Food: Everyone's in the Kitchen

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This is inevitable on a noncommercial TV show budgeted so low that there was only one rehearsal before taping, where volunteers had to be recruited to wash dishes, and the food sometimes had to be auctioned off to the audience afterward to cover expenses. Obviously, the station could not afford to dub the flubs even if it wanted to. The thing is, it didn't. Seeing Julia Child goof can only make viewers less fearful of disasters in their own kitchens. Says the producer, Ruth Lockwood: "We wanted to let Julia be herself at any cost."

Julia's success as a showman has been to turn her contretemps into triumphs. When the prop men forgot to take the butter out of the refrigerator, she covered by saying: "I'm rather glad this happened because I can tell you what to do if you've left your butter in the refrigerator and you find it is much too hard to work with." With that, she took the butter, dumped it into a stainless-steel bowl, and heated it carefully on the stove. Again, when the apple charlotte that she was making began sagging, she patted it back together, reassured her viewers: "It will taste even better this way." Her cardinal rule for hostesses: "Never apologize."

Shaving a Snout. Sometimes her fluffs are intentional: she deliberately let the hollandaise sauce curdle so that she could demonstrate the various ways of rescuing it. But most of the time the goofs are genuine. On her salmon show, she lovingly lifted,the fish out of the tub, carefully peeled back its skin with a paring knife, painstakingly wrapped it in a double roll of cheesecloth to prevent its coming apart during poaching and "so that he is happier while in the water." But when she came to prepare the simple white sauce for it, she was almost undone. "My sauce is going to be lumpy," she panicked momentarily. "Oh well, too bad. Maybe I can beat it out." She could, and did.

Once in a long time she gets stymied. Her suckling-pig program is a famous example. First she explained the extraordinary preparations she had gone through: cleaning its ears and nostrils, shaving its snout, even brushing its teeth. Each step, using three pigs with two in reserve, went smoothly. Then came the time to carve. Using an electric knife—"It certainly sounds like a dentist, doesn't it?"—all went well until she reached the rlbs. They would not yield. She attacked with a huge chef's knife. Still no luck. Finally she put down the knife, rested her hands on the table, and looked straight into the camera: "People say that you just carve it into chops, but you try to do it. I certainly can't." And with that, Julia wound up the show.

Nipping Gravy. She counsels both her readers and viewers that there is no substitute for starting with fresh, high-quality meats and vegetables, and says, "Every woman should kiss her butcher." (Actually, Julia's Cambridge butcher, Jack Savenor of United Service Super Market, tends to kiss her first, proudly keeps an autographed copy of her book on the meat-counter shelf so that his other customers can check ingredients.) But, trusting though she is, Julia also insists that women should know their steers. In her zeal to demonstrate the various cuts, she has no hesitation in using her own body along with the meat chart to get the point across.