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Picture me at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris last year, poised to write a story about Julia Child and her culinary raison d’être. I had the angle, the setting, the intention. What I didn’t have was Julia.
She kept getting sidelined.
Instead, people stepped in, one by one, and refused to move out of the frame.
First came Pooja Dhingra, a 23-year-old student with bright ambition and a clear plan: to return to India and build a French-style pâtisserie. She was charming, sharp, and already living several years ahead of herself.
Then Patrick Caals, chef extraordinaire, fresh from being selected to cook for the Nobel Prize Banquet in Stockholm—an extraordinary feat considering the committee’s longstanding preference for Swedish-speaking chefs residing in Sweden.
And finally Patrik Högberg, General Manager of Stockholm City Hall, organizing the Nobel Prize Banquet for the first time in his career.
I lost myself in their stories. Julia faded politely into the background.
Fast forward to summer. I was tasked with writing a travelogue and found myself torn between two pilgrimages: a day trip to Julia Child’s house in Cambridge—or a journey to Stephen King’s house in Bangor, Maine.
"Do you think Stephen King would let you into his house?" asked Erik Karlsson, chewing on his favorite turkey sandwich at a café in Harvard Square.
Why wouldn’t he? I wondered.
I’ve read at least a thousand King novels, paid for maybe 10. The rest I borrowed, devoured, returned dog-eared. I cried watching "TheBody/Stand By Me". "The Shining" terrified me. "It" gifted me a lifelong suspicion of clowns. In all fairness, not only should His Majesty let me into his castle, he should invite me to live there permanently.
Still, Julia won.
The project became "Wherefore Art Thou, Julia?" The logistics were easy. Karlsson knew the new tenants. And experience had taught me that Julia Child projects tend to end with dessert.
I was right. Sort of.
Professor Michael Klarman emailed to welcome me for a tour de la maison. After a phone call, I was officially invited for dessert—an invitation I enthusiastically accepted after discovering, through some light Sherlock-style Googling, that he had once participated in A Special Dessert Reception. Clearly, I thought, a man with a sweet tooth.
"I may have eaten some of the cake," Klarman later clarified, "but I did not provide it. Still, I’ll happily get some if you’ll commit to eating it."
Fair enough.
The Julia Child house, once home to philosopher Josiah Royce,stands at 103 Irving Street. Grey, three stories tall, its front door turned shyly away from the street. Inside, it’s beautiful, thanks largely to Klarman’s wife, Lisa Landsverk, an art historian with a global eye. Their walls tell stories from every continent. The campaign button board in the study came from Klarman’s brother, Seth.
They have four children—two grown, two still at home. One teenage daughter was busy being everywhere at once. The teenage son was doing what teenage sons do best on Sunday afternoons: sleeping. Later, he had a date with his dad to see Inception.
There’s also a dog, and several rescued cats living in the basement. Landsverk, a devoted animal rights activist and lover of Victorian novels and Jane Austen adaptations, grew up feeding stray dogs with her mother during road trips through Mexico—buying barrels of food along the way.
Next door, at 99 Irving Street, lives Timothy B. Brown, Harvard’s International Fund-Raising Director. He grew up there too—and remembers impromptu dinners at Julia’s, baguettes passed over the hedge like neighborhood currency.
When the Childs were in France one summer, ten-year-old Brown was hired by Paul Child to tend the garden. He was told to keep a logbook and set his own wage. He chose 25 cents a day until he damaged the garden. Mortified, he crossed out every entry and rewrote them as 15 cents instead. That summer’s entrepreneurship earned him ten dollars.
A five-minute walk away is Savenor’s Market, where Julia once shopped. Outside, the pavement reads Bon Appétit—JC engraved beneath it.
The store is now run by Ron “Ronnie” Savenor, a semi-retired road racer with restless energy and an incurable optimism. "I only do things I’m passionate about," he told me. “People confuse passion with craziness. They only really understand it when it’s about sex.”
I understood him perfectly.
Savenor grew up around Julia. She was a close family friend. His market appeared on her TV show. He remembers Paul and Julia as a great love story and describes his own marriage the same way. He met his wife on a blind date arranged by his late father. She’s British. Her accent still lives on his voicemail greeting, which he proudly played for me.
I was more fascinated that it was still there after all these years.
In the end, it was an inspiring project to meet so many remarkable people through a journey centered on someone who no longer lives there.
Julia may have been absent.
But somehow, she was everywhere.
