Laura Shapiro by Julia Child Page A

food,” she wrote home. “If it is vile, the cook must just grin and bear it, with no word of excuse.” Her famous advice to the hostess—“Never apologize”—was forged in crucibles like this one.
    The harder she worked, the more impatient she became with her class at the Cordon Bleu. The GIs weren’t making much progress, and the course was slowing down and becoming repetitive. “After 6 months, they don’t know the proportions for a béchamel or how to clean a chicken the French way,” she complained. Finally she decided she’d had enough of the school but not nearly enough of Bugnard, so she dropped out of the course and hired the chef to teach her privately for another six months, while she practiced between lessons. Then, with a year of study behind her, she decided she was ready to take the exam and receive a Cordon Bleu diploma. Here she ran into a problem. Madame Brassart, director of the school, had always disliked the big American woman who thought she was too good for the amateur course, pushed her way into the professional program, then dropped out before completing it. Now she had the effrontery to demand a diploma. The director refused to schedule the exam. It took months before an increasingly furious Julia was allowed to take the exam, and Madame Brassart relented only after Julia sent a letter hinting that the embassy would soon start wondering why an American student was being treated so badly by the Cordon Bleu. When Julia finally received her certificate—Madame Brassart wouldn’t issue a real diploma, since Julia hadn’t finished the course—it was dated March 15, 1951, some two weeks before the date on the warning letter. The director was covering her tracks. For many years, Julia included Madame Brassart on the very short list of people she hated, which was headed by Senator Joseph McCarthy.
    The exam itself sorely disappointed her, for it was superficial and made no reference to the complicated procedures she had practiced with zeal. Madame Brassart had decided to give this uppity student a beginner’s exam, the sort given to housewives who took a six-week elementary course. Julia was outraged, all the more so because she flubbed quite a bit of the test. She did well on the written section, in which she had to describe how to make a brown stock, how to cook green vegetables, and how to make a béarnaise sauce. But in the cooking section, she made mistakes everywhere. Asked to prepare an oeuf mollet, she made a poached egg instead of a soft-boiled one; she also put too much milk into the crème renversée, or “caramel custard,” and she forgot what went into an escalope de veau en surprise (veal, duxelles, and sliced ham, cooked and then reheated in a paper bag). Julia sautéed the mushrooms instead of making duxelles and left out the ham entirely. “All my own fault, I just should have memorized their little book,” she admitted in a letter home. “My mind was on Filets de sole Walewska, Poularde Toulousiane, Sauce Venetienne, etc. etc. etc. and I neglected to look at the primary things.” Her mistakes in the paper-bag recipe didn’t bother her, since it was an idiotic dish anyway—“the kind a little newlywed would serve up for her first dinner to ‘épater’ the boss’s wife.” The whole experience was frustrating: she could turn out flawless sauces, pâtés, and mousses; bone a goose without tearing the skin; clean, eviscerate, and cut up a chicken in twelve minutes—and she had tripped over her own feet when asked to take a baby step. When she opened her own cooking school, she vowed, she would turn people into cooks “through friendliness and encouragement and professionalism,” not the nasty methods of the mean-spirited Madame Brassart. Who, she added pointedly, was a Belgian, and not French at all.
    During these months of intensive cooking, a friend