A Word on Words; 0860; Julia Child

A Word on Words, a program delving into the world of books and their authors. Tonight, Julia Child talks about The Way to Cook. Your host for A Word on Words, Mr. John Seigenthaler, publisher of The Tennessean and editorial director of USA Today. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Once again, welcome to A Word on Words. I want to introduce you to my guest this evening. It's a face you will recognize. It belongs on television. And it is Julia Child. Welcome to A Word on Words. Well, I'm happy to be here and happy to be in Nashville, too, for this convention. It's so great to have you here. And your book, quite naturally, is a subject that will delight our viewers and your readers. It is titled simply The Way to Cook. And who knows that better than Julia Child? I have to ask you, after all this time, it's not the first time you've been in the television industry promoting ways to cook and cookbooks to do it.

Why this book? Why now? Well, it's been gestating for quite some time, because we had our program called Dinner at Julia's, and we had a lot of new recipes in that. And then we had six one-hour teaching cassettes, also called The Way to Cook. And then what really set it off was that I did four or five years monthly articles with Parade Magazine. And we had all these beautiful pictures that we slaved over, and they very kindly gave us all the negatives of the pictures and the rights to use them. So we had about 600 from them. Then we took about another hundred. But that was the real raison d'etre, because it would have been infinitely expensive and time-consuming to take as many pictures as there are in it. Well, it is a beautiful book. It is an absolute... It is not only a book on the way to cook. I mean, it is an artistic delight to read.

You know, you can write your heart out, but if you don't have publishers that care how it's done, it can just... I'm overwhelmed at how beautiful this is. It opens up nicely, and it's got plenty of space. It does indeed. And it has lots of white space so that you feel at peace if you're looking at it, I think. Well, I must say that some publishers do work to be proud of, not just to sell and make. And Knopf, I think, is a publisher that cares. It does. And they're not a great money that will take that time and space and extra money to make it beautiful. You must be excited about the fact that it's a book of the month selection. I'm just delighted. And I think another very useful thing is that our editor, Judith Jones, pushed everybody, and we really had those books in print by the end of August, which I think is remarkable. So we've gotten a jump on most of the other great big books this year, which is very lucky,

I think. Oh, indeed it is. Because it's trotting out of the bookstores. I was in Boston at a big bookstore, and there was no discount or anything, and 300 books trotted out of there in an hour. That doesn't surprise you, does it? At $50? Yes, it does. But I'm delighted. Well, you know, I mean, as someone said about, well, as David Halberstam said about his own book on the automotive industry when he was on this program, he said, John, it won't hurt you to read it, but don't drop it on your toe. That's a problem. This weighs five and a half pounds. Well, I'll tell you, it's a different five and a half pounds than David's book. I think that there must be, I mean, you've talked about those beautiful color pictures, and some of them are so helpful because they take you, they give you a really a bird's view close up of how you do what you then tell us how to do.

And they're also taken from the cook's point of view. Sometimes they'll take a picture of a cook doing something, but you want to see it from your own point of view. I mean, separating the leaves from the cone on an artichoke heart, for example. I mean, I know how to eat artichoke, but I found that and other pictures fascinating because I was looking at it just as if I were a chef. Exactly. The number of pictures that were left out must be enormous, a stack this high probably. The number of recipes, I mean, it would go to the ceiling, I'm sure. Well, there are always thousands of recipes available. Well, just tell me how you went about the process of selecting. What went in and what went out? Well, we always, see, I had several backgrounds. I had the background of all of the recipes that came from Parade, and then we had done

our television series, The Way to Cook, which was, it separated everything. But I decided this time, I'm often interested in people understanding The Way to Cook, and it's really its method. And some people, I think, get awfully afraid when they get up to a stove and they'll look at the recipe and they say, oh, it's just two tablespoons of tomato paste and I only have one. If they know the method, they know that it doesn't make any difference if they have no tomato paste at all. So what I'm trying to do is, no matter what you see, you know how to cook it, even if it's a shoe probably. Right. Well, when you begin, you begin in the book with soups. Yeah. And I'm sure that you began by saying there are certain soups I must include here. Yeah. Well, I guess I did. Maybe you did.

I don't know. Maybe you didn't. I don't know. But one thing that I found very useful was to have an all-purpose soup base that starts out with onions and chicken stock, and then you can put just about anything else you want in it, like potatoes or clams or something else. Then I found that you can make a wonderful cream soup, which sounds naughty cream nowadays. It does indeed. But you puree rice in the blender and it really tastes like cream and the blender does a beautiful job of completely purring it and you think that it was a cream soup. So you're able to provide cream of mushrooms, say, or cream of cauliflower. And then what I've also done, because I've unfortunately had to be very concerned with nutrition. I hate nutrition, but we all have to pay attention to it now. Well I think you're right about that. And how did you deal with that? Well, I dealt with it with most of the basic recipes, I mean, like this cream soup.

You don't have to have any cream in it at all, but you can at the end of it stir in some sour cream or some heavy cream or something like that. So your base recipe is pure and non-fattening on the whole. Or the way, say, of doing a fish in which you can just poach it in salted water if you want, and then you could just serve it plain, which is rather dull, or you can make a nice sauce for it. You can make a very simple something like just a julienne of red and green peppers cooked in a little bit of olive oil and spread that on it so that you can go from very pure and non-fat up to the wildest of your dreams of butter sauces and so forth. So it's up to you, and I think people should know, because it's terribly important to really know your medical, family medical history.

So to say if everyone in your family died at 42 of a heart attack, you're in trouble unless you are very careful of how you eat. Well it's, I think that it's a good thing for our society that people who are providing us now with references on what to eat and how to prepare it also have a concern for that. I know that it probably did not exist when you first began that famous television series. Well those were lovely days in the 1960s. Nobody paid attention to that at all. Well I can't remember that we were fatter then, were we? No. But it's interesting that now in the last 10 or 15 years people are definitely living 15 or 20 years longer, at least 10 years longer, and I'm sure that a lot of that has to do with more sensible eating and more exercises that people are aware that you do have to pay attention.

But I'm awfully glad that you know we had this, when the cholesterol reared its ugly head at first, people got so scared that they wouldn't eat any butter or anything that like that, and I know I've talked to some newspaper editors, and I'm sure your newspaper is not like that, in which the editors who really don't know much about food at all don't want even butter mentioned in the food pages, but I think it's very useful that this Mr. Moore came out with this article in the Atlantic. But I think the whole cholesterol business, one, depends on your age, if you're over 65 you're more liable to have coronary heart disease, or CHD as they call it, and then sex, men get it more often than women, and your medical heredity, because you do inherit your forbearers tendencies, and then one of the worst things you can do is smoke. Did you ever smoke, John?

Never in my life, Julia, did you? I smoked like a fish on a chimney. I guess fish don't smoke. But I gave it up, luckily, thank God I did, about 25 years ago, thank heaven. But evidently smoking is one of the worst things you can do because it constricts your arteries I think. And I think it has an impact on your diet that you really wouldn't understand. And overweight, because for overweight you can get diabetes, that's very bad, and a sedentary life is very bad, so that, except for those first three things that you can't do anything about, age, sex, and history, you can control smoking, weight, exercise, and the moderation too, which I think people are coming back to. You should have a little bit of everything, and if you don't even eat enough fat, you're not going to process your vitamins. And if you're not going to have fun eating, you're not going to live very long anyway.

Well, you know, you have a terrific lineup here of delicious foods, and I'm particularly glad that you not only had a segment on desserts, but also one on cakes and cookies. And cakes and cookies. That's right. Lots of meat and fish and beautiful vegetables. That's exactly right. You know, so many people are saying when the dessert tray comes around now, no, just give me coffee. That's bad. It is bad. You can have just a little piece. You can have a great big beautiful butter chocolate cake, but just a little piece. How sad it is people are depriving themselves because they're hooked on this mentality that does indeed affect an awful lot of editors. The thing that bothers me about my peers in the newspaper business is that one day every week, at least one day every week, every editor of every Metropolitan Daily has a section, not a page, but a section dedicated to food.

And most of them just blatantly call it food, and they will fill it with advertising that includes anything the advertiser wants to put in there. And butter certainly is advertised. And still they take this position primarily out of ignorance that, as you say, don't put butter in my paper, it'll make the page too greasy. Well, I think the media has a lot, it bears a lot of the blame because they'll get something like the Alar apples. And I understand from Dr. Fred Steyer that you would have to eat 500 pounds of apples in one sitting to have any effect on it at all. If you ate 500 pounds of broccoli, the same thing would happen, I think. But to scare everybody to death and to ruin the whole industry for something, just because it makes a good story, is irresponsible. Well, the apple industry is still struggling on the burden of that action.

It was taken by, as you know, by a private research, so-called publicly funded private research group. And why should it be published that way and scare everybody without giving us the full facts? Well, and you know, the way that the agency released it, that public interest agency released it, they worked a deal with 60 Minutes so that it first broke on 60 Minutes. The result was editors like me saw it on 60 Minutes and we said, we haven't had that story. And so we came in the next day and said to our sub-editors, look, 60 Minutes scooped us, they're bound to be grocery stores here right now with apples with Alar on them. And the result was no apple pie in Julia Child's menu for dessert menus. How can we avoid having that happen again?

Well, I think the media is reappraising its position. I hope so. I think that there has been a great deal of criticism. There was a conference in Washington three weeks ago in which many of us who were involved in that scare, and that's what it is, the scare, including representatives of Ralph Nader's group. Nobody from 60 Minutes came, but the other networks were present. They refused to come? Well, I don't know. They didn't come. But at any rate, we had the discussion and great journalists for great publications, New York Times, Washington Post, my own agency, the Associated Press, all of us pointed the finger of blame at the agency and said, this is the way you went. You went to 60 Minutes and in effect said, you trapped us by doing this. We pleaded guilty and I think pledged to be more careful in the future. Now, that might exist until the next scare.

Well, of course, we did have the scare about the eggs and the salmonella. Exactly. Well, I think that's more believable and more serious. Oh, sure. And there are times when there are certain markets in this country where that is suddenly a very real problem and we'd be remiss in our responsibility if we ignored it. But on the other hand, there has to be a balance, I think, in what we're doing. Just as you look at this book, how would you hope that people would approach this book? When 300 people line up to buy the book, it says something not only about their interest in food, it says something compelling about their interest in you as an author and as one they came to trust from watching so many years on television. I take it very seriously because I have a lot in the book about safety and fish, for

instance, because the shellfish pollution is something that we have to be very careful about. And I went into that quite seriously in there. I remember I went to a newspaper food editor's conference in Providence last year, and there had been a lot of talk about pollution, and I just said I wouldn't eat any oysters, which I love. And then I got back to Boston, and we have a very good fish restaurant and fish marketplace called Legal Seafood, a strange name. But they're very much concerned about it, and they have a whole laboratory in their warehouse and every batch of shellfish they get in, they test for bacteria count. And I have, I know them all, I've known them since they started out, so I'll eat all their oysters, every one they'll give me. But I'm very careful wherever else I get them because unless you know your restaurant the source from which they come, there are a lot of fish poachers that will mislabel

things or will fish in polluted waters, and restaurants and markets that aren't careful who will take those things. Do you have, like most of us, favorite foods? I mean, if you were going to have... Besides oysters. Yeah, besides oysters. I mean, if you were going to have dinner tonight, what would you... I wouldn't mind starting out with a little fresh foie gras, some of that New York State foie gras, sautéed so it's crisp on the outside and tender and melting inside, that's delicious. With some alar apples sautéed along with it, that should be very good. Right. And then I might go on in the duck vein and I might have a duck dish because I think there's so many interesting things that you can do with it. That would be the entree? That would be the entree. And then some very nice fresh vegetables of some kind, beautifully cooked. Some kind of a potato dish, probably.

Do you have a favorite green vegetable? Well, asparagus in season I love, and I love beautiful fresh green beans, carefully cooked so that they're green and just cooked properly. I hated that period when we went through of constantly undercooked vegetables, do you remember that? Yes. And they were neither raw nor cooked, they were sort of warmed over raw. I thought that was a dreadful period. Sometimes they put a little muck-like sauce on it to try to make them go down easier. And then I think that we're going through a careless period of that kind of so-called California cuisine where they just dump a lot of vegetables on the grill and half of them are burned and half of them are raw. And I don't like careless cooking at all. Now you said that if you were starting tonight you might go in that direction. And after duck for an entree, what would you do for dessert?

Well, I suppose having had foie gras and duck one should be rather simple for dessert, probably a fruit dessert and a cookie. But if one didn't have to be dietary, one could have a lovely chocolate dessert of some type. Now that's the way you're feeling today or would you feel that way generally? Is that seasonal or? Or you could have that wonderful apple dish, except you wouldn't do that if you had had your apples with the foie gras, you could change it and have something else like beets would go very well with the foie gras and then you could have that wonderful apple dessert, the tart tarte, which is when the apples are cooked, it's kind of an upside down apple tart, but it's all filled with buttery caramel. It's absolutely delicious. I want some right now. That would end up awfully well and then delicious wines to go with everything. Well I was going to ask, what about the wines? Well with the foie gras, I might have a very mature chardonnay of some type and probably

a pinot noir with the duck and with the apple dessert. I love a good sautéing, don't you? Yes, I do. The Chateau Huitquem is only about $200 a bottle now. Well that's by all means. If you bought me that. Well I will. I'd drink it. Do you have people who have seen you on television who sort of do triple takes when you pass them by and who then pester you for not just your autograph but your latest recipe autographed? Well no, people are very nice and I can always tell because I do Good Morning America, but I haven't done a series, but they get repeated and I can always tell if they're repeating a series because there's street recognition, but I think that's one thing that you realize that on television if you're not on for about two months you're gone so that there's no

reason for you to get a swelled head because no one's going to know who you are afterwards. I'm not sure you're right about that. I think people identify Jew Your Child as they recognize nobody else who does this in the business. I mean I have. Well I've been on. Well you have, that's right. When did we start? I remember it was February 11th, 1963 our show started and I was the first cook. There had been before when television first began, do you remember Deoni Lucas? She was marvelous, a marvelous technician and then I don't know why she stopped, but she did and then I came along and there was nobody else. You probably put her out of business. No, because she wasn't doing it then. I watch the Today Show occasionally and there's a chef there from New Orleans who's been showing up periodically. I wouldn't recognize the man if he walked in here and said where you are.

Paul Prudham you recognize? Paul Prudham, I know his name. I've been in the restaurant, when I've been in New Orleans, I think he's a wonderful man, but I simply wouldn't recognize him. I don't think most people would identify with him. Well he hasn't been on as long as I have. He hasn't been on as long. Have you seen those pantomimes of you? Yes, the one, Save the Liver. Yes, we have a tape of that. Have you really? No, I have a tape of that. That's wonderful. I just loved it. Do you? Well we happened to turn it on by mistake. We had just had some people for dinner and we just turned on the television to see what was on and there it was and we just thought it was so funny. Oh did you? And then they sent us a tape of it, which I have. Well you know that I think that distinctive style you have, you're clearly identifiable style and voice. My voice sounds all right to me, but it definitely has something. I think it sounds all right to everybody.

But that gives me away and then they don't expect me to be so tall and the smallest and in my family at 6 feet 1.75. Wow, I guess the camera sort of. Well I'm the only one there, so you don't see. Sure, that's right. And I have all the counters 38 inches. That's sort of misleading, but here is this counter, that counter 38 inches you think? That's 38 inches. I don't know if the camera can pick up Julia there by that 38 inch counter, but people don't think about that, but it seems to me the difference between a good cook and a not good cook shouldn't be whether you can reach the food or whether you have to stretch or cut your finger. Well I'm hoping in this book, I think there are a lot of people now who say we all work and there isn't any time to eat and then they eat TV dinners, which I think by the time

you've flavored up a TV dinner you might just as well have started from scratch and then you don't know what's in it. And I think now that we're very interested in what we eat and cooking can be so easy and you don't have to be formal anymore. I think there are very few people give these formal dinners with china and napery and maid servants running around because we're very informal in our house and most of the people are. Well as a woman who has been quote a working woman for a long time, you'd recognize that many have less time than they've had in the past, but I find more males cooking. Which is wonderful. It's a wonderful hobby. It is. That's right and I'll be very surprised if this book doesn't have a phenomenal number of men. I hope so. Are you finding that yet?

Well I think of course I would hear about men who like to cook, but I think men are There's a lot of mechanics in it which they like and then in this book I have a lot about what the home butcher can do. Like there's so many ways that you can do with the turkey. Like one recipe that I'm going to do this Thanksgiving is the disassembled, reassembled turkey which cooks in half the time and much better because you take the breast part off. So there you have your whole breast and you have the stuffing in it. Then you have the leg thighs off which you cook separately. Then you reassemble them on the platter. It looks exactly like a whole turkey. But it's so easy to cook. And it saves dad the problem of carving and cutting his fingers. Yeah, exactly. It's wonderful. But when it's fun to fool around and that's what I like of once you know how to cook then you can make up your own ways of doing things. It's very interesting and fun to do. Part of what people who appear on television deal with, something we've touched on, is

a public. And you certainly have one. Times when a book like this comes out you're confronted with the need to go around and publicize it. Yeah, which is fun. Well that's what I was going to ask you. Is it really fun? Well like I've never been to Nashville before and I'm delighted. Well we're delighted. But I mean meeting people in large numbers to talk about this continues to be fun for you after all these years. And then going to places where I've never been before or places that I like that we go to. We've just been in Chicago. I think Chicago's a marvelous town. It's handsome too I think. Have you been there recently? No, I have. Very recently. I think it's beautiful. We were in a hotel quite high up over the lake in these isolated skyscrapers. It's beautiful. I hope that they don't all mess them together because it's lovely I think. Julia Child, the author of The Way to Cook, has been our guest on A Word on Words featuring

John Seigenthaler. This program was produced in the studios of WDCN Television, Nashville, Tennessee.