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

starving Armenians,” but she never worried or used guilt on her children, who were always hungry. Caro was too busy conducting the conversation from the head of the table, where she was always served first. “We did not talk about food.” Julia remembers, “and we ate as much as we could at every meal.” They drank water in gold-rimmed, long-stemmed glasses, not because of prohibition, but because there was no tradition of wine-drinking. Her father had cocktails, including one called an “orange lady.” When he tried to make wine in the basement, the children blew into the curved glass and the experiment did not work.
    Sunday dinners could swell to tremendous proportions of noise and dishes when McWilliams relatives or friends of her grandfather visited. The Pasadena sun was an attraction for the McWilliams clan, especially Grandfather’s nephew Charles, who came every year from Dwight, Illinois, and provided Julia with her only male cousins—Alex, John, and Charlie McWilliams, who were two to six years older than Julia and attended the Thatcher Academy in Ojai while their parents lived at the Raymond Hotel in Pasadena.
    Julia learned the secret of life at an early age: appetite. “I was always hungry, I had the appetite of a wolf,” she would say after living in Norway. The best cook in the family was her father’s mother, according to Julia, “a modest and retiring little woman with gray hair in a bun at the back of her neck.” Though Grandmother was always occupied caring for her older husband, Julia remembered the foods she prepared: “Grandmother McWilliams was a great cook who made wonderful donuts and some of the best broiled chicken I ever ate…. She grew up in the farming country of Illinois and her family had a French cook in the 1880s.”
    M CHALL GANG OF FOUR
    The McWilliams children were more attuned to their Airedale dog, Eric the Red, and their neighborhood friends than to their cousins. By the time Julia began attending elementary school, she and John formed a gang with the Hall kids across the street: Charlie and Babe (her name was really Orian, but she was the baby of the family). Sometimes George Hall, who was older, would join in on the plays in the vast McWilliams attic. Julia wrote the plays, which she remembers as “terrible,” and they dressed in Caro McWilliams’s old clothes. John ran the curtain. Charlie remembers working the lights in the attic, which often blew the house circuits, and Mrs. McWilliams’s casual acceptance of this major inconvenience. When Babe and Julia tried to raise white rats in their half of the playhouse, they called it the McHall Rodent Farm.
    Babe Hall was a short, wiry girl with as much daring and courage as her friend Julia, who was one year older—the same age as Babe’s brother Charlie. They did not like the other girls whom their parents invited over. Juke and Babe loved to “take things”—everything from the fruit on the trees at the Raymond Hotel, where Babe’s grandmother spent each winter, to nails at a construction site. They were accomplished liars, but were spanked when they were caught.
    Julia early on showed a preference for group play. The McHall gang (or Delta Club) roamed the neighborhood on their bicycles, followed by Eric the Red, as far as the rolling foothills and the boulder-strewn, oak-shaded ravine—the Arroyo Seco (dry wash)—that bordered the western edge of the city. Above them loomed the new Colorado Street Bridge, completed the year Julia was born. One could still go trout fishing in the river below and the Arroyo Park had a fishing pool, archery, and golf. In addition to the Arroyo Seco, their landscape was characterized, except for bedrock outcroppings such as Monk Hill, Raymond Hill, and Devil’s Gate, by a long gradual incline toward the Los Angeles basin.
    No child’s neighborhood would be complete without a Mrs. Greble, whose very name could evoke their collective screams. “Mrs. Greble was the witch of the