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Scrambled Brains. Sent East to Smith College ('34) to follow in her mother's footsteps, she is remembered by her classmates for her gigantic appetite for jelly doughnuts, her high good spirits, and her practical jokes (painting the John seats in Hubbard House red and dangling tom-toms in the wind outside a faculty member's window). Her dreams of glory as a star basketball center were dashed when, after one look at her height, Smith decided that she had an unfair advantage over her college mates, changed the intramural rules so that the ball was thrown in from the side. With vague hopes of becoming a novelist and a ¶average, she graduated.
Before the OSS sent her to Asia, Julia was in Washington, D.C., where she struggled valiantly with a hot plate, only succeeded in "splashing chicken fat all over the walls." Back home after the war, she enrolled in a Los Angeles cooking school to prepare for her marriage—with disastrous results: her bearnaise sauce congealed because she used lard instead of butter; her calves' brains in red wine fell apart; her well-larded wild duck set the oven on fire—she had completely forgotten to put it in a pan. Says Husband Paul gallantly: "I was willing to put up with that awful cooking to get Julia," but he still shudders at the memory.
Maítres & Pátissiers. After their marriage, Julia delved into cookbooks and made rapid progress, but it was not until Paul was transferred to Paris with USIS that the Julia of today burst into full bloom. Having polished up her college French with two Berlitz lessons a day, she decided to master French cooking, enrolled in the six-month Cordon Bleu course along with twelve G.I.s. "Some of the boys weren't very serious," says Julia. "Those of us who were could get the chefs full attention."
Julia was lucky enough to have for a teacher Master Chef Max Bugnard, then in his 70s, who had worked under Escoffier in London, had run his own restaurant in Brussels. "I absolutely adored him," she confesses. Classes ran from 7 to 9:30 a.m.; in the afternoon she attended a little cooking theater manned by some of the top pátissiers in Paris. "Unlike at Smith College, I became very friendly with my teachers," Julia says, and the maitres responded in kind. "Since then," she says brightly, "my whole life has been cooking."
Watching Sales Soar. Through friends in Paris, she met Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, a pair of Frenchwomen who were working on a cookbook for Americans. In no time they decided to open a cooking school, L'Ecole des Trois Gourmandes, using the Childs' spacious Left Bank kitchen as their classroom. At $5 a lesson, the school fees barely covered the cost of the food. But the practical experience of teaching proved invaluable, for by now Julia-had not only been taken on the team as translator, but also, with Simone Beck, was making the major creative contributions to the cookbook.
"We felt the book should break down into something intellectually reasonable, so you could see the connection between things," explains Julia. "The idea was to take French cooking out of cuckoo land and bring it down to where everybody is. You can't turn a sow's ear into veal