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Sowing Wild Rice. The gourmet trend has created a succession of favorites. According to Gourmet Magazine Editor Jane Montant, boeuf bourguignon and coq au vin were the fashionable dishes in the 1950s, only to give way to the vogue for paella in the 1960s. Right now, the rage across the U.S. is beef Wellington, a filet slathered with pate de foie gras and baked in a pastry crust. Manhattan Hostess Mrs. Bartley C. Crum, who sends out Menus by Mail to 6,000 subscribers in 45 states (among them: Jacqueline Kennedy, Ilka Chase and Pauline Trigere), currently recommends beef Wellington along with Indonesian pork sate, but varies her suggestions with more unusual dishes, such as Peruvian seviche (cold raw bay scallops marinated in the juice of limes, lemons and oranges) and Arabian chicken, roasted with cloves, honey and bacon.
In Washington, with the departure of Nicole Alphand, party-giving wife of the former French ambassador, the Spanish and Venezuelan embassies have become the chic places to go, and Latin fare has leaped into prominence. The favorites: esponjoso, a rich, caramel-covered confection that delighted Lady Bird when she sampled it at the Venezuelan embassy, and pisio, a Spanish vegetable concoction similar to the French ratatouille.
South of the Potomac in Smithfield, Va., Sybil and Doyle Northrup would rather stick with Julia Child. "Last week I went down to our pond and caught two bluegills," says Sybil. "My husband has never been able to get me to touch a fish, but I thought: 'Julia, if you can do it, so can I.' We broiled them in butter just the way she does. They were delicious." Under Julia's tutelage, the Northrups are developing into fullfledged gourmets. They are even going so far as to plant their own wild rice, because, explains Doyle, "at $4.50 for 8 ounces, you'd better grow your own."
Haute Cuisine Turkey. For all their new-found epicureanism, Americans are not about to fiddle with their traditional Thanksgiving menu. Julia is as patriotic as the rest, but she cannot resist giving her Thanksgiving a French accent. The turkey she and Paul will share with her sister-in-law in Bucks County, Pa., is called dindon demi-désossé (see diagram). To make it easier to carve, the upper part of the rib cage is removed before roasting. She plans to use a sausage and bread-crumb dressing (rough measurement is I cup of dressing for each pound of "bought weight"), recommends marinating the cut-up breast meat in cognac, shallots, salt and pepper for 20 minutes while preparing the stuffing. "If you do your turkey this way," she says, "it will be haute cuisine—which means never leaving anything alone."
Failure at 5 a.m. Next week, with Thanksgiving behind them, Julia and Paul Child will be off to winter in the house that the book built, next door to Simone Beck in Grasse, above the French Riviera. There, Julia and Simca will get down to the serious work of preparing Volume II of Mastering the Art. The new volume will follow the same pattern as the first, but will vary the recipes and include such new material as puff pastry, brioches, croissants and a plain chocolate cake. Promises Julia: "It's going to be the best chocolate cake anyone ever ate."