Free The United States of Arugula by David Kamp Page B

rolled into St. Vinnemer, Franey, still unrecognized beneath his U.S.-issue helmet, saw a throng of cheering villagers gathered in the town center, one of whom, waving a homemade American flag, was his mother.
    As more and more Americans voyaged to France in the postwar era, abetted by the dollar’s strength against the weak franc and the advent of jet travel, they came to understand France as the home not only of swank Parisians eating Escoffier food but of bistros and auberges that served
la cuisine de bonne femme
, the cookery of women, of comfort, of the home: potatoleek soup, pot-au-feu, omelets. “The magic that France had at the time was felt by so many of us,” says Chuck Williams, a Florida native, who, after completing his wartime duty in the air force, built himself a house in the undiscovered hinterlands of Sonoma County, California. “It was roaming on the side streets of Paris and eating in the small mom-and-pop restaurants where you might be sitting next to a charming dog or cat,” he says. “It was the haunting music and songs sung by Edith Piaf that I heard everywhere. It was the wonderful pastry and chocolate shops in every block, the butcher shops, the crepe and waffle stands, the standup bars where you stopped for an espresso, a café au lait, or a cognac.”
    So taken was Williams with Parisian culture that he eventually put aside his career as a building contractor and, in 1956, opened a kitchenwares store that he called Williams-Sonoma. “I wanted to capture the magic of Paris in my shop, and I think I achieved it by making it completely French,” he says. “Imagine a wall of every mold and baking tin in every size, a display of all the French tools, wooden spoons, knives, and spatulas. Another wall of heavy copper and aluminum pots and pans. A display of fish poachers and couscous cookers in every size. Even the roll-down awning for the front of the shop was the French flag.”
    Judith Jones, later Julia Child’s editor at Knopf, was another youngAmerican who chose to live the Parisian expat life after the war. “It was all so heady,” she says. “Cooking at home had all been sort of boring and traditional and English. You weren’t supposed to say, ‘Mmm, wasn’t that yummy?’ It was like sex—you just didn’t talk about such a thing. We had a maid who cooked, and my mother was always closing the kitchen door, ‘cause she didn’t want the smells to come out. We weren’t allowed to have onions in the house. And garlic! That was really beyond the pale. So you can imagine how excited I was by France. I loved the way people shopped, the care they took. It was right after the war, and people would stand in line at the charcuterie, with their toes sticking out of worn-out carpet slippers, and spend four times what I spent. They’d spend their last penny for something good.”
    THOUGH JIM BEARD had been steadily making a name for himself as cookery’s Mr. U.S. of A. when the war broke out, and though 1944 saw the publication of his latest volume of culinary Americana,
Fowl and Game Cookery
, he, too, was caught up in the era’s Francophilia. Beard had been to France in the 1920s, when, having been sent by his mother to London to study with a renowned voice coach, he was unable to resist an extended side trip to the spiritual home of gastronomy. Even on his student budget, Beard ate well at the sorts of homey Paris bistros that A. J. Liebling would later romanticize in his backward-looking
New Yorker
pieces of the fifties: places where “the food was good bourgeois fare and exceedingly cheap,” Beard remembered. “We ate good
pot-au-feu
, calf’s feet
poulette, blanquettes
and
boeuf à la bourguignonne
, with an occasional roast chicken or bit of game.” An intrepid market-goer, Beard became a regular at Paris’s enormous central market, Les Halles, which made his beloved Yamhill Market in Portland look like a roadside farm stand. To cap off these wonderments, Beard found himself,