Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child Read Online Free PDF Page A

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