Mastering the art of French cooking in Julia Child’s summer cottage
I have always felt unsure of myself in the kitchen. Even something as simple as dicing an onion or grilling a steak makes me uneasy. I attribute my culinary anxiety to two things: 1) Having a Martha Stewart mother whose idea of my helping in the kitchen extended to licking brownie batter off the spatula. 2) An eightyear stint at Food & Wine magazine where my job was to eat, not cook, and where I was surrounded by recipe experts and culinary school grads who magically made chopping, roasting and frying appear effortless.
French cuisine, in particular, terrifies me. I’ve always thought of French food as being complicated and fussy. So, imagine my nerves when I learned I’d be attending cooking school in Julia Child’s former summer home in Provence. The curriculum promised I’d master French classics such as beef bourguignon, coq au vin, bouillabaisse and more in one week. I anticipated both embarrassment and disaster.
Child, America’s first TV celebrity chef, is actually my perfect kitchen muse. Adorably awkward, she took the intimidation factor out of French cooking for many Americans with her hit series, “The French Chef.” Unabashedly honest one-liners such as, “Always remember: If you’re alone in the kitchen and you drop the lamb, you can always just pick it up. Who’s going to know?” were reminders that mistakes happen. Cooking isn’t about perfection. It’s meant to be fun.
That’s the exact ethos American Francophile Makenna Held embraces in Child’s former kitchen. “If you know what’s in Dinty Moore beef stew then you know what’s in beef bourguignon,” she tells me over glasses of rosé. “People know a lot more about food than they realize. They just second-guess themselves.”
In many ways, Held’s curriculum is just as much about building confidence as it is about learning knife skills and French sauces. Many students assume they will be working their way through Child’s legendary cookbook, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” However, the name, the Courageous Cooking School, hints at Held’s bold, recipe-free approach to teaching.
“I don’t believe recipes are the best tool in the kitchen,” Held confesses. “They are a great starting point to play. But our goal is to get students thinking for themselves about taste and texture and flavor.”
Held, 31, never intended to run a cooking school. A life coach and ski instructor from Colorado, she grew up in a family that appreciated good food and regularly visited France. Like Child, Held is a tall (6-foot-1 versus Child’s 6-foot-2), bombastic Smith College alum with a freewheeling spirit and deep love of bringing people together around food. In 2015, she read in the New York Times that Child’s summer home, La Pitchoune, was for sale.
“Something told me I had to buy it,” says Held, who bought the place sight unseen. “I couldn’t bear to think of the kitchen being torn out or the home being private and exclusive.”
Child and her husband, Paul, built “La Peetch,” as they lovingly called the humble, threebedroom cottage, in 1965 on the property of Julia’s culinary collaborator, Simone Beck. The couple lived here on an off until 1992, entertaining culinary greats such as James Beard and M.F.K. Fisher.
It seemed fateful that Held would continue La Peetch’s legacy as a place to gather around and celebrate food. She welcomed her first guests in April 2016. One year later, she launched the cooking school.
The cottage accommodates just six guests, the perfect amount for Child’s small kitchen, a replica of the kitchen from her Cambridge, Mass., home (now enshrined at the Smithsonian Institute). Pegboard walls have been traced with outlines of pots, pans, peelers and other kitchen gadgets, including some of Child’s originals utensils.
Guests are encouraged to make themselves at home. My first night, wide awake with jet lag, I wander into the kitchen in my robe and help myself to a glass of Côtes du Rhône and a snack of olives and stinky French cheese. The relaxed vibe immediately puts me at ease.
Held, who is currently studying at Le Cordon Bleu Paris, tag-teams in the kitchen with Dominie Clarke, a Le Cordon Bleu-trained Scot with “Jeopardy!”-worthy culinary knowledge. Each day has a loose theme — knife skills, salads, stews — based around four to six dishes. Our group of five gathers the first morning, aprons tied, ready to master knife skills. The kitchen smells of freshly cut oregano, thyme and dill, and the voice of French singer Édith Piaf croons from a speaker. On our menu today: potato Dauphinoise, ratatouille and steak and salmon tartare.
The German woman next to me deftly wields her knife, slicing eggplant at an alarming speed. I timidly chop potatoes, keeping my knife tip on the board and initiating the movement from my shoulder, rather than my wrist, per Clarke’s instruction.
“There is no benefit to cutting extra fast, despite what male TV chefs make us think,” says Clarke, making me feel better about my tortoiselike pace. “But cutting the vegetables the same size is crucial.”
I layer my evenly sliced potatoes in a Le Creuset then “drown” them in cream. More cream and more butter, I soon understand, are the secret to French cooking. Clarke puts the potatoes into the oven and the pot of ratatouille on the stove then drops a hunk of raw beef in front of us. “Choose your flavoring,” she instructs. I feel like I’ve been tasked with a “Top Chef ” challenge. My fellow students all go with the classic steak tartare accoutrements — capers, cornichon, Dijon, mustard, parsley — a combination that has never appealed to me.
“A recipe should not dictate taste,” reminds Clarke. “Trust your own palette. If you think it tastes good, you’ve succeeded.”
I decide to give my tartare an Italian twist, mixing my chopped filet with pesto, Parmesan, basil, toasted pine nuts and sun-dried tomato. When we sit for lunch on the wisteria-shaded patio, I can’t help but feel impressed by our work. The preparation was surprisingly simple, and the result is absolutely delicious. I share bites of my Italian tartare and grin as my fellow cooking mates complement the flavors and texture.
Our kitchen time — usually four to five hours a day — gets broken up with daily excursions to fishmongers, butchers and markets, as well as fairytale-worthy villages. Success in the kitchen, I learn, is heavily dependent on the quality of your ingredients.
One day, Held drives us 20 minutes to Antibes. We’re each given 50 euros and instructed to purchase a vegetable we’ve always wanted to learn to cook. The produce in France seems superior to anything I’ve seen even in my neighborhood Whole Foods. I grab a head of romanesco, a psychedelic-looking cross between cauliflower and broccoli; someone else selects a bunch of wild asparagus, and Held grabs squash blossoms. Before we leave, we stop at the butcher and watch as he decapitates a plump poulet noir, a black-footed chicken from Burgundy. “Dinner!,” Held says enthusiastically.
That afternoon we divide into team coq au vin and team beef bourguignon, two dishes that have always seemed beyond my culinary capabilities. I try to cheat and ask Clarke which is simpler, and she assures me both are “easy” and identical in technique.
“They’re both peasant dishes,” she says. “Nothing complicated about them. It’s really just a choice of working with chicken or beef.”
I decide to go team coq au vin and hours later find myself massaging a whole chicken. Clarke walks me through how to find just the right place to “dislocate” joints and avoid “shrapnel” as I break the bird down into eight pieces, leaving the skin on for extra flavor.
“Don’t listen to Julia,” is one of Clarke’s favorite sayings. We may be cooking in the recipe queen’s kitchen, but that doesn’t mean her taste and methods reign. Traditionally, at this point in our dish Child would have added bacon and mushrooms into our pot of chicken. But Clarke prefers to pan-fry the mushrooms and add them later so they don’t lose flavor. I admit, I would agree. We also break tradition and add white wine rather than red to the dish. “No one wants to eat a purple-grayish bird,” Clarke explains.
Our final evening Held leads us through an al fresco champagne tasting, a fitting way to celebrate all we’ve learned. We raise our glasses and toast the freewheeling spirt of Julia. And I add an extra “cheers” to Held and Clarke for helping a timid cook find her courage in the kitchen.