Julia Child held a golden, plump heirloom tomato to her nose and inhaled deeply. Julia Child! Right there in the produce aisle. In all the years I’d lived in Cambridge, Mass. I’d never seen her. I glanced at my list, gathered a bunch of barely yellow bananas, a bag of onions, my courage and trailed after her as she headed toward the meat department.
It was late August 2000, I’d just returned to Cambridge from Bernard, a tiny hamlet on Mount Desert Island, where we’d spent six weeks at the Child Cottage on Lopaus Point, as we had done for six years, where Julia Child had spent a portion of every summer for almost 60 years.
The house, built by the Child family, welcomed our family, our two dogs, three cats and friends, as if it were our home. My daughters, then 13 and 6, were excited. I felt excitement too, tinged with awe; Julia Child cooked in that kitchen. What would it be like?
Not what I expected.
No chrome, no stainless steel, only one slab of butcher block in front of the window that looked out on a fence where the honeysuckle would blossom and an occasional emerald hummingbird would hover and dart. A magnetic strip beneath the window held paring knives, a fillet knife, bread knife, boning knife and a cleaver, each blade honed to paper-cutting sharpness.
Short lengths of narrow countertop ran on each side of the butcher block with shelves beneath. A rack of pans hung suspended from the ceiling over the gas stove. By the dings and slight warping I knew those pans had served many a long year. I also noticed that the bottoms of the pans held not a mark of carbon.
Beside the sink hung every utensil a kitchen would need. Beneath the spatulas, measuring cups and spoons, scissors, eggbeater and whisks, comical faces and figures had been drawn in greens and reds, blues and yellows, the faces and figures marking the shape of each utensil. Later we would discover whimsical outlines of hammers, pliers and screwdrivers in the workshop. We always knew where any implement belonged.
The first summer we initiated the pie-a-day plan, and when guests filled the house, we often made three a day. We used the well-worn “Joy of Cooking” from the bookshelf as pie after pie rolled out: chocolate, lemon meringue, apple, peach and berry — strawberry, raspberry and blueberry. When cherries ripened on the trees on the hillside behind the house, we picked, gathered and removed the stones, and mixed them with the berries.
Beyond pies — though in our family we consider pie an ideal food for any meal — we gathered mussels at low tide, cooked them with shallots and garlic and served them over linguini. We roasted turkeys, made soup from the bones and tetrazzini from the leftovers. We steamed clams, made crab cakes, flipped hamburgers, made lasagna and tomato sauces with meatballs and sausage, and cooked quarts of fish and clam chowder.
We also made jam from the fresh berries, countless loaves of bread, and batches of cookies: Chocolate chip, peanut butter, molasses or whatever took the fancy of the person baking. We fried doughnuts. We made ice cream sundaes.
Our meals, whether on the deck under the umbrella, or inside at the table that easily seated 20, were graced with fresh greens and tomatoes from local farmers markets, and the huge wooden bowl, well-seasoned through the years, became the creative center for whomever made the salad.
Was there “Julia” magic in that kitchen? From a simple bowl of cereal to a complex entree, all foods at Lopaus Point tasted as if they had been prepared by the most talented of chefs. At the meat counter I watched as she, with a steady hand, pointed to the ground sirloin, and in her familiar voice said, “I’ll have a pound of that and a half-pound of veal, if you’ll grind it for me.” The butcher went through the swinging doors to the back. I approached, took a deep breath, and introduced myself.
I told her I’d just returned from Lopaus Point, and she told me that she would make her final trip there in a couple of weeks since she would be moving to California soon after.
“Doesn’t everything taste wonderful on Lopaus Point?” she asked. I looked up at her, and answered in agreement. All of us who cooked in that kitchen had felt the magic of Julia.