The Map and the Menu: Julia Child and Changing Definitions of the US Frontier

Bernard DeVoto was born and raised in Utah. His mother was the daughter of a Mormon farmer, and his father was the son of an impoverished Italian American immigrant. According to his biographer, western writer and close friend Wallace Stegner, DeVoto was shunned by both the Mormon and the gentile communities. Stegner noted: “Like many who fled the limited and puritanical village, [DeVoto] would not know until he had separated himself from it how much he knew about his home and how much he valued it” (6). Perhaps Stegner was thinking of Willa Cather, who had earlier moved from rural Nebraska to New York City, and then to Europe, only to return in her early novels to the frontier prairie, which she romanticized in O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918). “[B]eing literary in Ogden,” and feeling his “masculinity” in question, DeVoto transferred to Harvard after his first year at the University of Utah (Stegner 1974: 33, 24). Graduating after World War I, he initially taught at Northwestern, and then returned to his alma mater, where he remained on the faculty until the end of his academic career. In a letter to a friend, written in 1920, DeVoto described himself as a “spore [from] Utah, not adapted to the environment, a maverick who may not run with the herd, unbranded” (39). DeVoto acknowledged his alienation from his birthplace, while simultaneously dramatizing his frontier origins (“maverick,” “herd,” “unbranded”).

Earlier generations of eastern-educated men—including Francis Parkman Jr., Owen Wister, and Theodore Roosevelt—had traveled out West, testing their manhood in the “wilderness,” becoming ranchers, and participating in such activities as buffalo hunts (White 1968). DeVoto also enjoyed certain aspects of “the strenuous life,” spending one summer as an adolescent working on a sheep ranch in Idaho (Stegner 1974 1995: 43). But the East Coast intellectual returned to the West more frequently in his teaching and writing, reexploring the early US frontier.

As DeVoto began publishing historical scholarship on the nineteenth-century American West, American chefs and cookbook writers in the 1950s were promoting rustic western cuisine. James Beard had initiated the trend a decade earlier with his second book Cook It Outdoors (1941). That work was followed by a series of books in the 1950s: The Complete Book of Barbeque and Rotisserie Cooking (1954), The Complete Book of Outdoor Cookery (1954, with Helen Evans Brown), and Treasury of Outdoor Cooking, written in the late 1950s but published in 1960. In addition, Helen Evans Brown’s West Coast Cook Book (1952) featured dishes that had been eaten by early Spanish and Mexican settlers and white pioneers who had come to “the new country to dig gold, or build railroads, or seek adventure” (Brown 1952: 4). Conversely, The Virginia City Cook Book (1953) celebrated the Americanized European cuisine that had been eaten by silver-lode millionaires on the mining frontier. It is possible to read these works in opposition to the trend to modernize the American kitchen and to introduce more processed foods and microwavable precooked meals into the public’s diet. But in truth, the habit of combining manufactured food with wild game, homegrown fruits and vegetables, and natural herbs and spices began at least as early as Lewis and Clark. The explorers prepared for their lengthy journey by packing a keelboat with ninety-three pounds of “portable soup, a concoction that was boiled until gelatinous and then left to dry until hard.” Whenever possible, they also hunted for elk, deer, and bison, and traded goods with Native Americans, in exchange for roots and berries, wild licorice, and pemmican (Avey 2013; Mansfield 2002).

Not unlike Lewis and Clark, Child was a pioneer who introduced new foods and dishes to American palates—not in a rustic setting, but in non-modernized kitchens. Instead of mapping the early frontier, she rewrote the menu of food choices for domestic women in the mid–twentieth century, transforming the kitchen into a space both domestic and foreign, familiar yet experimental. No longer the site of domestic drudgery, the kitchen became a new frontier where amateur cooks could cultivate more sophisticated palates and cosmopolitan dishes.

In a letter to Avis, written in December 1952, Child asked DeVoto if his recent article in Harper’s was an excerpt from his forthcoming edition of Lewis and Clark. “It’s a period which fascinates Paul, and we both chewed into [it] with great satisfaction,” she enthuses (Reardon 2010: 58). Child imagined each new installment of the journals as a dish served by a master chef. In fact, The Journals of Lewis and Clark—like Mastering the Art of French Cooking—can be read as an instruction manual, featuring directions on how to navigate the early frontier, as well as recipes unfamiliar to most American readers. Journal entries contain measurements concerning longitude and latitude, distances traveled each day, and natural landmarks to follow as Lewis and Clark chart a course through the West. In addition, it lists the foodstuffs and cooking utensils exchanged with indigenous tribes in order to ensure their goodwill.

After the frontier “closed” in 1890 (Turner 1995: 6), President Theodore Roosevelt established an “Open Door Policy” (1899) allowing US missionaries to travel abroad, converting foreigners to Christianity, democracy, modern technological methods of farming, and various aspects of American culture. The establishment of trade relations between the United States and foreign countries sparked an interest in eastern Asian cuisine. Later, in reciprocal fashion, President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy introduced European cuisine at the White House, paving the way for Child, who during the President’s administration began appearing on public television, further heightening the public’s fascination with classical French cooking (Collins 2009: 3).

Beard also championed new methods of cooking that included both native or regional as well as foreign ingredients. The renowned chef was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1903, two years before the Lewis and Clark Exposition, a centennial fair celebrating the exploration of the early frontier. He combined such foods as Dungeness crab, caught off the Oregon coast, with recipes inspired by his British-born mother, who was taught how to cook by the family’s Chinese chef (Beard, Delights and Prejudices, 2010: 16). Beard blurred the line between highbrow and lowbrow cuisine. In The Complete Book of Outdoor Cookery, coauthored with Brown, he included a “grub list” that featured julienne vegetables and dishes set in aspic (303). The jacket copy for Cook It Outdoors proclaimed: “It is a man’s book…[that promotes] healthy outdoor eating and cooking habits” (7). But Beard was also a homosexual whose work reflected his queerness. Such men “used food as public expression,” creating dishes that combined “a matrix of color, feeling and pleasure, [and] the exuberance of intimate lives they couldn’t otherwise reveal to the world” (Birdsall 2020: 15).

During the Cold War, the United States sought to prevent the spread of communism by pursuing a policy of “containment” (Hamblen 2011: 45). Homosexuals were also considered social pariahs. “National strength depended upon the ability of strong, manly men to stand up against communist threats.…[S]exual excess or degeneracy would make individuals easy prey for communist tactics.” For homosexual males, the closet was much like the kitchen (May 2017: 82).

Essayist Richard Rodriguez suggests why gay men were attracted to aesthetic professions. At a time when homosexuality was considered “a sin against nature,” these men found refuge “in artifice, in plumage, in lampshades, sonnets, musical comedy, couture, syntax, religious ceremony, opera, lacquer, [and] irony.…We’ll put a little skirt here. The impulse is not to create but to re-create, to sham, to convert, to sauce, to rouge, to fragrance, to prettify. No effect is too small or too ephemeral to be snatched away from nature, to be ushered toward the perfection of artificiality. We’ll bring out the highlights there” (Rodriguez 1992: 32–33). Beard was drawn to nature but was also considered unnatural in the socially conservative mid–twentieth century. He was attracted to the fripperies of civilization—to outdoor cooking with julienne vegetables.

Lucius Beebe was also openly gay. He often appeared in public wearing a top hat and tails, advertising himself as a bon vivant who wrote about New York City café society. After Prohibition ended, he wrote a book about cocktails, emphasizing their foreign or exotic origins. The Stork Club Bar Book (2015 [1946]) featured cocktails with international ingredients—including Danish aquavit, Jamaican rum, London gin, Russian vodka, and French vermouth. They also had exotic names. The Bermudan, Cuban, and Panama cocktails, the London Fog, and the Scottish Loch Lomond vicariously enabled consumers to feel as if they were cosmopolitan travelers rather than conservative homebound Americans (Beebe 2015: 21, 23, 46). The Stork Club—patronized by celebrities and the Manhattan elite—represented “the dream of suburbia” (ibid., viii). Bartenders garnished their cocktails with Japanese umbrellas, maraschino cherries, and other sugary fruits, offering bright-colored confections in elegant glasses.

In The Hour: A Cocktail Manifesto (1948), DeVoto claimed there were only two kinds of American cocktails: the “slug” of bourbon and the vodka martini, which required merely a slice of lemon rind and a whiff of vermouth (11). His manly drinks (a “slug” of bourbon) contrasted Beebe’s more elaborate recipes, revealing “the trend of American life away from the countryside to the cities and the rise of mixed drinks, imported beverages, and a general alcoholic sophistication” (Beebe 2015: xxi). The American home was the new urban frontier, where a variety of cocktails—originally presented in the nation’s swankiest restaurants, night clubs, and bars (Beebe 2015: vii)—were consumed with increasing frequency.

Child took her job more seriously than Beebe, seeking to replicate (“to re-create”) the sauces that were essential parts of her recipes rather than fripperies (“to sauce, to rouge, to fragrance, to prettify”). But in other ways, like the flamboyant Beebe, she embodied the essence of camp. Standing more than six feet tall, with a less “feminine” physique than many of her female counterparts, yet speaking with a high-pitched voice, she reminds one of the characters in the second episode of Julia of “a man trying to sound like a woman.” Three episodes later, she meets her double—a San Francisco drag queen named CoCo Vin. Elsewhere on television, Child has been impersonated by male comedians such as Dan Ackroyd and John Candy. Julia also allows the viewer to speculate whether Child may have been lesbian. (At her Smith College reunion in episode four, a former classmate comes out to Child, revealing, “I changed after knowing you.”) Although the insinuations that Paul was also gay have never been proven, the couple was definitely “queer.” Julia and Paul had an unconventional marriage. In addition, the chef was larger than Paul. Whereas DeVoto was an advocate for nineteenth-century westward expansion, Child illustrated Turner’s belief that Americans were “an expanding people” (32). In Julie and Julia, when Paul comments on his wife’s talent for eating, Julia replies good-naturedly with her mouth full of food: “I know. I’m good at it. I’m growing in front of you!” While this critique of the female body may strike some as offensive, it also symbolizes Child’s growing ambition and expanding horizons, including her desire to bring French cuisine to the American people. Her union with Paul was equally unorthodox. Child had “no wish to give up her identity; what she was hoping to do was expand it to meet his, and then dissolve the borders” (Shapiro 2007: 58).

At times, Child is compared to a man. A pivotal scene in Julie and Julia occurs when she meets with her editor to determine the title of her forthcoming book. The title is a condensed version of the manuscript, featuring key words that indicate what the work is about. While the bewildered author watches, the editor moves the words around on a board until she discovers the ideal title. In Mastering the Art of French Cooking, three words are “key.” Art refers to a creative practice that requires natural talent, while Cooking suggests a practical skill that anyone can learn. (American chefs of Child’s generation often used the word “cooking” or “cookery” instead of “cuisine,” a foreign word with snobbish connotations.) Mastering means “acquiring an ability” or perfectly completing a task. As a gendered noun, master finds its complementary opposite in the word mistress. But as an action verb, it has no equivalent. (One can’t mistress the art of French cooking.) The editor engenders Child as a man, conquering a European form of cuisine, much as Lewis and Clark mapped the American West.

Child reclaimed a woman’s place in the kitchen during the political and sexual revolutions of the 1960s.² Apocryphal stories claim that Betty Friedan once confronted the chef, accusing her of hurting the feminist cause by encouraging housewives to remain in their kitchens (Hollows 2007: 33–48). But there is no tangible evidence that Child did any such thing. In fact, one might argue that Child was a pioneer who infiltrated the male world of professional chefs, while transforming the domestic sphere into a realm of empowerment.

The Cold War sparked renewed interest in Turner’s thesis supporting US expansion. “Frontier mythologies coursed powerfully through this time period…, as they came into contact with innovative and explorative endeavors that sought to take ‘man’ beyond the plains of the American West.” During this period, the United States ventured into previously unexplored places—underwater, outer space, and anywhere else that could be “mastered and conquered.” Instead of appropriating territory, the United States sought to convert its ideological foes, crediting capitalism with America’s higher standard of living. For women, the kitchen became “The New Frontier,” a term Kennedy coined in a speech that he delivered at the Democratic National Convention in 1960. Food processors, new appliances, and more efficient, labor-saving devices were also examples of the nation’s higher standard of living (Squire 2011: 6; Rozwadowski 2018: 161–87; Hitt et al. 2008). A year earlier, Kennedy’s rival, Republican Vice President Richard Nixon, and Soviet Secretary Nikita Khrushchev had compared the merits of capitalism versus communism in the Kitchen Debate, a referendum on “living standards, political economy, culture, and consumer desires,” held at the American National Exhibition in Moscow (Hamilton and Phillips 2014: vii; Farish 2010: 45). The technologically sophisticated kitchen bore little resemblance to the work environment that Child preferred, featuring her husband’s hand-crafted cabinets and non-stainless-steel knives. Although later she embraced such liberal causes as Planned Parenthood and funding for HIV/AIDS (Kingston 2012), Child was as much of a politician as Nixon. She also had more in common with her father and her hometown of Pasadena than she may have realized. In the early twentieth century, Pasadena was known for its boosterism. Local politicians, civic leaders, business owners, and land developers like her father, John McWilliams, promoted the city’s temperate climate, its fertile soil, and its potential for economic growth in order to attract new residents, thus contributing to their own personal wealth. Child was a “booster” who lauded the virtues of classical French cuisine. The fact that she financially profited in the process of doing so was probably irrelevant to her purposes.

Child was a different kind of pioneer. Unlike DeVoto, who published androcentric narratives about western expansion, or Turner, who viewed the “frontier line” as a border separating civilization and savagery (31–34), Child defined the kitchen “frontier” as a liminal space of transformation and possibility; as a contact zone in which different cultures converged. In that sense, Child anticipated feminists of color—including Gloria Anzaldúa (Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) and the contributors to This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1983), edited by Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga. There were many differences between Child—a white, upper-middle-class chef—and these minority, working-class writers and political activists. Yet, like these women, Child redefined the “frontier” in the mid– to late twentieth century, transforming it from a site of conflict into one of creativity, collaboration, and female empowerment.