the dean of the hotel school was replaced by someone who was unwilling to support my project. The new dean terminated the budget and tried to sell my software to the owner of Cointro liqueurs for one million dollars. That fellow was smart and knew his limits. He knew that investing in software was a potential black hole, not at all like investing in a new alumbique for distilling more cointro. He politely told the new dean to get lost. At this point, I decided to follow my father's advice. He had said to me, Tom, you're an academic, like me. You should get your PhD at this point. So I went to Cornell's food science department and enrolled as a PhD candidate. My father was right, and I finally listened to him. My dissertation involved developing software that would display a food, allow you to rotate it and observe it from all angles, and then choose what you wanted to eat for dinner. While doing this, you were subjected to an aroma with the notion that because the olfactory region of the brain is connected to the amygdala, good aromas cause good moods, and people are more open to exploratory behaviors when in such a good mood. In 1998, I left Cornell due to adverse political winds, and so I gave up the entire fabulous project. We moved across the country to California, and from 1998 to 2015, I was a professor in the Department of Food Science and Nutrition at California Polytechnic University. During those 17 years, I taught an anthropological historical food course for nutrition students. Slowly, I steered myself from the chemistry of cooking interests of my youth and began to focus more on my new passion, which was the unfairness of the post-colonial food system, which keeps farmers in the global south impoverished. And I was particularly interested in uh the cocoa business, in the chocolate business, and cocoa growing. And so starting in 2003, and from then on, I have visited West African cocoa villages on 14 uh years uh running. And in 2006, during that period from 2003 until now, I've established the uh nonprofit known as Project Hope and Fairness, which is dedicated to improving the lot of uh African cocoa farmers. And now here I am, retired in France and working on Project Hope and Fairness, and I also established the French version, Projet Espoir et Equité. Um, and I'm working on a website to sell chocolate, village chocolate in all throughout Europe. But here I am reading Julia Child's last book, My Life in France, uh, which I've uh someone gave to me. And uh I uh I've been reading it, and it reminds me of how important Julia Child was to my culinary career and at least to at least half of my own life story. So I have to say that I admire Julia Child's courage, charisma, and convictions. I'll never forget her, and I owe her a great debt of gratitude for adding such meaning to my life. Well, that's the end of my little presentation about my four encounters with Julia Child. And now I want to say something about what's happening with Project Hope and Fairness because I make a point of doing that each time I do a podcast. So in the last month, since the last time I did uh the podcast number 33, uh, that we've made some progress. Um one, we are closer to pressing cocoa liquor to extract cocoa butter. Uh you might remember that I mentioned that uh David, who is the president of SOCO Plan, which is uh an agricultural cooperative that I helped him establish back in 2019, David is now getting much closer to figuring out how to use the food press that I uh engineer figured out how to get for him, and um he's now extracting cocoa butter uh uh from it and also getting a cocoa cake, press cake. Uh so that's happening. Um, and then next week David will be picking up the grading machine uh that we purchased for him from a company in China, and he will begin his first experiments at grading the press cake from the pressing process to make cocoa powder. And this is uh a real um special thing because it will, if we can make this work, then villages throughout West Africa can make not only chocolate, but they'll be able to make a cocoa beverage that um will be popular, could be popular throughout Africa. Um, and this is revolutionary for the cocoa farmer. Um, this project was funded by Project Redwood, a nonprofit established by alumni from Stanford's business school. A third thing that's been happening um is that uh in nearby Pesouan, Adama Yamba, uh, who is the other person that I work with, uh has now um started a his own uh cooperative from his village of Pesouan. It's called a SCOP, uh Societe Cooperative Agricole de Pesouan, SCOP S-C-A-P. And uh he's going to be manufacturing fudge-filled chocolate bars for sale in the US and in France, where I now live. Um, we expect to start exporting his bars um in September of this year. And the fourth thing that has happened since the last podcast is that by August 1st, uh, the French version of Project Hope and Fairness, known as Projet Espoir et Equité, Project Hope and Fairness in French, uh, will have an operational website which uh with which I will be able to sell chocolates that we manufacture here in La Guépi uh on the European market. I have been busily uh also uh I have been busily playing piano concerts, which I call Chopin Chocolat et Champagne, to develop awareness of the uh what we're trying to do and interest. Anyway, that's it for now. Um I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Uh I expect to have a lot more news in about a month. And in and to end today's session, let's leave by listening to Chopin's Prelude Number 20.