MONDAY 21 SEPTEMBER 2009 • JULIE & JULIA - WHO ATE AT LE MANOIR?
If there’s anybody in the country left who doesn’t know about Julia Child (there’s been a feature and a review of the movie in nearly every Saturday and Sunday paper, plus radio and TV coverage), she was an amazing lady. .
First she was six feet two inches tall, and dressed almost to emphasise her stature. Second she had a breathy, high voice and unmistakable American accent (though she spoke good French). Third, she wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which, as I write, is yet again number one on the New York Times bestseller list. And fourth, she was the most famous TV cook ever in America. And would have been here, too; except that (it is always said) the BBC producers who auditioned her thought her drawling speech owed something to using the brandy bottle for more than making sauces. Of course they were wrong (I’ll tell you how I know in a moment); but her misfortune was Delia’s good luck.
I know Julia was a moderate drinker, because when she came to dine at Le Manoir in the late 1980s, her tablemates tell me she had precisely one glass of champagne and one of claret (my informant confesses to consuming most of the rest of the red wine). She was a splendidly gracious lady, and her compliments on the meal and service were delivered in a carefully measured way that made them all the valuable to me and my team. Looking at her recipes in Mastering, I am impressed by their extraordinary detail – some are pages long for a single dish. But you can see what she was getting at. She assumed each recipe was being made for the first time by a first-time cook. It’s hard to imagine that was always the case – but that’s got to be the reason she almost always tells you what to do when you go wrong.
Meryl Streep captures Julia Child so fully and exactly that I can almost imagine her sitting at the table nearest the door in the old dining room – and what pleasure this movie has given me!