In the recipe for Homard à l’Américaine, Julia instructed me to “split the lobsters in two lengthwise.” Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? Many people insist that plunging a knife through a lobster’s head is absolutely the quickest and most humane way to kill it. I have to say, though, that the lobster I murdered in this way did not seem to think so. It did not think being sawed in half vertically was much fun, either. Even after I’d chopped the thing into six pieces, the claws managed to make a few final complaints about the discomforts of being sautéed in hot olive oil.
But when I had completed my Homard à l’Américaine, I ate it. And, raising a glass, I took a moment to remember all the chickens and cows that have died for me, if not at my hands.
Live. And Learn.
It is a mysterious fact that I had never once in my entire life watched a Julia Child cooking show before the inception of the project. To me, Julia Child was always the book, plus Dan Aykroyd blithely gushing blood on Saturday Night Live.
So watching my first episode a few months ago was illuminating. I had just had a kitchen meltdown, complete with hurled cutlery and the beating of skulls on door frames. (These incidents occur, it must be said, not infrequently.)
My husband, fearing I might do myself an injury, sat me down in front of the television—and who should be on PBS but Julia herself! It was, truly, a miraculous event, a manifestation in my living room of the Patron Saint of Servantless American Cooks. The show was an old episode of Cooking with Master Chefs and Julia was being taught, by a French person I didn’t recognize, how to temper chocolate.
I had come to think of Julia as my mentor, but as I sat there, the tears still drying on my face, clutching a food mill clotted with fish, and watched her warbling away, I realized that she is also an exemplary and inspirational student. There she was, 80 if she was a day, sticking her fingers into the chocolate, leaning over on her big, curled paws to watch the proceedings, and asking, asking, asking. She was teaching me again —this time, how to learn —with grace, generosity, wit, and endless enjoyment.
Sometimes —for instance, when I contemplate making Pâté de Canard en Croûte, which involves boning a whole duck and stuffing it with homemade pâté, then baking it in a pastry crust—I despair.
But then I picture Julia, sipping a glass of wine and biting into a gorgeous piece of the chocolate she just learned to temper, crying “Bon Appeteeeee!” with the relish of a deranged schoolgirl, and I remember. I am learning—to cook, yes, but also to live, like Julia.