Cooking Dinner For Julia Child

I told him I'd been thinking about it and had some pretty good ideas because I knew that Maxime was fond of historical recipes and that Julia preferred classical French cooking. I decided that a combination would be the best thing, and here's the menu I came up with and prepared:

Hors d'oeuvres
Crudités
Mousse de foies de volailles
(a classic chicken liver mousse from Julia's first book, with Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, given to me in 1966 by Claude Lévy.

First course
Avocado stuffed with fresh Dungeness crab meat, sauce rémoulade
(a nod to my California background)

Entrée
Boned roasted capon stuffed with lamb and mystical herbs
(I'd seen Julia's TV show where she demonstrated boning a fowl)

Vegetable
Spinage
(a combination of fresh cooked spinach and peas in an onion cream sauce flavored with almond oil; a recipe included, from an earlier French source, in Giles Rose's A Perfect School of Instructions for Officers of the Mouth, which Charles II's chef immodestly claimed to be "a Work of singular Use for Ladies and Gentlewomen..." which I found in the Horizon Cookbook.)

Salad
Fresh local (Boston) lettuce with a mustard vinaigrette

Dessert
Torta di ricotta
(a light, 17th century cheesecake baked with lemon and orange rind, toasted pinenuts, and dusted with cinnamon sugar; the recipe also from the Horizon Cookbook, originally published by Bartolomeo Stefani in L'Arte di ben cucinare circa 1662.)

Julia and Paul were the first to arrive, and Julia walked into the kitchen even before taking off her coat, saying, "Everything smells delicious," and startling me by lifting lids off all the pots on the stovetop to sniff the contents.

Dinner and the entire evening were completely successful, the company was splendidly congenial, and after dinner we retired to the music room for coffee and cognac. My friend Larry Delorier came over with his flute, and he and I played the Shostakovitch Sonata in D Minor to top off the evening.

A few days later I received in the mail a copy of Maxime's new book with an inscription which made me (and my mother) very proud: "For Angus, one of the best cooks I know."

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