The Church of Julia
Julia didn’t only teach you how to cook food. She taught you how to have a relationship with it. She taught you that the way to relate to food was the way to approach life: unafraid, with gusto, with exuberance, with curiosity and with the confidence that you could make mistakes and still succeed.
When I was a kid we’d flip through the few channels we had back then and, if we landed on Julia, we’d stop, mesmerized, entertained and a little befuddled. Who was this big, big woman who was burnishing cleavers and flinging chickens across our TV screen? And what about that voice: excited, pitched in an unknown octave and teetering on being out of breath? She talked about food like other people talked about sports: with passion, joy, partisanship, opinion and fact. Like the newly converted, she was bursting with energy and was on a mission to teach the world of French food to the uninitiated. It was infectious. We’d stop and watch, unable to change the channel. We’d entered Julia’s world. It was the world of sport and the world of religion: something to play and something to believe in. What more could a kid want?
Julia didn’t shame, she didn’t berate. She had only one Golden Rule: Love the food and Love the process. The
The physicality of it, the sport of it was a big part of the appeal. Here she was a quarterback in a linebacker’s body. She was Terry Bradshaw, chopping through a rack of lamb like he’d shrug off a tackle. She’d bang pans like he’d bang heads, just for the fun of it. But like a quarterback, she had a game plan. She knew where she was going. Her recipes were her plays, each designed to get you where you wanted to go. Watching Julia on TV was like being in the huddle with her. When she’d tell you what to do you knew you could do it. Failure wasn’t an option or a thought. You could cook, if only because Julia told you so.
Years later, when I was working my way up the kitchen pecking order, learning while I produced, I became entranced by the motion of the kitchen. Working the line combined the raw power and strength of contact sports with the choreography of dance. We’d be pulling heavy roasting pans hot from the ovens, maneuvering sauté pans for burner space while flipping their contents with the flick of wrist. All the while instructions and call backs would punctuate the cacophony of a kitchen in motion. Like a square dance caller, the chef would yell out the orders and the cooks would go into action, firing and plating tickets at the same time, searing one order of fish while completing the intricate plating and saucing of another. With minds fully engaged and bodies in constant, fluid movement the cooks on the line would enter into an intricate do se do which allowed us to move quickly in very cramped quarters with hot and very sharp objects.
On my off hours, I’d study the movements of my station and trace the patterns like Venn diagrams with the intersecting circles describing the points where I’d interact with the other cooks. When I ducked down to check a quail in the oven another cook would reach across to whisk butter into a sauce. When I turned to grab mushrooms for a sauté one of the other cooks would fill the momentary void to pull the just turning translucent sea bass. We’d dance like that for hours every night. Afterwards I’d go home and think of it like a time and motion study and try to figure out how to be faster, better, more efficient.
Back in the formative years at home, I’d watch Julia and then I’d watch my mother cook and I’d cook with her. In some ways my memories of the two of them are meshed together. I don’t know how much my mom watched Julia but she cooked with the same irrepressible exuberance. My mom didn’t follow recipes; she used them for inspiration then interpreted them in her own style with her own unerring vision for how a dish should be made and how it should taste. Like Julia, my mom was unafraid in the kitchen. She’d try anything. If she didn’t have an ingredient she’d figure out what to substitute and keep going. And like Julia, she didn’t have the best knife skills. I can’t remember how many times I’d be helping her and then hear my mom scream, “Damn, I really did it this time!” Off she’d run to the medicine chest, her thumb wrapped in a kitchen towel, “Watch the rice!” she’d say. In a few minutes she’d be back, angry at herself, her finger in a wad of bandages, but back to work, tasting, stirring and chopping as she assembled the family’s dinner.
Sport and the Church of the kitchen. It’s how I’ve spent my life. I wonder how many others have started the way I did, initiated by Julia who taught us not to be afraid and to love what we do.
By Janos Wilder