Triss Stein--Almost Julia Child

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Last week our Lucy Burdette talked about her current obsession with cooking icon Julia Child. In the comments on that post, our JRW author friend Triss Stein commented that she'd lived in the same Cambridge neighborhood as Julia and that she had some stories to tell. 

We were intrigued and asked Triss to come on the blog and share those stories with us!

Almost Julia Child

by Triss Stein

Julia Child’s first television broadcast was in February 1963. In 1966 she was on the cover of Time magazine. In 1967, I moved into the apartment in Cambridge MA that made us neighbors.  Some context here:  I was a college senior, a hick from a small city in New York dairy farm country. I had never, ever seen any famous person in real life or believed I ever would. 

Well, we were almost neighbors.  My shared apartment was on Trowbridge St., south of Kirkland. 

It was at the back of a typical Boston three decker with stacked porches in the front, floor-throughs long since chopped up into student rentals. 

One bedroom had a built-in china cabinet- we had no china-  and we looked out at the scenic driveway.  

North of Kirkland Street, this student  almost-slum became a neighborhood of spacious Victorian homes occupied by Harvard senior faculty, and yes, Julia and Paul Child. Right there  on Irving Street. 

Savenor’s is the grocery store mentioned in the series. It was right around the corner from us, on Kirkland Street, handy for that forgotten quart of milk, and run by an intimidating, messy, elderly woman. Imagine our surprise when we learned she was Mrs. Savenor and the store had a butcher department famous all over greater Boston. Yes, Julia bought her meat there. The housekeeper for John Kenneth Galbraith, the renowned diplomat, writer and Harvard professor, also shopped there. Someone I knew overheard her telling the butcher the meat had to be especially excellent as Mrs. Kennedy was coming for dinner! (Yes, that Mrs Kennedy.)  

Sadly I never did see Julia  around the neighborhood, but I knew people who had. The best story ever: some grad students decided it would be an adventure to cook a whole suckling pig. They managed to obtain one but then realized they had no idea what to do with it. So they did what any smart grad student would do in those olden times: they opened a phone directory (a paper book, free from the phone company), looked up Julia Child’s home number and called her.  She was enthusiastic about their project and walked them through the whole process. I remember that she invited herself to the dinner, but it is possible I made that up.  

Finally, years later: my husband worked at Knopf, and would bring home the best cookbooks ever, a whole new kind of cook book, edited by the brilliant Judith Jones, another unforgettable character in the PBS series. Classics by Madhur Jaffrey, Claudia Roden, Edna Lewis, Lidia Bastianich, came to me hot off the press.  

I’ve read several books about Julia and Paul and that time and place. Here are two of my favorite Julia facts: she liked McDonald’s French fries and wasn’t afraid to say so. And when Paul Child was old and ill and needed constant nursing care, she called him at the nursing home every night, same time Cambridge time, no matter where she was and what time it was there. 

Triss Stein has spent most of her adult life living and working in Brooklyn. She was inspired by Brooklyn’s varied neighborhoods and so is her urban historian heroine, Erica Donato. In the most recent, Brooklyn Legacies, (Poisoned Pen Press, 2019) a chance encounter draws her to the quaint streets and deep conflicts of historic Brooklyn Heights.

 

These days, Triss is hard at work on an entirely new project.

DEBS: What lovely behind-the-scenes glimpses of Julia, Triss. Did your husband know Judith Jones? I wish they'd make a TV series about her!

And of course we're hoping you'll give us a teeny hint about your new project!

Reds and readers, have you ever brushed orbits with someone famous?

Oh, and has anyone managed to watch the Julia documentary?