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The holidays are upon us, so it seemed appropriate to check in with Julia Child, whom I've long admired. Now 88, she has been a tireless proponent of good French-style cooking for decades. She's famous for her Public Television series, The French Chef, which started in 1963, and more recently for the PBS show and books she has done with the French-born chef Jacques Pepin.
I've always liked Child's zest for life and her unpretentiousness. Rabidly opposed to the low-fat food trend, she loves butter, bacon, and beef, and she's an advocate for enjoying all other elements of the good life -- albeit in small portions. And she has even been known to eat an occasional Whopper or Big Mac. She splits her time between homes in Boston and Santa Barbara, where she goes right after Thanksgiving to spend the winter months.
Child has written a number of books. In my own stumbling efforts to learn to cook, I've found her The Way to Cook, published in 1997 (Knopf, $65) invaluable. I can also heartily recommend her latest, a 107-page volume called Julia's Kitchen Wisdom (Knopf, $19.95), which is a very handy distillation of the basics of cooking. Everything you need to know for putting together a holiday dinner is in there, from how to prepare broccoli to how to roast a turkey. (Her advice on the latter, by the way, is to slow-cook the bird at 325 degrees, stuffed with flavorings such as lemon, celery leaves, and a couple of small onions. She prefers to cook the stuffing outside the bird.)
I spoke by phone with Child on Nov. 16 about these and other matters pertaining to the proper enjoyment of the holidays. What follows are edited excerpts of our conversation.
Q: Could you sum up your feelings about the low-fat food movement?
A: I don't go for that at all. In the American Institute of Wine & Food
[which she founded with winemakers Robert Mondavi and the late Richard Graff to advance American gastronomy], our motto is: "Small helpings. No seconds. No snacking. A little bit of everything, and have a good time." If you can follow that, it keeps your weight and health in good form. Even if you're going to have some rich dessert, you can always just have a little spoonful to taste it and keep your spirits up. Then I don't think you have to go into that miserable, low-fat stuff.
Q: That's more the French way of eating, I think. Americans always wonder why the French aren't fat even though they eat rich foods.
A: It's because the French don't eat these great big helpings. It's really horrifying to them to go to Disneyland and see these great big fat Americans plodding along, always eating something. No snacking is very important, I think.
Q: What is your plan for Thanksgiving dinner?
A: I'm going out. I'm going to Providence to be with a family I've been [dining] with for a number of years. The husband barbecues turkey in one of those things that has a top on it, so you get a little bit of smoke but not too much. I'm just sorry that I won't have any leftovers. I love to make a big sandwich the next day with the mayonnaise and so forth.
Q: I went through your latest book and you give all the basics for preparing a Thanksgiving meal.
A: It's a cute little book. It's just really an aide-mémoire. It gives the bare bones of things. Most people keep notes in the kitchen for how many minutes you need to steam a lobster and so forth. The book's really a compilation of all those notes I had.
Q: Looking ahead to Thanksgiving, do you have any advice for cooks?
A: Plan it out ahead. If you're going to do a pumpkin pie, do the filling ahead of time. If you're going to have string beans, get them strung. You can do creamed onions ahead of time. Make it as easy for yourself on Thanksgiving Day as possible.
Q: What's your theory on preparing the stuffing? You advise us to fill the bird with flavorings, not stuffing.
A: Yes. What's fun is to bake a great big fat squash, a long one, cut it in half. Get that almost [cooked], put the stuffing in it and finish it off in the oven. You can baste it with turkey juices. It's very nice. There's a stuffing recipe in my Wisdom book. I like to have croutons -- diced pieces of bread cooked in the oven [and] lots of onions and sausage meat in my stuffing.
Q: You'll be in Santa Barbara for Christmas. Does what you eat and cook change when you move from Boston to Santa Barbara?
A: No. I'll be with friends I've [dined] with for many years. We usually have a big roast of beef. They also are very good at making pies. So we'll probably have pumpkin and minced meat pies and probably a banana pie. I'm sending them half a smoked salmon, so we'll have plenty to eat. But again, I won't have any leftovers.
Q: You lament the low quality of beef and poultry we get anymore. How do you shop for good meat?
A: It's very difficult. You have to ask around. One problem for turkey raisers is how do you get thousands of birds ready to roast at the same time. I wonder if you're not better off getting a reputable frozen turkey -- at least you know that it was frozen at its prime -- and then defrost it over three or four days in the refrigerator. It's not a good idea to hurry up defrosting. If you do, very often the ice crystals can break through the flesh and that'll make the meat mushy. Leave it in its wrapper while you're doing the defrosting.
Q: What about beef?
A: It's very difficult to get really prime beef anymore. You have to know your butcher.
Q: And vegetables. Do you go to farmers' markets?
A: Yes. We have very good markets in the Boston area. We have Wilson Farms, which is in Lexington. They have beautiful produce. Then we have Bread & Circus, which is a special store that has very good produce also. They have forced the supermarkets to get good produce, so it has been useful all around. But you have to know how to pick your produce, too. With brussels sprouts, you have to practically look at each one -- feel it to make sure it's firm and fine.
Q: How should one go about picking a wine for the holidays?
A: If you've got the money, a fine, mature California cabernet is just lovely with a turkey. A pinot noir is nice too, or a merlot. Any mature red wine with a good nose. What are you going to have for a first course? Oysters are nice. I love oyster stew. I'd have a dry white wine with that.
Q: What do you typically eat for breakfast?
A: If I'm at my proper weight, I like to have eggs and bacon and fruit and coffee. It suits me very well.
Q: At this point, how do you feel about French cooking and French food?
A: I wish we saw more of it. I'm getting heartily tired of all this Italian. I think a lot of people still don't know about French cooking. They think all it is is big sauces and stuff. But French cooking can be very, very simple. The main thing is that it's, as we say, cuisine soignée -- careful cooking where everything is perfect.
Q: You say knives are very important in cooking. Do you have any advice on that?
A: Yes, you've got to have good knives that will sharpen and that can cut. You should be able to do all the dog work very fast. You need a great big chef's knife, a medium one, and a paring knife. You could get along with three. I have dozens because I'm a knife freak.
Q: What are your projects for the future?
A: I have a big book that I've started about our years in France. My husband [the late Paul Child] was a wonderful photographer, so we have hundreds and hundreds of photos. The book will be based on that. But I'm taking my time on it.
Q: Are you doing any more programs with Jacques Pepin?
A: They've finished that series. But they [rerun] it frequently. We have a retrospective that's going on [Public Television nationwide] in December. It's little snippets from all my television shows going back to the first one in 1963. It's going to be a big Public Television fund-raiser.
Q: Do you use the Internet? If so, has that affected how you do things?
A: I love it. I do all my writing on the computer and lots of e-mail. I'm always trying to see what's on the Internet.... I have a wonderful search engine called Dogpile. It has everything on it. I think it's marvelous.
Peterson is a contributing editor at Business Week Online. Follow his weekly Moveable Feast column, only on BW Online Edited by Beth Belton
Copyright 2000, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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