Julia Child and the Art of
Cooking up Friendships –
A tribute by Angela Lorenz
When Julia Child was guest or host,
Even if the meal was toast,
The meat of the meal would be
Her interest in company.
Probably the best thing about being an artist is having
the opportunity to meet so many interesting people through work. As
my work mostly consists of artist’s books, I have had the pleasure
of meeting many librarians and curators at museums, public libraries
and university collections like Smith’s rare book division in
Neilson Library. One never knows what might come out of a meeting.
Sometimes a purchase, sometimes a proposal for a show or a lecture,
or perhaps just an interesting exchange of knowledge, a mutual show-and-tell.
At a meeting at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts over
a decade ago, former head of the library Nancy Allen, who currently
works for the Mellon Foundation on artSTOR, invited me to present
my work to the Library Visiting Committee. She hoped that by acquainting
people with the genre of artist’s books, she might be able to
increase acquisition funds earmarked for them. Among the members invited
to the dinner afterward was Pat Ross Pratt, Smith class of ‘51.
Pat introduced herself to me at the dinner, and we immediately discovered
friends in common through summers in Maine. She suggested we meet
up in Venice, Italy a few months later, close to my home in Bologna,
where she would be traveling with her husband Herbert and good friend
Julia Child, Smith ‘34. Fortunately for all of us, the invitation
to Venice at the behest of the Cipriani Hotel cooking school lasted
for six straight years.
Within five minutes of meeting Julia, then 81 years
old, I was struck by one of her most outstanding characteristics –
her interest in others. When it somehow came out right off the bat
that I document recycling around the world, she immediately came up
with two examples for me, unsolicited. From her experiences in France
she recounted how bottles are put on fruit tree branches so that pears
may grow inside the bottles for liqueur, and from Boston she cited
the baking of bread in a coffee tin.
Julia loved art, but she preferred people. On a five
day trip to Friuli two years later, Pat, who is also an artist, and
I tried to pack in as many museums as possible. Julia insisted on
mixing with the locals, enjoying her incognito status in Europe, occasionally
to my consternation. “I need a rainhat,” she declared,
and made us stop the car on the way to the archeological museum so
she could she poke around. She didn’t seek exclusive locales.
In Cambridge Julia would make similar requests, asking us to pull
over for a coffee and cookie at Starbucks. She wasn’t about
to let any fetters of fame interfere with her earthly desires.
That said, Julia was patient with the fanatical public.
While she mostly traveled in anonymity in Europe, places with high
densities of Americans like the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice
were exceptions. People darted in and out of rooms, whispering and
staring, to look at her as opposed to the art. After Julia and I exited
out the back, walking down the gravel path, a woman’s voice
reached us from the rear, panting, “Is that Julia?” Without
stopping or turning, Julia uttered to her audience of one, “No.”
Her sense of humor was paramount. But as the American caught up, she
politely stopped and chatted, pleasantly deflecting the woman’s
assertion that Julia defended herself well against what she perceived
to be a quarrelsome TV cooking personality. “Oh no,” Julia
corrected her, “We’re friends.”
Julia was friends with a lot of people, largely because she knew how
to be a good friend. She knew who her friends were, having acquired
many long before she became public figure in her 60’s. But she
made new friends even during her brief final tenure in California.The
fact that she always answered her mail and sent thank you notes was
indicative of her respect for others, as well as her industrious nature.
As opposed to sending holiday greetings, she responded to them. For
many years, she and her artist husband Paul would send back Valentine’s
greetings in response to Christmas Cards.
I was particularly touched by her last note, several
months before she died. I had sent her a photograph of my latest work,
a pair of faux blue-jeans made of Japanese paper. “The paper
jeans are marvelous. But what does one DO with them?” she commented.
Perhaps it was her curiosity that made her a natural friend. When
Pat told her I had a show up at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland,
Maine, Julia made her way over from the North Haven ferry during a
family vacation. She showed up at the front entrance unannounced,
declaring she was there to see Angela Lorenz’s work. The staff
was electrified and the head curator recounted proudly to me several
days later that she took Julia around my exhibition personally.
Two months later, Julia and the Pratts stayed in our
home in Bologna, on their way from Venice to Florence. Although I
had eaten many meals with Julia in the preceding years, I cringed
to cook for her. Two summers earlier, the grandson of her dear college
friend Betty Kubler, Smith ’33, told me how Julia and his grandparents
often stopped off at his place for lunch in South Thomaston heading
south from Mount Desert Island on their way to the Pratt’s at
Prouts Neck. I was incredulous he wasn’t nervous about what
to cook. “Oh no,” he assured me, “She’ll eat
Kentucky Fried Chicken.” Indeed, she didn’t have a problem
eating lunch at the Italian roadside chain Autogrill in the Veneto,
I’d noticed. Her courageous eating habits made a huge impression
on me. To earn my keep on the Friuli trip, I had to translate all
the menus, and navigate us to the exquisite out-of-the-way restaurants
her friend and colleague Faith Willinger recommended. Although I was
pregnant at the time, that didn’t preclude creeping around to
the back of a house in dark woods at night to bang on a window for
directions. At a loss for certain culinary terms in english, I referred
to young wild venison as “Bambi” and dried, shredded horsemeat
as “filet of filly”. A frontierswoman at heart from Southern
California, Julia alone ordered the filly, served with lemon squeezed
on top.
While I wanted to impress Julia and the Pratts with
Bologna’s finest, I wasn’t about to make lasagna, invented
in Bologna, or attempt the famous Bolognese meat sauce, served on
tagliatelle, not with spaghetti, contrary to restaurant menus from
Bolivia to Japan. So my husband Gianni and I boiled up three handmade
fresh pastas we bought for them to sample: tortellini(traditionally
served in broth), tortelloni(traditionally served with butter and
sage), and passatelli, an extruded pasta made with egg, flour and
bone marrow, served in broth. After a salad, we finished with a Bolognese
sweet-crust pie with a noodle filling. No wonder Julia didn’t
consider the preparation of Italian food really as cooking. It’s
more about fresh ingredients than preparation, she’d noticed,
luckily for entertaining purposes.
But in later years, Julia was one for preparing simple
meals herself, I discovered, when she secretly put me up for the night
in Cambridge so that I could surprise my family on Thanksgiving the
next day. Food purveyors the world over were sending her free products
in the mail, including frozen steaks, which we sampled that night.
Ever a proponent of eggs and butter as opposed to “fat-free”
processed foods, which she just considered a dangerous fad, Julia
served up eggs in the morning. And bacon, I think. I’m not one
to take menu notes for posterity, no matter who’s cooking. In
the live satellite interview from the Pratt’s living room on
Julia’s 90th birthday, the Good Morning America anchor Charlie
Gibson got it right, on the other side of the split screen, when he
said it was only a tunafish sandwich he fixed her, but it was the
best he’d ever had.
Julia hobnobbed with a lot of people, including a series
of U.S. presidents, but she never talked about her experiences unless
someone asked, and even then might change the subject. The only time
I asked her a question relating to her public life was on the night
I met her, over dinner at the Cipriani Hotel. We were an enthusiastic
hodge-podge bunch, even though the table included the director of
the Hotel chain, Natale Rusconi, husband of Connie Titzel Rusconi,
Smith ‘62. Everyone was offering tastes from various dishes
and passing things around while the elegant, subdued patrons surrounding
us looked on in silence. My curiosity got the best of me. I wanted
to know about David Letterman. She tactfully called him a “naughty
boy” and said she refused the last invitation to his show which
would have required her to chop a bunch of watermelons with an axe.
She may have been a ham, but only if it served her purpose, that of
bringing knowledge of cooking to a vast public. Chopping watermelons
would have been like Dan Ackroyd’s version of Julia on Saturday
Night Live, not Julia Child, live.
Part of the desire to imitate Julia sprang from her
very distinct voice. I was told by Trevor Nelson, the youngest producer
ever at “60 Minutes”, who tragically died at age 34 the
summer before Julia did, that her voice was so recognizable radio
programs loved to have her as a guest. In an odd revelation on fame
he also informed me, when he was still working at Christian Science
Monitor Radio, her obituary had already been prepared, long before
her death.
This occurred to me as I was driving to Belfast, Maine
on an errand, when the news of Julia’s death came over the radio,
two days shy of her 92nd birthday. I knew Pat was probably at her
side, having gone out to Santa Barbara to celebrate. A memorial text
spontaneously formed in my head. But what can I possibly add to the
mountains of mass-media on Julia, I questioned. Pat disagreed, saying
I knew her in a special way. She was right – I knew her through
Pat and Herbert Pratt. It was not until my visit to Smith last fall
that I seriously considered writing something. Karen Kukil asked to
interview me briefly about my friendship with Julia as she was installing
a work of mine in a case in memory of Julia. The book in question,
“Paper Plates – She’s a Dish”, was purchased
in Julia’s honor by fellow friends and alumnae a number of years
ago. I donated the printing plate, or matrix, used to make one of
the six prints in the series. It was created by cooking spaghetti
and gluing it down onto a drawing of a woman from an Italian Renaissance
majolica plate.
I have learned a lot about food and friends since meeting
Julia. I’m one of legions. The librarian at the Clark Art Institute,
Susan Roeper, told me how her 11-year-old twins rushed up to her when
she came home from work to tell her that Julia had died. I know Julia
would have been very pleased at the passion for cooking she inspired
in the two young sisters, who ask their mother if they should chop
the onions “the Julia way”. I have only hazy childhood
memories of the spirited woman who came on after “Zoom”
on Channel 2 in Boston. I was more apt to turn to The Three Stooges,
who had their own comic variety of food preparation. But I know what
the linoleum floor looked like in her kitchen. On a backstage tour
of the Smithsonian History Museum where the technicians re-installed
her Cambridge kitchen, they gave us scraps to take home of the faux
linoleum reproduced from the original. I’m giving a piece of
this to Smith’s library, for although Julia gave her papers
to Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library, where she had been instrumental
in establishing a major culinary collection, she gave her home to
Smith. It’s only fitting Smith gets a piece of the linoleum,
too.
Our acquaintance commenced at the Cipriani and ended
at the Four Seasons Hotel. My husband and I flew from Maine to DC
to participate in the 90th birthday celebration at the Smithsonian,
part of the conference by the American Institute of Wine and Food,
of which Julia was a founder. A few friends gathered in her room for
champagne and caviar before going over to the gala in the museum.
Of course she had her work cut out for her, even there, with huge
stacks of the anniversary edition of “Mastering the Art of French
Cooking” to sign on the table. She may have been privy to many
a banquet, but there was no end to her industry. We traded books.
You must come out and visit me in my new digs, she said. Regretfully,
I didn’t. That was our only glimpse of her that night. She wisely
fled the fete after a brief appearance, opting instead for a quiet
dinner with her assistant, Stephanie Hersch. Like a bride at her own
wedding, she probably wouldn’t have tasted a morsel of the artistic
spread laid out by scores of the best restaurants in D.C., each trying
to outdo the next in flavor, originality and presentation. It was
her final East Coast appearance, as she, regrettably, was not able
to return the following year to accept her Medal of Freedom at the
White House. Julia’s kitchen has proved to be one of the most
popular exhibitions ever at the National Museum of American History.
When curator Karen Kukil suggested the library newsletter
would be interested in my reflections on Julia, the book artist in
me started imagining special packaging for the essay. I remembered
the apron from the Cipriani Scuola di Cucina that Julia, Pat and Herbert
autographed and gave to us as a gift when they stayed here. It has
an unusually large pocket. Actually, they gave us two. I couldn’t
bear to use the autographed copy, but the other was good when I needed
to glue books together. Then it occurred to me to add a few signatures
of Julia’s friends, like Faith Willinger in Florence, who wrote
to her in the 70’s asking advice on becoming to Italian cooking
what Julia was to French cuisine. It must have been good advice. It
also seeded a friendship.
This time I visited Faith, she cooked me up some pasta
with fresh tomato sauce, after taking out the seeds and spreading
them to dry on sheets of paper. These sheets of tomato seeds, laminated,
form the covers of this essay/artist’s book, reminiscent of
a restaurant menu, or a spill-proof cookbook. And so the recipe for
friendship continues. When I remarked to Faith how art is a great
profession for meeting people, she replied that cooking inevitably
leads to friendship too, for food, as well as art, is meant to be
shared. Seeds may seem absent of life at the end of a meal, but their
legacy, when nourished, will continue.
