Free Backstage with Julia by Nancy Verde Barr Page A

French truc of how to make end-of-the-season, slightly over-the-hill garden peas taste sweeter by cooking them with a few of their pods and some shredded lettuce, and I ran into my first snafu as executive chef.
    It was a taped segment, and that meant we needed three backups for every stage of the recipe Julia would demonstrate. The script called for her to begin by shelling a few peas and adding those to a pan of peas sitting on the stove. So we needed four times enough peas in their pods for her to shell, four times enough shelled peas to fill the pan on the stove, and one set of cooked peas to put on a serving plate. The problem was that it really was the end of the season, so we could find only enough peas in the market for one backup for every stage instead of our normal three. But it was a simple spot—what could go wrong? Scary words in television.
    Paul Child offered to shell the peas and sat on a stool quietly removing the pods and then dividing the peas into the two setups. At one point, I heard him say, "Forgive me, but I'm peeing on the floor."
    Excuse me? Had I heard right? I turned and immediately saw the twinkle in his eyes. He was referring to the occasional wayward pea that slipped from its pod onto the floor. He was pea-ing, not peeing, and I thought it was a terribly funny thing to say, but Julia, who usually gave such comments her great hoot of a laugh, merely smiled, and I realized it was probably a quip they had shared many times while shelling peas. I also realized that we needed those peas that were scattering hither and yon, and I crawled around on my hands and knees to capture them as they rolled under stools and nested next to cable wires. Such is the lot of an executive chef.
    With the cameras rolling, Julia shelled a few peas, put them in a pan with the ones we had placed there, added pea pods and a healthy handful of finely shredded lettuce, and then something—I don't recall what—went wrong. The director yelled, "Cut," and asked that she start again. Starting again meant using the last of the pea crop. If something went wrong with the next take, we had no backup, and directors and producers don't want to hear that the segment has to be scrapped because someone (me) has run out of peas. Furthermore, when the director tells the talent to start again, he or she means immediately. Time is money in network television.
    Stagehands rushed our one and only backup to the set and then raced the "used" peas to the prep kitchen, where I tossed them out onto a cookie sheet. As Julia began her second take, we began frantically and painstakingly to pick pea pods and tiny shreds of lettuce out of the peas that she had started to cook in the first take. Again, after making it through the addition of lettuce and pods to the second pan of peas, something went wrong, and we whisked those peas back to the kitchen for lettuce removal. That oh-so-simple spot took five takes, and today I have a Pavlovian reaction to cooking old peas: I add the lettuce and pods to the peas and then immediately pick them out.
    "Hooray! We did it," Julia said, enthusiastically cheering her team for hitting the target in spite of the chaos. It was, of course, what she expected her team to do, and no more than she herself always did. What felt so good about her response to overcoming what could have been a failure was the way she acknowledged that it was a team effort. Other than having us jump on the field in a large pig pile, she couldn't have done more than exclaim, "We did it!"
    No segment we did for Good Morning America gave us more trouble or more satisfaction than the one on the complex making of a Tarte Tatin. The famous upside-down apple dessert, known classically as tarte des demoiselles Tatin in honor of its creators, the spinster Tatin sisters, is a lovely dessert with a good story. Supposedly, the two Loire River restaurateurs forgot to put the pastry in the bottom of the pan before layering the apples in it, so