“Paul and I floated out the door into the brilliant sunshine and cool air. “It was heaven to eat,” Julia wrote in From Julia Child’s Kitchen-"a dining experience,” she remembered in My Life in France, “of a higher order than any I’d ever had before.” One could say it was another shaft of light, not angled upward as from a signal mirror, but piercing inward-an annunciation. All it required was butter, flour, parsley, lemon, precision, history, and heat. For Julia’s first meal on French soil, Paul ordered sole meunière, that simplest, purest, most implicitly French preparation of fresh fish. Straight from the ship they drove to a restaurant in Rouen called La Couronne (the Crown).
THE HAYSEED KNIGHT RULE 34 MOVIE
Written and directed by Nora Ephron, and starring Meryl Streep as Child and Amy Adams as Powell, the movie starts in November of 1948, when Julia and Paul landed in France for his new post in the diplomatic corps. It is here that the new movie Julie & Julia, based on Julie Powell’s popular blog of 2002-2003-a year in which Powell made all 524 recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking-begins. In a spiritual sense, however, the making of Julia Child-“Our Lady of the Ladle,” as Time magazine would dub her in 1966-happened over lunch. For Julia Child, French cooking was a guild art requiring a committed apprenticeship, years of practice. It is hardly an overstatement to say that the child of this marriage was public television as we know it today. The Julia that you see on television is the one who registered on the national consciousness and created a place for herself in the national heart.” This, too, was a soul match, the marriage between Julia and the camera, between food and the tube. But if that’s all we ever had, Julia would have been over and forgotten by now. “And it actually has a fair amount of personality in it. “ Mastering the Art of French Cooking is a great, great book,” Shapiro explains. It was the only time the word “instant” would attach to this embracing, warm, spontaneous yet methodical woman, who stood firm against the priggish, frozen, in-minutes cooking of midcentury America. Presented on Boston’s fledgling educational channel, WGBH, The French Chef was an instant success-the first cult cooking show in America.
She describes one of Julia’s performances on The French Chef, a television show that first aired nine months after the 1961 publication of Child’s momentous Mastering the Art of French Cooking (co-authored with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle). It is at a later life-changing moment that the historian Laura Shapiro begins her biography, Julia Child, of 2007. And then, in 1946, when the war was over, marriage. And yet their sure-footed friendship, forged over Indo-Asian food and shared danger, was climbing, slipping, into love. He was looking for a soulmate, but had counted Julia out. Paul thought Julia unworldly, unfocused, and doubtless a virgin-“a hungry hayseed” is how she would describe herself-but also steady, game, a “classy dame,” and “brave,” he wrote his twin brother, Charlie, “about being an old maid!” He was 42 to her 32, five feet ten to her six feet two. A worldly intellectual with a poetic sensibility, an artist and photographer who relished wine, women, and song, he designed war rooms for General (Lord) Mountbatten in Kandy and for General Wedemeyer in Kunming. She was glad of the transfer because fellow O.S.S.er Paul Child had been sent to China some months before. had transferred Julia McWilliams from Kandy, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), to Kunming, China, where she continued her work as head of the Registry, processing all top-secret communications. “I asked myself,” Fitch remembers, “What’s the critical moment that changed her life and initiated her into the woman we know-the adult Julia?” The answer was Paul. It is at this point-the two years she spent in the O.S.S.-that Noel Riley Fitch begins her 1997 biography of Julia Child, Appetite for Life. It is displayed on a wall in the exhibit, forever near the kitchen drawer where she kept it-a leap of light, an SOS, symbolic of the point in her life when she was found. In 2001, when Julia Child’s entire kitchen was relocated from her house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the first floor of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, in Washington, D.C., the rescue mirror went, too. It was standard issue for Americans working in the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.), the dashing precursor to the C.I.A., active during World War II. The mirror was always in the drawer, the little handheld signal mirror, to use if one is lost.
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