Thoroughly American Julia

By Michael Demarest

For her new TV series, the French Chef comes home in style

Wow! Nifty! Eek! Gosh! Lookit! Oh boy! Those unique, familiar chirrups and chortles of gustatory delight are wafting through the kitchen once more as cameras record another salivant television series by Julia Child. The wood-notes wild, the vibrato delivery, the blue-eyed conspiratorial beam have changed little since the first segment of The French Chef went out over the Boston area's WGBH-TV on Feb. 11, 1963. Only this time, as the camera closes in on stockpot and saute pan, cleaver and colander, the mistress of cuisine is not demonstrating the joy of Gallic cooking. Dinner at Julia's, her new 13-part public television series, which will start in October, celebrates American cooking, ingredients and wines with such dishes as poached Alaska salmon, duckburger with wild rice, California fish stew, braised stuffed bottom round of beef, New Orleans crayfish bisque and an incendiary version of baked Alaska that Julia calls Mount St. Helens in Flames.

The French Chef has come home.

All of which may come as a shock to faithful Child lovers. Was it not Julia who proclaimed in 1966, "I will never do anything but French cooking!"? Her 716-page first volume Mastering the Art of French Cooking, written with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle and published in 1961, is still regarded as the definitive English-language work on classic French cuisine. Her 207-part French Chef and subsequent TV series, along with her five books and hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, earned her two prestigious awards from the French government. Indeed, Californian Child, nee Julia McWilliams, has done more than any other individual of either nation to raise Americans' standards of culinary excellence and persuade them that doing things the French way can be uncomplicated fun.

Now, like many French chefs who own and cook in restaurants in the U.S., Julia Child has been deeply impressed by the variety and ever increasing excellence of American raw materials, many of which, like goat cheese, wild mushrooms and caviar, have become generally available only in recent years. "We no longer have to kneel down and bow to foreigners," she insists. "We can be proud of what we have here."

It was certainly not beyond Julian ingenuity to whip up another series on French cookery. She could, for example, have concentrated on la nouvelle cuisine. In fact, Chef Child is not a lover of nouvelle cuisine and claims, not entirely rhetorically, that it has been the ruination of many great French restaurants. Moreover, in deciding to mine the rich resources of her own country, Julia is joining a nationwide movement toward a redefined American style of cooking that has won recognition in restaurants from Alice Waters' Chez Panisse in Berkeley to Manhattan's Four Seasons. Julia maintains that American cooking has always been nouvelle in its best sense: based on fresh ingredients, contrasting flavors and a respect for natural tastes unmasked by heavy sauces. She says, "We're lucky not to have been shackled by tradition like the French."

The new series will bear little resemblance to the gray, grainy, slapdash shows that made Child a kitchen word: no more dropped eggs, lumps in the sauce or uncarvable suckling pigs. Dinner has a slick new format, a grant of about $1 million from Polaroid, one of her previous underwriters, and, of course, mouth-watering color. Instead of concentrating on the making of a single dish, each 30-minute segment will include the preparation of a dinner for ten, an interview with a master chef and a winemaker, a "gathering" sequence in which Julia seeks out her raw materials at their source, be it a crab boat or cheesemaker, and shots of the actual cocktail party and dinner. On one of the first shows, Julia visits a chicken farm, and Austrian-born Chef Wolfgang Puck of West Hollywood's famed Spago continental restaurant concocts a dish called Chicken Winged Victory. On another, Executive Chef Louis Evans of New Orleans' Pontchartrain Hotel prepares crayfish bisque with live crustaceans from home.

The show's setting is a handsome, Colonial-style mansion outside Santa Barbara that has been leased for six months. Says an associate: "The idea is to have fun together, and the show will be fun too." The house has been equipped with what, even for Julia, is the dream kitchen, with two huge central islands and a six-burner Wolf gas stove. "If she turned on all her electric appliances at once, there'd be a blackout from here to Boston," says Russell Morash, the executive producer who has worked with Child for 20 years. (Morash also produces public television's widely acclaimed This Old House and Victory Garden series.) A perfectionist who will go through four crates of pineapples to get a one-minute paring sequence right, the producer teams smoothly but uncompromisingly with his star, even to working out her lines, which are all unscripted. (Sample Juliana: "A recipe is an attractive idea, not a sacrosanct monument." "If you get it wrong, you'll do it better next time. If you remember what you did wrong.")

Under the most trying circumstances, Child shows no sign of strain or temper. At 70, an unstooped 6 ft. 2 in., she strides and chops as energetically as the Smith College basketball player she once was--though to stay at 170 Ibs. she is a periodic Scarsdale Dieter. Out to stalk the wild mushroom, equipped with topee, stout stick, a yellow slicker and blue New Balance sneakers, she slogged through viscous mud that bogged down her party's four-wheel-drive Bronco, gathering a basketful of the yellow, peppery, precious ($8 per Ib.) chanterelles (Cantharellus cibarius) that had been prodigally "planted" on the scene that morning.

Child has by no means severed connections with France. She and Husband Paul, 81, her "officially unofficial" photographer, spend several months most years at their house in the Alpes-Maritimes. But as between the U.S. and France, she observes, "the French just don't have educated young people going into the restaurant business. And peasants would rather go into auto factories." Noting the number of college-level cooking and restaurant schools that have sprung up in the U.S., she says quietly, "I think America is going to win out." In home cooking, too, she maintains, Americans may have the edge: "The middle-class French just won't cook."

When the new series has been completed, Julia plans to serve up another book, tentatively titled The Way to Cook. It will contain recipes from Dinner as well as from the monthly column for Parade magazine that she has been writing since 1981. Her formulations for both show and book will be for fairly advanced cooks. "We will not," she vows, "be chopping onions." The recipes, says an associate, "are as exciting as ever. Julia is still the idea woman." Meanwhile, shooting is on time and on budget, which is as much as anyone could ask of a real-life dinner by Julia. --By Michael Demarest This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.