There might be more kitchens in Max’s series “Julia” than in every Nancy Meyers movie put together. The list starts with the kitchen at Julia Child’s home in Cambridge, Mass. — so iconic it’s preserved at the Smithsonian. Then there’s the WGBH set where she films “The French Chef,” her friend Avis DeVoto’s period house, the modest apartment kitchenette of her young producer Alice Naman (Brittany Bradford) — and notably in Season 2, the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris, Simone Beck’s rustic Provence cuisine and finally, the White House’s massive catering facility.
Production designer Patrizia von Brandenstein and culinary consultant Christine Tobin returned for the second season to build out several more sets and showcase dishes including loup en croûte, fried chicken and shrimp ‘n grits — not to mention lobster a l’américaine, which necessitated bringing lobster wranglers on set to monitor their happiness. “They were very well taken care of,” says Tobin, who explains that productions are not allowed to show lobsters being boiled alive onscreen.
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“You know if you follow the logic of the story, in fact, this is a show about kitchens, and about
the comfort and the challenge of them,” says von Brandenstein, an Oscar winner for “Amadeus.”
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Tobin and von Brandenstein detailed how they crafted the extravagant meals and varied kitchens for season 2 of “Julia,” which stars Sarah Lancashire as the pioneering TV chef and David Hyde Pierce as her patient husband Paul Child.
Shooting the White House special
For the episode depicting Julia Child’s White House TV special, which aired in 1968, the production crew searched for a suitable location for the White House kitchen all over Boston, finally finding a spacious area at a downtown event space with enormous stoves and ovens. The more formal White House rooms were shot at a “gracefully proportioned” Boston-area hotel. But there was just one problem with the event space, von Brandenstein remembers: “It had all the things that we would want, except it was tiled in a bright pink. So, after agonizing a bit, because it had to be done within a day, we changed the color. We used a stretch vinyl and used hairdryers to apply it,” she says.
Once the kitchen was credibly tiled in white, it was fitted out to look like it could serve hundreds of diplomats. “We used professional grade, very high-quality cooking utensils, and made them visible with racks that were hung from the ceiling or on the walls,” says von Brandenstein.
After that, it was time to dress the set with food. “Then came this great bounty of vegetables and food of all kinds because they are preparing food for sometimes hundreds and sometimes thousands of people. Every surface was stacked high with great looking vegetables, the freshest we could find,” von Brandenstein says.
For Tobin, it was the culmination of years of food styling for film and TV. “Every job, everything I’ve ever done has led me to this point at the White House because of the amount of planning to execute such a scene, to fill out that sort of space,” she says. “We worked really closely with the historical footage so it is as close to accuracy as humanly possible.”
From Jello molds to an elaborate puff pastry seafood dish, everything was inspired by Child’s actual trip to the White House.
“That was a scene that took a blueprint to plan out,” Tobin says, “giving each background actor a task that would make sense to the recipe.”
But the fussy Continental dishes made by White House chef Henry Haller weren’t the sole focus of the episode named “Shrimp & Grits.” It also spotlights Zephyr Wright — President Johnson and his wife Lady Bird’s personal chef — who cooked her specialties like fried chicken and peach cobbler for the couple.
“To tell Julia Child’s story is really wonderful, but also telling Zephyr’s story is just as important,” says Tobin. After Julia’s crew films the stuffy state dinner, Wright crafts a dish of shrimp ‘n grits for the hungry Child and her team, folding in some insights about the Civil Rights Movement along the way. Tobin based the shrimp ‘n grits on a recipe from Wright’s native Texas, guessing that Wright might have liked to cook the homey dish for the president and his wife.
Tobin made sure the crew got the chance to taste some of the props, like a typical 1960s cake that people got to take home. “Everything else that we see throughout the series is always enjoyed. Sometimes within seconds of wrapping the scene, the arms start coming in camera,” Tobin says with a laugh.
Simca’s House in Provence
Simone Beck, nicknamed Simca, is Julia’s French partner in cookbook writing. Played by Isabella Rossellini, she’s fiercely devoted to Julia but in Season 2, she’s also highly skeptical of her friend’s growing television fame. Julia and Paul Child built a house on the grounds of Beck’s real-life house, La Pichoune, in the village of Placassier north of Cannes.
For the show, an estate overlooking the sea in nearby Cap d’Antibes stood in for La Pichoune, though the property’s real kitchen was too modern to look like Simca’s. Some scenes were shot in the South of France, but the French tax credits were expiring and the weather was unforgivably hot, so the interior of Simca’s kitchen was also recreated on a stage in Boston. And it wasn’t just a few dishes that were needed: for the “Fried Chicken” episode, Julia Child and Simca try to one-up each other with their menus, while food writer James Beard jumps into the fray with fried chicken.
“In the feast at Simca’s house, I still had to come up with each person making 20 dishes,” says Tobin.
Von Brandenstein says her department brought back lanterns, textiles, beautiful plates and Le Creuset pots — a bit of product placement that added color to the scenes. “Because they’re enamelware over iron, it comes in wonderful colors, the greens and so forth,” she says.
“Simca’s real kitchen was a country French cook’s kitchen, and we use it as a guide. But we added a lot of charm and made it less utilitarian, with a great deal of warmth in coloration,” says von Brandenstein.
Getting the Cote d’Azur light right was also key, von Brandenstein says. “Cap d’Antibes has light like nowhere else. The whole Mediterranean is reflected, and so everything glows. We did our best to recreate that light,” she says, crediting the cinematographers with pulling out every trick to achieve the South of France’s golden glow.