JULIA CHILD IN AMERICA
Melanie Rehak, Dan Barber, David Kamp, Molly ONeill, and Laura Shapiro
Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers
7:00 P.M., October 10, 2007
JEAN STROUSE: Welcome to the New York Public Library, and to what promises to
be a terrific opening for the fall seasons Conversations from the Cullman Center. Im
Jean Strouse, the Director of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, which is up on
the second floor here, and I apologize if you had a hard time getting in today. As you
probably heard, theyre shooting Sex and the City: The Movie, today, tomorrow, and
Friday, and the enterprise has completely, if entertainingly, made a mess of this place.
Theyre doing it actually right outside thethe shootings going on on the stairs going
from the second to the third floor, which is right outside the Center, so you can see all the
actresses sitting there getting their makeup put on and Ithis afternoon, Carrie Bradshaw
in her wedding dress got married or almost got married.
(laughter) I hope I dont get
sued by the film company. I was spoiling it. Shall I spoil it or shall I say no more? Okay,
I wont say anymore, except thatoh, never mind.
(laughter) Yeah, right. Its quite a
dress.
Youll find this card which lists our, the other programs we have coming up in the next
couple monthsits on the table at the exit as you leave. Next Tuesday the novelist Joyce
Carol Oates will be interviewing Edmund White, who was a fellow at the Cullman Center
and wrote a novel while he was here called Hotel du Dreamthats Tuesday the
sixteenth. Later on in the fall well be hosting conversations about the writer Leonard
Michaels, about two slaves who escaped from the South during the Civil War and about a
new best-selling novel called Redemption Falls by the Irish writer Joseph OConnor, who
will talk with his fellow former Cullman Center FellowI was worried about tripping on
thatanother best-selling Irish novelist Colum McCann. So you can find dates and times
for all of those on this program, called Murder in the Stacks, which, I dont know, will.
Special thanks to Betsy Bradley, the Cullman Centers Manager of Public Programs, for
setting up and managing all of these events, including tonights.
Which brings us to Julia Child in America. Melanie Rehak, the moderator for the
evening, wrote her own best-selling book, Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created
Her, while she was a fellow at the Cullman Center. The book won the Edgar and Agatha
Awards and was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Chicago Tribune for
2005. Melanies currently working on a book that will be called Meet the Farmer: Food,
Family, and Balancing the World, One Meal at a Time. As you might guess from the
title, it will be about local farming and will follow various kinds of food from growing in
the earth to arriving on the plate. Whats not evident in the title is that the story will be a
first-person account, part of it based on Melanies work in the kitchen of Applewood, a
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great small restaurant in Park Slope. If she werent here tonight, shed be cooking fish at
Applewood, and if you havent eaten there I really recommend it.
Melanie will introduce the panelists, and Ill turn the mic over to her in just a second, but
I want to add that books by the four panelists will be on sale just outside the doors also as
you leave. The authors have agreed to sign copies, so please let them get out, back to the
hallway after they speak and buy the books and ask them your follow-up questions there.
Thank you.
(applause)
MELANIE REHAK: Hi. Thanks for coming. Im going to do a quick introduction of
our four panelists so we can hear what they have to say. David Kamp, to my right, is the
author of The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation, which is a
great book for anyone who wants to know why you can buy sushi at your corner market
and what a salt tasting is, which I found kind of interesting, and which was also named
one of the New York Times Hundred Most Notable Books for 2006. Hes a contributing
editor at Vanity Fair and at GQ, where he recently wrote, not about Sylvester Stallone,
which was what I thought, but about Sly Stone of the Family Stone.
(laughter) That was
a very critical conversation we just had backstage.
(laughter) And his new humor book,
which is called The Food Snobs Dictionary: An Essential Lexicon of Gastronomical
Knowledge, coauthored by Marion Rosenfeld, just came out yesterday, so you want to
rush right out and buy it. And according to that book, which I think is very appropriate
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for this evening, it will give ordinary folk the wherewithal to take down the food snobs,
which Julia Child would surely have appreciated.
To his right is Laura Shapiro, whose most recent book is Julia Child, published in the
Penguin Lives series, which is an acclaimed brief biography of tonights reason for being
here. She is a former senior writer for Newsweek, where she covered food, books, and the
arts, and has also written for the New York Times, Gourmet, and Gastronomica, and she
is the recipient of a James Beard Journalism Award. In addition to her new biography of
Julia Child, shes also the author of two other food-related books, Perfection Salad:
Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century, and Something from the Oven:
Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America. Like her Julia biography, both of those books are
about a lot more than just food and cooking in America. They cover social and historical
contexts of our great national culinary journey and Im sure shell help us learn more
about that tonight as it pertains to Julia.
To her right is Molly ONeill, who is most recently the editor of American Food Writing:
An Anthology with Classic Recipes, published by the Library of America, a really kind of
incredible book that includes everything from George Washington Carvers recipe for
Puree of Peanuts Number Two, extra fine, which he allowsI couldnt resist telling
you all thisa generous layer between slices of bread makes an excellent sandwich to
Julia Childs essay about how her TV show The French Chef began, which begins that
she ended up on television by accident, so maybe well be able to talk about that a little
bit tonight, too. Molly is also a former food columnist for the New York Times and the
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author of several cookbooks, including the award-winning New York Cookbook and one
of my favorites, The Well-Seasoned Appetite, as well as a memoir.
And finally, to her right is Dan Barber, who is the chef and co-owner of Blue Hill
Restaurant here in New York, which just received its first Michelin star, and Blue Hill at
Stone Barns, which is actually up in Westchester County. He also serves as Creative
Director of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, which is committed to
sustainable community-based agriculture and to educating all of us about what that
means, with a lot of great programs for children and for adults. The farm raises free-range
animals, one of which is in the back of Dans car outside right now, which Im probably
not supposed to tell you, but . . . and also produce year-round, and they have a twenty-
two-thousand-square-foot greenhouse which they use during the winter and you can eat
all of that stuff at both of the restaurants, both upstate and here. And, in addition to all of
this, Dan is also a recipient of the James Beard Award for Best Chef in New York City.
So, thats who these people are, and sadly, I have no introduction for this fine creature,
but our fifth and final guest, maybe is the perfect introduction for her. So we thought we
would start the evening off with a little taste of what Laura refers to in her book on Julia
as Julias joyful fanaticism, a phrase that really stuck with me. So well start the first
clip.
JULIA CHILD: Look at this magnificent head. Its from a giant cod. And here is a hank
frame. Were going to do fish soup and bouillabaisse today on The French Chef.
(theme
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music) (laughter) Welcome to The French Chef. Im Julia Child. Today were going to
do fish soup and bouillabaisse. Bouillabaisse is probably one of the most famous of all
French soups. It originated on the Mediterranean coast of France, in Marseille, and all it
is, really, is a plain fishermans stew made out of the days catch, or the unsalable
leftovers. Unfortunately, when you get a famous recipe like this, the gourmets get hold of
it, and they fancy it up so much and say do this, do that, or thats not the real thing that us
ordinary people feel that its impossible to do and terribly expensive. But you can make a
bouillabaisse out of any kind of fresh, lean fish that you want. And its wonderful to eat
and everybody enjoys making it and particularly eating it and theres nothing very
difficult about it. Now, the first thing that you do when you want to make a fish soup or a
bouillabaisse is to make a great fish stock.
MELANIE REHAK: Well, that was rather abrupt. Every time I see that, I feel like we
should have invited a sociolinguist onto the panel just to talk about how Julia says the
word gourmets because I feel like so much untapped material here. But since we
havent, well turn to these fine people and, maybe, Laura, you want to start us off on
Julia and who she was and why this woman became so popular right away in American
culture.
LAURA SHAPIRO: This bouillabaisse clip is actually a great way to introduce Julia,
because bouillabaisse was kind of a fetish of hers, starting back when she was living in
Paris and had gone to the Cordon Bleu and she had met Simca and Louisette Bertholle,
her colleagues there, and they were working on this big French cookbook for Americans
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that would become Mastering the Art of French Cooking. And while she was working on
the book and, being Julia, her way of working on the book was to take every recipe, every
traditional recipe, every recipe of Simcas, every recipe from Escoffier or any other book
and tear it apart and deconstruct it and redo it from every possible angle and try to make
it come out right every single time and be the perfect example of that, so she was an
incredibly hands-on, plus academic, cook.
In that time she was also a Foreign Service wife, her husband Paul was working for the
State Department in Paris, so they had this social life and they were always meeting and
spending time with the French people in Paris, who paid noits hard to believe now
they paid no attention to Julia, and they didnt think that she was an interesting or
important person because she was (a) American, and (b) interested in cooking, well,
isnt that nice, and it was sort of a pat on the headit was a pat on the head.
(laughter)
So, and this infuriated her. They were condescending to this nice little housewife who
was working on recipes. She could, you know, run them six times around the room, with
what she knew about bouillabaisse, but they would insist that to make a bouillabaisse
and this was one of her examples all the time when she raged about this in lettersyou
had to be a grizzled old Frenchman, a fisherman in some coastal town, and you had to
had to have exactly this fish, and you had to, you know, pull this sprig of something out
of the ground exactly for thatshe thought this was ridiculous.
So her idea, and she says this when she writes about bouillabaisse always, is, its fresh
fish. Its this, its saffron, whatever, its anise, those are the flavors. Its going to be
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French. You can do it. You dont have to be French, you dont have to have gone to
cooking school to do it. Its yours, you can do it. So thats what shes doing here.
MELANIE REHAK: And Dan, maybe you can tell us
DAVID KAMP: Im not Dan, though.
MELANIE REHAK: Im sorry, Im sorry. Oh my God. Julia would be soalthough
actually, Julia would probably.
DAVID KAMP: Just make the most of what you find, girl! (In Julias voice)
MELANIE REHAK: David, maybe you can put this into a little bit of a context for us.
You write a lot in your book about what was going on when Julia came along and
DAVID KAMP: Well, it was it was the postwar era, and it was actually a very
Francophilic era, I kind of view it wistfully because now we hear about the French as
cheese-eating surrender monkeys, and theyre, you know, reflexively derided and we
are supposed to hate them, but it was actually mutual, and the French reciprocated in the
postwar era, and this was kind of a natural outgrowth of that, about Americans becoming
more aspirational, and there really hasnt been an era like it before or since, in terms of
mutual admiration and respect between the French and the Americans, and then towhat
she did was she took on the seemingly undemystifiable thing that was French cookery
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and saidyou know, the populism in that clip, that anyone can do it. And in fact, this
would set hearts aflutter now, but when she talks about bouillabaisse she says, I believe
in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, you can use some canned clam juice if you
dont have such and such available to you.
But that was part of it, too, was that she really was trying to take away any intimidation
factor whatsoever and that was brilliant of her, but it was also brilliant timing, because
she hit this moment when ordinary literal G.I. Joes, you know, were going to France,
traveling, because airfare was cheap, and were willing to take on this idea of cooking
without being intimidated, and she took away that intimidation factor.
MELANIE REHAK: Well, Dan, now I know I have that right.
DAN BARBER: Im certainly not intimidated.
MELANIE REHAK: As arguably a gourmet, can you speak to
DAN BARBER: A gourmand at heart.
MELANIE REHAK: A gourmand, exactly. Could you speak to that issue of, you know,
how Julia wanted to make food approachable and
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DAN BARBER: Yeah, Im not sure I have quite the historical perspective that David
does.
MELANIE REHAK: But you have the chefs perspective.
DAVID KAMP: Im going to lord it over you.
DAN BARBER: Yeah, she opened doors. My generation doesnt have a direct
connection to her in the sense of watching that and being inspired directly, but I can see
just from that clip how its influenced chefs like me today in tryingin our approach to
food both in the kitchen and in front of the live audience to make what we do accessible
and friendly and approachable and thats a gift that I think sheshe handed down to us in
a way that opened up the kitchen beyond creating the perfect plate of food and beyond
being imprisoned by the kitchen, and she gave rise to the Wolfgang Pucks of the world
and today you see her influence everywhere. So it was really refreshing to see that.
MELANIE REHAK: Just wait, theres more.
DAN BARBER: Right.
MELANIE REHAK: And Molly, maybe you could talk a little bit about what she did
for home chefs. I mean, and just how that show went into American airspace. And I
mean, some of the fan mail she got, its as though she had releasedas Dan said
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released people from their chains and you sort of have this image of, you know,
American women in front of the TV set, you know, just waiting to learn more from her.
MOLLY ONEILL: Right. Right. Nora Ephron did a wonderful take on what happened
in the years after, you know, as soon as Julia began airing and suddenly the shift went
from discussing the ballet to discussing the poulet,
(laughter) and, you know, it
happened and everyone was making the same recipes and they were fairly derivative of
The French Chef.
MELANIE REHAK: Like what, could you give us some examples?
MOLLY ONEILL: Yeah, I mean, suddenly everyone thought they could make a
baguette,
(laughter) and Julias recipe was like, twelve pages long it was hilarious. I
remember one time as a tribute to Julia, I wanted to run it in the New York Times, but
there werent that many ad pages, the magazine would have weighed five poundsit was
insane. The other thing thats really interesting to me. I mean, there were a couple of
things that were very interesting to me. I always forget what a klutz she was. And I
worked with Julia. I lived across the street from her in Cambridge. I learnedshe was
incredibly generous to me when I was coming up. And she was a real battleship in the
kitchen. Andbut I forget that on camera, too, that was one of her great things. I mean,
shes just such a real person. With her cleaveryou know, getting her cleaver out,
putting that down. And then those big handsI mean, her hands were like these teamster,
these stevedore hands,
(laughter) and then, you know, that chirpy warbling voice, and
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then, you know, her whole thing about speaking for the proletariat, and speaking for the
common person, and none of those gourmets for us.
To me the irony is that she created, she took fine food from the professional class and
brought it into the middle-class household and made it part of daily vernacular, but she
also created a generation of Dan Barbers,
(laughter) and so were seeing it movethat
fine cooking is moving back to the professional kitchens. And I see, you know, the kind
of science cooking as a way of doing that. Lets keep it here. Lets make the divide. We
always have to create that distinction, that distinction, that distinction, and I think that
JuliaI love to think sometimes, well, what would she well, what would she say about
this? Sometimes I channel her.
MELANIE REHAK: Sometimes we all channel her.
LAURA SHAPIRO: Yes, its true, this business of making these recipes available to
ordinary people and loosening up the kitchen and so forth, and that all happened, but she
had a great little streak ofI dont want to call it elitism
MOLLY ONEILL: Oh, I will!
LAURA SHAPIRO: When Craig Claiborne did thathad that famous storyit was on
the front page of the New York Times in the early seventies. He had won a four-thousand-
dollar dinner anywhere in the world. He and Pierre Franey went to Paris and this
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restaurant and they ran a story about this dinner and in the early seventies spending four
thousand dollars for it. You could send your kid to college for that in those days. And the
letters poured in. People were outraged. The Times ran letters for weeks on this thing.
Juliatheres a letter from her to Craig Claiborne writing to him and saying, They are
crazy. What are they complaining about? These are people who have mink coats and big
cars. Thats what theyre spending their money on. Why shouldnt you spend your money
on this food? Whether or not she really believed that, I dont know. She had a funny
thing about Craig Claiborne, she was real nice to him and she also criticized him, you
know, with the other, on the other side. But
MELANIE REHAK: Well, do you thinkI mean, that brings up an interesting point
was that she was accused more than once, Im sure, of being a food snob. And was that
maybe could you speak to this, David. Is this true, or
DAVID KAMP: Actually, I dont think she was, necessarily. I thought she was really
more the anti-elitist. In fact, she is, on paper, as elite as you get. Born in a wellborn to a
well-to-do Pasadena family, educated at Smith, and she and her husband were in the
OSS, which was a haven of rich preppies and all that, andbut the thing that got across
about her. But to this day, thats sort of the biggest fear that a lot of ordinary people have
in crossing over into embracing better food and, you know, farm to table and all that
stuff. Oh, it seems so elitist. It seems so intimidating, and she somehow despite this so-
called on-paper elitist background had this streak of populism that was the complete
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opposite of what her background was. And so she wasnt a food snob and in fact the way
she delivered the word gourmet, I mean, you know, she torpedoed that word.
MELANIE REHAK: Right. Well, what about the ideaI mean, she was a huge
supporter of the food industry, and Safeway even sponsored The French Chef for a long
time, and I mean, that seems so the opposite and, Dan, maybe you have some thoughts
about this, of what we think of as, you know, good food or fine food now, I mean, her
whole idea, as David mentioned, was that, you know, you could make it with canned
clam juice, and it was fine, and it seems like now, you know, were all coming back to
the idea that you know, if you cant buy it at Greenmarket, you do it in a pinch but you
dont really want to use it. I mean, how do those things . . .
DAN BARBER: Well, she strikes me as very political. I mean, she knew who her
constituency was and she was going after that. Id like to think that she didnt actually
believe in the kinds of things that, you know, supported big agriculture, although there
are quite a few examples, and Im sure you could probably reference them much more
readily than I can where she spoke in favor of those corporate interests, and whether they
were sponsoring her or not, from what I understand.
MOLLY ONEILL: She was very much for large corporate food interests and very
intimidated toward the end of her life about a number of things that were the truth told
today would cast her in a less favorable light. There were a few political things that as a
diehard liberal Democrat she stumbled on. And there werehuge things in the food
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industry. I mean, a couple things that I remember, when PETA started going crazy about
the milk industryremember Primo Veal and that whole thing. I went, I went to a veal
farm with her, and it was a nightmare. It was a nightmare. I mean it was like being in a
Holocaust. It was horrible. And she said,
(in Julia voice) I see nothing wrong with this
place. What are they talking about? I mean, it was horrible. And when I, you know
MELANIE REHAK: All right, Laura and Dan, you guys are up next for the Julia
impression. Okay, just so you know. Two down, two to go.
MOLLY ONEILL: The tide began to shift in America away from very meat-heavy
dishes to kind of lighter dishes and the use of vegetables became more pronounced and
the use of carbohydrates became more pronounced. Every Sunday morning, this is back
in the days of the answering machine. Every Sunday morning when I was writing at the
New York Times the answering machine would go off. Julia woke up very early and was
accustomed to talking to me early, so 6:15bing!
(in Julia voice) Molly! Have those
vegetarians gotten to you? I see no meat in your column!
(laughter) We need to be
careful, dear.
(laughter)
LAURA SHAPIRO: That was really it. It was not for her constituency. Her constituency
was your constituency, and they were appalled by some of the things that Julia got around
to saying. She would get these letters: Julia! How could you? Youre promoting genetic
engineering. Youre in favor of MSG!
Page 15 of 38
DAVID KAMP: And irradiated food. She was pro-irradiated food.
LAURA SHAPIRO: She believed the things that the food industry said and she had a
history of believing them. Again, when she was in Paris, when she had questions about
the food for the book she would write these letters to the Rice Council and the dairy
industry.
DAN BARBER: Id like to read their answers. The irony in that of course is that the
kinds of things she was talking about, classic French food, is rooted in great agriculture.
Organic agriculture, of course, before the word was invented. But great fundamentals and
heritage wisdom.
MOLLY ONEILL: She thought that was the least important thing in the world.
DAVID KAMP: I kind of give her a little bit of a pass on that just because of the era and
generation she was. Its sort of like I dont begrudge a ninety-year-old for saying all rock
music is noise. You know, its the same thing. She had a very specific battle that she
chose and won handily with America, which was just, Hey, dont be intimidated by
cooking. Dont be intimidated by good food, or by French food, which then can be a
gateway to other kinds of sophisticated or aspirational or adventurous cooking and eating.
So that was her battle, she took it on, won it handily, really convinced the whole of
America, pretty much, that that was worthwhile. She was, you know, by our standards,
wrong about ingredientsyou can do it all at the supermarket. No, you cant, if you
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really care. Like I said, that was sort of, it would be sort of like beating up on a ninety-
year-old for not liking the Rolling Stones.
DAN BARBER: But dont you think that her attacks on Alice Waters, for example, was
a direct appeal to the masses, who view Alice Waters, and I dont mean to single her out,
but those who are precious aboutor Dan Barbers, if I had been around at that point
(laughter) who approach this with too much of a sensibility and a preciousness that
wouldnt appeal to the kinds of people that she was trying to turn on to food. Am I wrong
on that?
MOLLY ONEILL: I think it was not about the masses or her audience at all. It was that
she thought Alice was out of her mind. The idea that you had to be committed to picking
every peach from the tree, and that a peach counts as a dessert. It justit was not her
thing.
(laughter) (in Julia voice) I can see it for lazy people. She doesnt even cook it!
(laughter)
MELANIE REHAK: Do you think, Dan, that she could survive today with this show
DAN BARBER: Well, there are a lot of chefs that I know of today who embrace that and
view Alice with that same kind of pretentiousness that I just mentioned and feel like, you
know, thats something thats a little bit backward and unrealistic, especially for our
climate in the Northeast, but also just for the general home cook, so there is something
that I think that is embracing about what Julia represented for a lot of chefs, ironically,
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becausealso of our haute imperative, as well. So it can get quite confusing when you
examine it.
MOLLY ONEILL: I think the objection was something different. I think the objection
was one of style. I think that forwhat Julia doesnt like about Alice is that Alice lives
out of her head and Julia lives out of her heart and her hands. And she wanted joy, she
wanted a robust feeling, she didnt want things parsed and tiny and Tiffany-d. She wanted
things to be accessible, and I think that thats what it was really about, and that the battle
line happened to be about products is incredibly unfortunate, but I dont think that thats
what motivated her in that battle.
DAVID KAMP: I would agree with Molly, too. That I think that with Julia it really was
about just enthusiasm, an infectious enthusiasm, whereas with Alice Waters, it is about a
noble ideal and I think that Julia to this day I think her approach as a politician was much
better because, you know, she won all of us over, whereas Alice Waters, honestly, she
comes out on the stage at some event, some people hunch over, they feel guilt-tripped
just by the very sight of her.
(laughter) The beret and everything . . . and I think honestly
we need more people who have Alice Waterss ideals, but more of a Julia approach to
popularizing them, you know, if we could somehow morph them in some tube thing.
MELANIE REHAK: Well, along those lines we have another clip.
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JULIA CHILD: And one thing thats nice about this, too, is that you can add other
things too it, such as these cooked diced onions, and we had them the other night with
onions and cooked diced green peppers
MELANIE REHAK: The context is shes making a potato pancake.
JULIA CHILD: And another thing you could do would be diced ham or chicken livers
or diced mushrooms. Im going to try, Im going to try and flip this over, which is a
rather daring thing to do, but Ive got to get a little bit of a crust on the bottom of it. And
another thing you can do with this is to have a fireproof dish and get the bottom nice and
crusty, and then pour some very heavy cream, and sprinkle a little cheese on top of it and
then bake that in the oven for aboutin a 375 oven for about thirty minutes. That makes
a perfectly delicious dish. And well see if that is flippable. Well, Im going to try it
anyway. When you flip anything, you really you just have to have the courage of your
convictions,
(laughter) particularly if its sort of a loose mass like this.
(laughter) Well,
that didnt go very well. You see, when I flipped it, I didnt have the courage to do it the
way I should have.
(laughter) You can always pick it up if youre alone in the kitchen.
Who is going to see?
(laughter)
MELANIE REHAK: All right. It almost bears no comment, butso Im not sure if
everyone could hear over the raucous laughter from the room, but that was the very
famous clip in which she says, you are alone in the kitchenif you are alone in the
kitchen, who is going to see? something I have often brought to mind when Ive had a
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big disaster during a dinner party. But why is that, I mean, this is maybe the most
remembered Julia moment of all of her shows and maybe we could talk a little bit about
that and a little bit about why this woman whowho, as you said, was such a klutz, and
did things wrong constantly on her show was still such an idol and became such a sort of
cooking guru for so many people.
DAN BARBER: I was trying to imagine Rachael Ray doing that
(laughter)
MELANIE REHAK: And maybe, since you bring it up, maybe we could sort of merge
all these conversations together and talk about how different that is from what we see
now on Food TV and what we expect from celebrity chefs and Food Network shows and,
you know, so.
DAVID KAMP: Well, the Food Network vetting process now would never allow a six
foot two inch woman with a warbly voice and breathing in the wrong places. I always
liken her to like her contemporary Howard Cosell
(laughter) in the sports world,
Brooklyn Jewish lawyer, talks like this, whatever, and you know, again, no ABC
executive now would allow that man to make it even into the reception, let alone the on-
camera screen test and so its just theres something to be said for oddball charisma,
which is what both those people had, and it was so infectious. I think it was part of her
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populist appeal, too, was just that she wasnt a Donna Reedtype perfect kitchen
character, which is what that era prescribed, you know.
LAURA SHAPIRO: The amazing thing about this clip, and this moment, which is the
famous moment from Julias whole television career all those years, this is the thing
everyone remembers and they remember it wrong. People will saytheyve come to me
and said and theyll say to anybodyI saw her drop a chicken on the floor and put it
back, I saw her drop a turkey, I saw her drop three ducks on the floor,
(laughter) a huge
fish, and she put it right back and she said, youre alone in the kitchen, who is going to
see? So they get the quote right but the food has grown, its just blossomed in their
memory, so, I in working on my book, I justI wrestled with that. What is it? What are
we trying to remember? What do we have to remember that makes us expand that
incident to include these gigantic things of food and Julia bringing it back? And I feel as
though the incident has to be as big as Julia, as big as our memory of Julia. That shes
such an outsized figured in our television memory, in our culinary memory, that
somehow that little incident had to be the same size. But it is remarkable. PeopleSome
of you probably remember seeing her drop a chicken but I promise you it didnt happen.
DAVID KAMP: And also, the Dan Ackroyd parody, I think it was like 78, by which
time she had not filmed an original show in something like, five, six years, right? So I
meanthat it was still that relevant, and that gettable to a young, TV comedy-watching,
stoner audience, probably, and that they would still get a Julia Child joke, because she
was that big.
Page 21 of 38
MELANIE REHAK: Well, Dan, what do you think? I mean, youre, you know, the only
person here who has to function. I mean, I dont know if you ever cook in front of an
audience, but I mean do you feel that now theres really a culture
DAN BARBER: In front of the twenty-year-old testosterone-driven young chefs that I
cook around all day.
MELANIE REHAK: Right, right, but do you feel theres a pressure to
DAN BARBER: a national audience.
MELANIE REHAK: to perform, you know, to execute your knife skills, and your
everything, you know, your flips, perfectly?
DAN BARBER: Do I feel the pressure toI mean, you wouldnt find me attempting to
do something like that in my kitchen, thats the only problem. Yeah. My audience, I say
that with some kind of truth. I mean, I feel tremendous pressure around my young coterie
of cooks because Ibecause they do look to me as if I know how to cook, flip the perfect
potato pancake, and so the humanizing around this group doesnt happen too often, and
so I tend to take on a testosterone-driven manliness myself,
(laughter) to be honest, and
those kind of clips are more instructive than you think.
Page 22 of 38
MELANIE REHAK: Do you think something has been lost? I mean
DAN BARBER: Well, when I watch the Food Network, yes, I think a lots been lost,
obviously when you see that, and the network seems to me to be more about fetishizing,
fetishizing food, more than it is about what everyone has described today, which is the
love of good food, and the love of the company that surrounds it, and the kinds of things
that Julia represented and that we ought to return to, but it seems as if the Food Network
is going in the other direction, and food shows, so, you know, its a little perplexing to
see this next to anext to a Rachael Ray show.
MELANIE REHAK: Molly, did you want to say something or were you just having a
laugh?
MOLLY ONEILL: It would have been so funny to see them cooking together.
(laughter)
DAVID KAMP: Well, one thing, Julia would have cooked with Rachael Ray. In one of
the last print interviews she gave, she sang Emeril Lagasses
praises and she was not, she
was not, you know, scandalized by the fact that he was so flagrantly commercial, because
that again was her populism kicking in. And my sense is that Rachael Ray would not
have offended her. She would have found a way to defend Rachael Ray.
Page 23 of 38
MOLLY ONEILL: She probably would have. The thing about Julias mistakes is that
she herself hated them. They were the things that everybody loved the best and in fact
they were incredibly useful for an audience to see. You saw her, you saw her mending
that potato thing, so she recognized. She knew that that was like a teachable moment, and
it was good to have it. She hated it, they made her cringe. That was going to be on reruns
for the rest of her life. And she wasshe was a huge perfectionist. She thought of herself
as a total professional. She had studied with chefs. She wanted to do it right. She thought
that good teaching was showing them how to do it right. It killed her to see things like
that just out there over and over, and the very quality that we love in that show and about
Julia, the klutziness, that things go wrong and stuff, drove her nuts, and its why in the
course of her career, the shows got glossier and glossier and more rehearsed, she did less
cooking, they got sillier and less interesting until there was justyou could just see a
huge change from the beginning to the end of her career because of that. But she liked
them better. She thought that they were better, the smoother they are and the more
professional.
MELANIE REHAK: Just to go back to something you said about your testosterone-
drive masculinity, the other thing that strikes me, Rachael Ray aside, is that of course
Julia was a woman and I feel like a lot of the chefs that we really hold in high esteem
right now are not, are men. You know, yourself included, but anyone from, you know,
Mario Batali to Emeril Lagasse or whoever and do you thinkis there room?
DAN BARBER: When you say, we hold them in regard, I mean, I dont.
Page 24 of 38
(laughter)
MELANIE REHAK: I mean we the non-chefs. You know, if you think of the names
who are big enough to exist on a kind of national level, Food Network people, kind of
household chef names, you know, a thing which didnt really exist prior to pretty recently
with the exception of Julia and maybe someone like Alice Waters, who I guess weve all
agreed is of another time/space continuum. I mean, why are there no women now?
Whydo you have a
DAN BARBER: Well, did you want to chime in on that as a woman?
MOLLY ONEILL: I prefer to do it as a woman than as a man. I mean
(laughter)
MELANIE REHAK: Sorry, I didnt mean to put you on the spot.
DAN BARBER: No, really, this is why I dont moderate these things.
MOLLY ONEILL: Were reallyI think a couple things are going on here. Were
dramatically overlooking Martha.
Page 25 of 38
MELANIE REHAK: Ah, good point.
MOLLY ONEILL: Im sorry, but you can put fifty-five Mario Batalis in a can and you
do not have Martha, by any way of judging except taste.
(laughter) Right? And you
know, so much of what the Food Network is doing is totally derivative. No ones come
up with anything new since this woman. No one is taking any risks. Theyre not allowed
to. The production values are so extraordinarily high. The cost of doingI mean, when I
was doing stuff for Channelfor public television, I believe that the budget was
$300,000 for thirty minutes and we were using BBC footage. I mean its an insane
amount of money that goes into doing it and it has to be committee-controlled. And you
know, yes, there is a genderthere is a significant gender problem and Laura and have
had real, some great lunches on this topic, prepared by men.
(laughter) But I think that
the issue is something different. Its about theresone thing happens, it changes the
world, and then the world imitates that thing until the next great thing happens. And in
thisthe next great thing hasnt happened yet. Were all riding her coattails. At least
thats what I think.
MELANIE REHAK: Do you agree with that as a man?
DAN BARBER: Thats a broad statement. I just want to go back to your point about
why are there no, you know, that question, why are there not more women to which we
supposedly emulate in the kitchen, it kind of goes back to why arent there more female
chefs running top kitchens?
Page 26 of 38
MELANIE REHAK: I guess thats reallyyou know, I certainly dont mean to
discount Martha Stewart, but somebody of a sort of a restaurant empire cookbook kind of
category.
DAN BARBER: The women chefs that I admire are not cooking the kind of food that
gets the four stars and the multiple restaurants and the backing to do restaurants in the
environments that get those kind of reviews and then get that kind of backing, its kind of
contagious. So, there are a lot of fantastic women chefs out there and in fact in my
kitchens at Blue Hill New York and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, I prefer hiring women. We
get quite a few through, and a lot choose not to work the hours and the intensity. But
theresId say I have thirty to forty percent women, which is triple the number of most
kitchens, because I look for them, its a kind of reverse sexism, whatever, because I do
feel like that when somebody can take the hours and the pressure, when a woman can
take the hours and the pressure, again its a very broad-stroke comment to make, but I
feel like the passion, the reason for them being there, is much more about the food and
about where the foods coming from, and about the sensibility and the whole gestalt is
the whole package is much more real than when usually this testosterone-younger-male-
driven chef is there for the r
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