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Lunch with Julia I had lunch with Julia Child last Sunday. A few friends joined by common interests in food and writing sat on her small, sunny patio in Santa Barbara, ate and drank, and talked food. The conversation wandered over many topics - how labor-intensive fava beans are, the importance of diversity in agriculture, and whether logic had more to do with writing a clear recipe, or was it really just story telling instinct. There was much talk of tangerines - one of us was Jim Churchill, a well known Ojai rancher who has been putting Pixie tangerines on the foodie map. An impromptu first course occurred with the tasting of half a dozen varieties of his tangerines, the peels piling up on the coffee table where we were gathered before moving outside. We talked our favorite olive oils, and what a good idea it is to drink wine every day, and about eating seasonally. Because it is spring, our dishes were filled with the bright tastes of nearby farms and fileds - fresh fava beans (labor-intensive but so delicious), blood oranges, green peas, mint, fennel, bright red Gaviota strawberries. It was a peaceful afternoon, unhurried, warm under a clear blue sky. We saw green mountains to the east, and felt the sea air from the west. Everything was in bloom, and the troubles of the world seemed mercifully far away for a little while. "It's such a lovely day," said Julia - then she added, with a twinkle, "You get tired of saying that every day." Barbara Sims-Bell, her oldest friend at the table, told her that in Cambridge, where she had lived for many years, they had just had seven inches of new snow. "Well," she said, "they can have it." We talked about buying food, and compared notes on the local farmers markets, remembering when they were getting started. We talked about simple food - the importance of starting with the best ingredients, fresh produce, and then simply not ruining it. The importance of being flexible, looking at what is available and beautiful in the market that day, and cooking with that. Most of all, we talked about the enjoyment of eating, and we did enjoy ourselves. I think all of us felt how particularly lucky we were to share a meal with the person who had taught a nation how to eat. Julia is not doing much cooking herself at the moment. She's ninety, and her famous Cambridge kitchen, designed by her husband Paul, is now in the Smithsonian. She has a nicely equipped small kitchen in her Santa Barbara residence, but she is recovering from multiple surgeries in the past year, and is still confined to a wheelchair. So the four of us, who drove out like pilgrims from Ojai, made lunch and brought it with us, packed in hampers. What do you cook for Julia Child, what do you bring to the queen? If any of you have ever had trepidition about cooking for someone, let me tell you - I'm in the club now. I did know from the start that I would keep it simple, and seasonal. I wasn't going to try to get fancy with the master of classic French technique. I was in charge of the soup course, and decided on the spring pea soup that I only make at this exact time of year. It is a delicate elixer of shelled green peas, butter lettuce, and a whiff of lemon - all pureed to a silky smoothness. To finish it, heavy cream is gently beaten with a generous handful of fresh, chopped mint leaves. A spoonful of this mint cream is floated in each bowl as the soup is served, and it melts into the essence of green peas. I was casual when I served the soup, but I was holding my breath. To make matters worse, we had been warned that Julia's appetite had suffered lately. "Oh, that cream is lovely in the soup, isn't it?" she said, then added, "I do love a meal that begins with soup." And then she ate every bite. I was relieved, but I wasn't done. The meal was a joint effort; there were tasty and sophisticated dishes from Sims Brannon, who teaches cooking classes in the upper Ojai, but I had been asked at the last moment to bring a dessert as well as my soup. My first idea was an old fashioned lemon-flavored buttermilk ice cream. My lemon tree has been producing gorgeous, big lemons and I knew it would be good. I mixed up a batch and put it into my ice cream freezer, and that was the very moment the freezer decided to quit for good. Now it was ten o'clock at night and I had no dessert. I got up early Sunday morning and again decided to keep it very simple. I went back to the Plan A of all desserts: chocolate. Because it was April, I made it chocolate and strawberries. The cake I made was simplicity itself: just good bittersweet chcolate, butter, eggs, sugar and a touch of citrus to stay in keeping with the citrusy theme of the lunch - a bit of Grand Marnier and some grated orange zest. This is a soufflC)-like cake, which gets tall as it bakes and then falls as it cools. The edges are slightly crusty, the inside moist and rich. Or, as Jim put it, it has that crunchy-gooey thing. It's an easy cake to make, and needs no decoration beyond a sprinkling of powdered sugar on top. I made sweetened whipped cream to go with it, flavored with a bit more Grand Marnier. The dessert plates looked like this: a wedge of dense, dark cake in the middle, a few glorious, bright red Gaviota strawberries on one side, a mound of orange-scented cream on the other. Would the queen like it? Julia took a bite, dipped a strawberry into cream, took another bite. Then she murmured, "What a perfect dessert." If you would like to make the chocolate cake that passed the Julia Child taste test, see this month's "New Recipes" - and be sure to get ripe, flavorful strawberries to serve with it. For the Spring Pea Soup, go to the recipe archive.
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