Julia & The New Kid

STORY & RECIPES by SARA MOULTON

photo by Bill Adler

Think you’ve read or seen everything there is to know about Julia Child? Well, there’s always something new. Sara Moulton looks back on her long relationship with Julia and how she will always be influenced by Julia’s natural thirst for new ways, ingredients and gadgets.

rhubarb potstickers

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How did I dream up these spring desserts, presenting seasonal fruits in unusual new recipes?

I’m inspired by many things and many people: eating out, traveling, cookbooks, online information, and my family and friends… not to mention my own personal lifetime of taste memories. But nothing and no one was more important to me than Julia Child, the first person who taught me how to develop a recipe.

As the chef/manager of a catering operation in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1979, I happened to be in the right place at the right time. One day I was peeling a lifetime’s supply of hardboiled eggs when I started chatting with Berit Pratt, one of my teammates, about Julia’s method of cooking hard-boiled eggs (which is not to boil them). Berit mentioned that she was a volunteer on Julia’s PBS TV show. I wondered if Julia might ever need another volunteer (namely me), and Berit said that they were just about to tape another season and she’d ask Julia.

The next day Berit told me that she’d talked to Julia, and that Julia wanted to hire me. I was astonished that Julia Child would even consider offering me a paid job without having met me. So I trotted down to the corner pay phone and dialed her right up. She picked up the phone herself, said she’d heard all about me, and asked if I “food-styled.” In truth, I didn’t really have any professional experience in food styling, but I figured, heck, as a chef, I certainly take care to land my food attractively on a plate. So what did I say? “Yes, Julia. I’m very good at food styling.” And I got the job.

That was the beginning of the most important relationship of my career. I worked with Julia on that show, Julia Child and More Company, and on the cookbook that was published with it. Afterwards, I assisted her at various industry events. In the mid-eighties, I became Julia’s prep cook/food stylist whenever she appeared on Good Morning America. We remained friends until she died, and I was lucky enough to host a special on her for the Food Network in the last year of her life.

But back to JC and More Company, for which I was supposedly the food stylist. I learned a ton on the job, mostly from Julia, but also from the executive chef, Marian Morash. I thought we’d just sit at the feet of a master and be told what to do, but that wasn’t the way Julia worked. We were all in it together. Recipe development was a group effort, although Julia of course always had the last word.

She was endlessly curious about everything culinary, including all new gadgets. When Carl Sontheimer was developing the original Cuisinart in the late seventies, Julia made a point of using it on air so that home cooks could learn more about it. I don’t know who first put a blow torch in Julia’s hands, but it became her weapon of choice for crème brûlée. She was reliably fascinated by new ingredients, too. The first time any of us tasted a sugar snap pea was when someone brought it to Julia on the set of her show. The same was true of spaghetti squash and string cheese.

ORANGE JELLIES

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Julia was also on a mission to introduce her viewers to all of the wonderful ingredients to which she’d first been exposed in France, including monkfish, rabbit, and celery root. I’d never cooked with any of them before and each one was a real eye-opener. Julia never hesitated using hard-to-find ingredients as long as they were worth it. She encouraged home cooks to become activists in pursuit of better eating. I can still see her looking dead into the camera and saying, “Tell your produce man you need leeks and shallots, and he must carry them. Tell your fishmonger that monkfish is a delicious alternative fish to the usual options.”

This isn’t to say that Julia was merely trendy. She always tempered her curiosity with a strict reliance on the scientific method. Here’s how she boiled it all down in Julia Child and More Company: Don’t take things for granted. Keep searching for better techniques, new applications, new ways of combining flavors. Try things out. One’s imagination can play one false—the only real test is to taste.

I took that advice to heart a generation ago and it continues to guide me today. It happens to be spring again, the season of renewal. Why not try something new in the kitchen?