A passion for food and people
– that’s how Daniel Barduzzi will forever remember culinary
master Julia Child.
The famous
”
French Chef
”
died earlier this month at the age of 92. She left the world a
legacy for fun with food that will long have an impact on the South
Valley region.
A passion for food and people – that’s how Daniel Barduzzi will forever remember culinary master Julia Child.
The famous “French Chef” died earlier this month at the age of 92. She left the world a legacy for fun with food that will long have an impact on the South Valley region.
Barduzzi, co-owner of the Old City Hall restaurants in downtown Gilroy, was for the last 30 years a personal friend of Child. He described her as a woman with a relish for living that was truly reflected in her philosophy of cooking.
The two first met in 1974 in Cambridge, Mass., when Barduzzi appeared on two episodes of Child’s famous PBS-TV cooking show. He remembers making crêpes Suzette on the show as well as a stuffed roasted chicken.
“She was entertaining and fantastic at the same time,” he said. “She had an incredible sense of humor. She tried to make cooking easy for everyone who was watching. She tried to remove the ‘sophistication’ of cooking and make it available and affordable to everyone.”
Child revolutionized the art of French cooking for Americans, and was encouraging to budding chefs, he said.
Before the genial woman with the warble voice came along, people thought French cooking was very difficult and only a trained chef could create the culinary concoctions Child whipped up so easily.
Child was not a born cook. She found her way into the kitchen later in life.
She was born Julia Carolyn McWilliams on Aug. 15, 1912 in Paradise, a small town near Pasadena. Her parents were wealthy, and servants did most of the cooking as she grew up.
While stationed in Ceylon working in the Office of Strategic Services, a division of the U.S. government’s intelligence operations, she met Paul Child. The often quiet, but sometimes witty gentleman was a decade older than her – and four inches shorter than her 6-foot-2 frame. Their love of food was the magic ingredient to their falling in love.
Paul Child had been raised on fine food, so Julia decided to study at the famous Cordon Bleu cooking school in France to impress her husband. The only woman enrolled, at 37, she was also considered rather beyond the appropriate age to start a career as a chef.
But she persisted and gained skills that helped her in writing an easy-to-follow guide to French cooking. Facing 10 years of rejections from publishers, when her ground-breaking book “Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1” finally hit stores, readers ate the cookbook right up. It sold 650,000 copies on its debut, making Child famous.
Two years later, she appeared on PBS television, frantically chopping chickens and stirring sauces while sneaking sips from a glass of Chardonnay.
She made no excuses when she flipped an omelete only to have it splatter on the stove, or dropped a whole salmon on the studio floor. She simply picked it up and announced good-naturedly, “Now, I can show you how to reconstruct a damaged fish.”
Barduzzi remembers Child as a “very down-to-earth lady.” She was so famous that, when she entered a restaurant, chefs and waiters would panic, expecting her to be demanding. She never was, he said.
He recalls her once telling him: “You know what I expect from a waiter. That he is capable of taking my dish from the kitchen to the table without dropping it. I’m already happy with just that.”
Although she never attended Gilroy’s famous Garlic Festival, Child did play a crucial role in the famous culinary extravaganza’s success, Barduzzi said. In the 1960s – especially on the East Coast – fresh garlic was considered by many Americans to be a low-class ingredient. It might be acceptable for Italian, Greek or French cooking, but many Americans stayed away from it.
Child’s “French Chef” show changed all that. She often used fresh garlic in the recipes she demonstrated.
“She helped Gilroy’s industry by promoting garlic,” Barduzzi said. “She loved the garlic, I’m tell you. Oh, yes!”
Child thought of cooking as a experience for all the senses, he said. She encouraged her audience to make their dishes “works of art.” And Barduzzi emphasizes this philosophy in the dishes he serves guests at his two Old City Hall restaurants – The Clocktower and the Courtyard Grill.
“When you bring a dish in front of your guests,” she would say to him, “it must look good, smell good and taste good.”
Child was revolutionary as a cooking show host, Barduzzi said. She emphasized the fun in cooking, and the flamboyance of her personality made her entertaining for everyone to watch.
And it pleased her to see, in recent years, that television expanded her concepts in many of the televised food shows – including the Food Network shows on cable TV. She paved the road for all the others who followed her.
Martha Stewart owes much of her success to Child, Barduzzi said. But the two women took very different approaches to demonstrating their recipes.
“Martha Stewart was a snob compared to Julia Child,” he said. “Julia was the one that wanted everyone to have fun while cooking. It’s fun to please your guests. Martha, however, says, ‘Well, you have to impress your guests.'”
Julia Child will definitely be missed in the cooking world, Barduzzi said.
“She was a very sweet woman,” he said. “She was a very great inspiration for people in this country – chefs and housewives and anyone who is interested in doing something in the kitchen … We’re going to miss her.”
To Julia Child, who is surely now forever cooking with the angels, we of the South Valley region raise a glass of Chardonnay and wish you a fond “Bon Appetit!”
