Cambridge Masters the Art of Julia Child

Dessert continued apace: Chocolate Charlotte Malakoff (I've never been able to identify her), ladyfingers dipped one by one into diluted Cointreau, carefully drained, then placed in a mold that was filled with several cups of whipped cream into which had been stirred chocolate melted in espresso coffee and a bit more Cointreau. It was spectacular to behold as it emerged, the top covered with slivers of dark chocolate. Once more a never-forgotten experience representing more time--and the consumption of another industrial-size vat of cream.

Eager to stretch my legs after hours of lingering over every glorious taste, I wandered into the kitchen. There as far the as the eye could see were dirty dishes stacked on counter spaces, in piles, on the floor--more, many more, than even that all-consuming dinner could have required. My incredulous look elicited the secret of the accumulation: these young men did not believe in doing dishes. Instead they bought them at the Salvation Army for five cents each, and when the kitchen reached a bursting point and there was no room to begin the next go-around of Julia's recipes, they threw them away.

Talk about a consciousness-expanding experience--it was wild, way beyond the wild mushrooms and research that Andy and my late husband, Norman Zinberg, were conducting on marijuana. I had wandered into a new world.

So more than 40 years ago, Julie Powell had her antecedents. And what became of them? Andy grew up to be Dr. Andrew T. Weil, the major force in integrative medicine and healthy-lifestyle guru to millions, a brilliant cook, for decades a vegetarian (eats fish), a self-sustaining gardener, and the author of many books that have had a profound impact on the way we live. His twelfth, Why Our Health Matters, arrived today.

Throughout his life Woody--Woodward Adams Wickham, Jr.--gardened and cooked with equal skill at his conservation-based home in Montana and at the homes of his multitudes of friends, including, frequently, Andy (whose philanthropic foundation he chaired). He spent seven years in Mexico and became--not surprisingly, being an anthropologist and later a professor at Puebla University--an expert on every aspect of Mexican farming and cooking. As the vice president of the MacArthur Foundation he oversaw the production of Hoop Dreams and many other independent films, and worked tirelessly for public broadcasting. Sadly, he died early this year, but his commitment to nature and the environment has been memorialized in the creation of an outdoor butterfly museum at the Botanical Museum in Chicago.

And Jeffrey, after Exeter, Harvard, Harvard Law School, MIT's Center for Urban Planning, and a stint as an advisor to the charismatic Mayor Kevin White in Boston, found happiness as Jeffrey Steingarten, the longtime food critic of Vogue and the author of The Man Who Ate Everything and It Must've Been Something I Ate; his essay "Salad, the Silent Killer" has provided legions of salad haters a scholarly rationale for never having to touch a green leaf. Eating with him in New York restaurants, where he is instantly recognized, I learned the meaning of "food celebrity." He can be seen frequently on Iron Chef, proclaiming much as he did while a student on how everything should be cooked. Now everyone listens. Jeffrey, alone, continues to cook and eat as Julia ordained and has written articles that often have eye-grabbing first sentences such as "Take forty pounds of lard." True he is overweight, but he thrives.

Lest I leave the reader with the impression that as young men the roommates were obsessed only with elegant French food, I should add that Andy, as producer of Harvard Medical School's Second-Year Student Revue, assumed Julia's voice (almost as good as Meryl Streep's) and lectured the audience on how to bake bread. With great clarity and careful enunciation he read slowly the ingredients from the wrapping of a loaf of Bond's white bread, which turned out to be almost all chemicals.

The threesome also prepared a "post-nuclear-holocaust" dinner for the Lampoon, a putative humor-based club at Harvard of which Woody was president. The dinner consisted of the charred remains of chickens that were turned into flying missiles. Boys, after all, will be boys.

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