Pearls In The Kitchen

An Essay on Substance & Style

Onscreen, the table is set. A white saucer sits on a tablecloth printed with oysters and olive martinis. In the center of the frame, a brown egg waits in a silver cup. Manicured fingers appear. They wield a small spoon shaped like a seashell. It taps the egg once, then bites. A pearl jumps to the plate at the strike; another. The egg is full of them—large and small, glowingly pooled in the white curb of its belly. The spoon digs and scoops out a seashell locket trailing a golden chain. Under the footage, a few lines of text reveal that the tablecloth is, in fact, a silk scarf. Some lockets are still available for purchase. 

I wish I didn’t know that this is an Easter-themed Instagram reel. The content creator who posted it stages worlds that appeal to me: dreamscapes of New York where she rushes around on chic errands that involve books, flowers, dogs, coffee, and cocktails; Nora Ephron movie meets Vogue editorial, spiked with midcentury glamour. Cinematic and referential, the images are beautiful. As much as I scroll through them, though, as much as I linger on a frame, carefully read a caption, or watch a reel replay, I am dissatisfied. Why? Why does it feel like this content works up style just shy of substance? And what exactly is the relationship between these two categories in the first place?

The fact that the Easter reel is an ad, meant to be consumed and drive consumption, contributes to my sense of dissatisfaction, but consumerism itself does not, surely, hollow out the artistry that’s clearly there. The reel does its job. It hooks you with the suspense of the spoon striking the shell, the shock of the pearls, the unexpected twist on traditional imagery of rebirth. The seashell locket and spoon rhyme visually with the eggshell. I considered getting that scarf.

There’s more. I’ve neglected to mention the caption, which reads: “No one tells you how much of adulthood is bribing yourself with a little treat in order to stave off psychosis.” Perhaps it’s meant to reassure an audience that might be weirded out by the footage alone. I cannot help but think, though, that the video, which otherwise works like a riddle, deflates its own cleverness with text reminiscent of platitudes printed on mass-produced coffee mugs. Maybe I expect too much from a promotional clip. Still, something about it raises my expectations. It makes me want something substantive, something to sink my teeth into. I know I can go look for it elsewhere but some part of it is already here. I don’t want to eat the pearls. Why do I want them to be edible?

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At age sixteen, my grandmother gave me her copy of Julia Child and Alex Prudhomme’s My Life in France. I’ve had cravings for food memoirs ever since. They tend to emerge in mid-April when spring drags its feet, or whenever I’m in a rut. The memoirs I like best deal in dining as much as in cooking. They blend narrative interest into the sensory experience of food. Like scent, like music, it wafts beyond the page and into the world around me—the one I sit and read and write in—even as the prose sets stages in my mind and plays out scenes of midcentury Paris. Such memoirs feel softly lit.

One could, of course, make the food in the books; they come with recipes. You could have Julia Child’s bœuf bourguignon simmering on your stove. The food memoir instructs. It inspires. It reminds us, simply, to pay attention. We’re in territory at the intersection of universal, deep-rooted appeal, and artistry. Substance, style. 

Rereading My Life in France, I realized I’d remembered the book as more idyllic than it is. In some ways, the idyll is there: the vacation home the Childs built in Provence, picnics by fields of mimosas, balcony views of the Mediterranean, and so on. But it also dwells on anxieties: McCarthyism, the uncertainty of working for the Foreign Office, health issues, the aftermath of war, the headache of relocating, etc. Part of the book’s pleasure comes from its feeling of a prequel. I know Julia will be a success. I know her cookbook will become a bestseller, that her TV show will take off, that all the worry and discomfort will unfold into a cozy scene in her Cambridge home (set, incidentally, blocks away from where I’m writing). There is a sense of order, resolution.

But the main reason I find this memoir so compelling is the same reason why it’s given me a taste for the genre: the book is about appetite. It dwells on Julia’s research and writing at least as much as it does on food. It’s about the hunger that drew her to learn French cooking with a discipline that verged on devotion, to dedicate months to perfecting homemade mayonnaise, to learn and untangle the French, English, and American names of various fish from Marseille. It helps that Julia is a lovable character. Her charisma brings readers along (as it later did viewers) to delight in subjects that might otherwise seem fussy, convoluted, or hopelessly niche. The appetite in the book is contagious. This is the heart of its draw, but not the whole of it. 

In the 2009 film adaptation of the food-blog-turned-book Julie & Julia, the protagonist (Amy Adams) wears a pearl necklace in homage to Julia Child as she works her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking. “She’s so adorable,” Adams says, watching an old episode of The French Chef. “Pearls. The woman is wearing pearls in the kitchen” (15:50). Just as they appear physically on the TV show, the pearls appear symbolically strewn throughout My Life in France. For the most part, Julia’s relationship to class stays in memoir’s thematic background, but it shoots to the fore every once in a while, such as when she notes that she was the only one among her friends who chose to shop for groceries herself because it was fun (68 Kindle), or when she discloses how scandalized she first was at the thought of becoming a public figure: “Back when Mastering was first published, I was of the opinion that ‘good breeding’ meant never having one’s name in print” (338 Kindle).

Highlighting the pearls, as Julie does, tugs at an undercurrent in My Life in France. Boisterous charisma notwithstanding, Julia Child is ladylike, cosmopolitan. The glamour of working for the OSS (precursor to the CIA) in Asia and marrying a “painter, photographer, poet, and mid-level diplomat” (28 Kindle), who whisked her off to Paris, clings to her story. Julie & Julia may exaggerate the romance of the Childs’ years in France (their apartment on Rue de l’Université—aka “Rue de Loo”—was stuffily furnished and freezing, despite its Haussmann façade), but the film pulls real threads from this semi-charmed life: bohemian late-night arguments with artists in cafés, rambling drives through the French countryside, the fairytale resolution of success and celebrity. The thread that runs through the rope of pearls entwines class with femininity, and it comes with baggage. 

Onscreen, the manicured hand pours milk into a silver-ridged bowl. Its luminous off-white blends with the pearls, which cluster gorgeously up the side of the dish. The hand picks up a spoon, heaps them on, and shakes to drop a few—which splatter, scattering sparkling droplets on the marble countertop. The caption in this second reel reads, “My mother always says there are two types of people in the world: avoid them both.” These words suggest that the reel is about eating alone. Covered in milk, the pearls become cereal, a quick breakfast, a lazy dinner. The caption frames the otherworldly food as what the character “really” eats when no one is watching. This raises two possibilities: either we are entering a world of magical realism where diners’ acid saliva can break down pearls for their calcium, or someone is about to choke.

It reminds me of a scene from the 2021 film Spencer. Late to a formal dinner, Princess Diana (Kristen Stewart) takes her seat under the Queen’s unsmiling gaze. There is no dialogue. We watch Diana squirm to an unnerving violin score. She hallucinates, for a moment, Anne Boleyn at the head of the table, adorned in ropes and trims of pearl. Anne lowers her soup spoon, staring at Diana. Her breath is visibly jagged. The heroine fingers her own oversized necklace. Unable to undo the clasp, Diana breaks it. The pearls land in the soup. She scoops them up along with creamy green liquid and swallows and swallows (31:15—34:58). 

The symbolism is not subtle. To link the necklace to an infamously beheaded queen also links the pearls to a deathblow. The choker becomes a literalization of how suffocating tradition, class, and femininity can be when they weigh around your neck. To complicate matters, Diana swallows the pearls. Directly after this scene, as elsewhere in the film, she runs to the bathroom and purges (35:20). We might read the act of ingestion, then, as bingeing on the trappings of oppression—a disquieting combination of a frantic impulse with the sensation of something shoved down your throat. In the aftermath of this dinner, as Diana stumbles towards the bathroom, the pearls reappear around her neck. 

Food-that-is-not unsettles. It severs pleasure from eating and renders the action grotesque. The reels partake in this visual language, even as their effect is playful and abstracted. Imagery of non-food distorts our expectations of substance. It makes meals out of the wrong substance or strips substance altogether. 

Hannah Louise Poston’s “Julia Hungry” describes a meal so delicate it’s hardly there. In the poem, the character (who I will call Julia for simplicity’s sake) pairs her “bloodless beets” no smaller than “a tea fork’s tine” with “pellucid / silver wine.” Her “slick glass noodles” slip down the throat, “without the use of teeth.” There’s nothing to chew on. In Julia’s mouth, the “uncooked fish / in lemon sauce…melted clear away.” On the plate, the meal is “completely imperceptible / against the platter’s ghostly porcelain.” Glass. Porcelain. Silver. Food fades into the dinnerware. I read this meal as an inversely proportional configuration of substance and style; one category necessarily feeds off the other. By making food its insubstantial subject, the poem critiques and plays with its stylized form: gleaming imagery, alliteration, chiming rhymes.

Pearls in the reels and in the biopic assert themselves in a way that Julia’s meal does not, but like the slick glass noodles, they must be swallowed whole. The reels themselves resist chewing. They resent my lingering. They want to slide along my screen like pills down my throat. Within seconds, their music clips become a broken record. The looping visuals start to yawn at me, a tired hostess. I’ve overstayed; I’ve barely arrived. The clip has done something arresting and refused to say more—a witty provocation with no follow-up. It is precisely the dissatisfaction from this “fancy meal” that prompted me to forage through its intertext. In wanting more, I wanted it to resolve or at least unfold, to say something about its own figurative weight. The reels don’t deal with their dissonance. They produce dissatisfaction without incorporating it into their content. 

“Julia Hungry” explores the opposite possibility. It hollows out substance for the sake of style, aestheticizing dissatisfaction, but this kind of dissatisfaction prompts creation. Description and reconstruction run through the text as its parallel actions. Julia “reconstructs her ruptured orange peel/ while telling [us] about the fancy meal,” (emphasis added). On the page, the entire dinner description appears between parentheses (which mimic the ruptured peel), a formal link that aligns the written form with the inedible rind. The insubstantial dishes with the absent orange: “Pressed between her palms, / the bitter peel is seamless as shellac. / It’s empty and the orange won’t come back.” Granted, the simile creates distance; the citrus skin is only like resin (shellac), but the way the rest of the food in the poem vanishes into its surroundings suggests a kind of magic at play. The orange “won’t come back.” It has vanished, not into nothingness, but into its very receptacle. To make our reading pessimistic, we could take this act of telling, of describing, of coating in resin, to represent food writing. Ironically, (and reveling in this irony) though the poem is itself a kind of food writing, its vanishing meal gives us plenty to chew on. This doesn’t mean the experience is pleasant. As tempted as I am to pull out the magical realism lens and make this act of retelling more positive, to render the vanishing food sublimely surreal, the poem resists. Its only flavor word is “bitter,” and Julia, it says, “swallowed nothing.” 

The poem may not offer an explicit motivation for the reconstruction of the meal, but the title frames the text in the idea of hunger. It also, I cannot help but think, must be a reference to Julia Child, whose liberal use of butter alone stands in direct opposition to Julia Hungry’s asceticism. This allusion builds a foil into the intertext. A spectral sole meunière now hovers over the fish in lemon sauce. The title’s function and effects are more varied and complicated than I can account for here, since it’s also the title of Poston’s poetry collection, but what I do want to note is that the allusion contributes to and complicates the issue of substance and style.

The intertext between poem, memoir, movies and reels charts a network of pleasures and hungers, cravings, lacks and lacquers. Shells make ready metaphors for overinvestment in surfaces. A hollow egg or resin-coated orange telegraphs “hunger,” a willful, stylized hunger, the emptiness of that which has been carved out. Pearls on a plate offer a loaded choking hazard of a meal. 

Where it appears in My Life in France, hunger figures quite differently: “[A friend’s] war story made me think about the French and their deep hunger—something that seemed to lurk beneath their love of food as an art form and their love of cooking as a ‘sport.’ I wondered if the nation’s gastronomical lust had its roots not in the sunshine of art but in the deep, dark deprivations France had suffered over the centuries” (81). This is a hunger of compounded absences, not one of hollowness. Julia’s speculation suggests that the literal, historical hunger she talks about also contained hunger for beauty, pleasure, and play; a metaphorical hunger that drove cooking into the forms of “art” and “sport”; deprivation that prompted a relationship to food so sensual, she characterizes it as “lust.”

The intertext between the two Julias shows a range of configurations for substance and style, all of which relate differently to hunger. In its more positive forms, food writing can allow and invite us to savor, linger, remember, and reproduce experiences. It can tend to hungers (aesthetic ones included) rather than generate or exacerbate them. Its desired effect in such cases dovetails with that of the food: pleasure, satisfaction. This, I think, is what animates the sort of food writing that creates appetite. It draws you to the text, which then draws out your hunger. 

In many ways, My Life in France is a book about writing. More than narrate the origins of her famous cookbook, the memoir shows what a vital role the project played in Julia’s life, how it engaged her passion and diligence for years. Mastering the Art of French Cooking also structures the story. It drives the action and generates suspense: Will it be finished? Will it be published? A flurry of correspondence scaffolds the constant testing of recipes. Onionskin pages labelled TOP SECRET fly back and forth across the Atlantic. A typewriter always clacks behind the chopping, frying, and simmering sounds from the kitchen.

Julia Child was as serious and as idiosyncratic about her writing as she was about her cooking. When it came to Mastering, she aimed to write “in an informal and humane tone that would make cooking approachable and fun. But the book would also be a serious, well-researched reference work” (218). At the publication stage, this ideology became a hindrance. “Our competitors were producing gimmicky cookbooks…and our more serious approach was considered too much of a risk” (291). Julia’s investment in seriousness is clear throughout the book. The first class she took at Cordon Bleu proved too basic to hold her interest, but after a single demonstration where “professional chefs taught traditional French cooking to serious students from all over the world, [she] was hooked.” (68) It surprised me, then, to stumble on passages where Julia conveys the fear that she lacks seriousness.

I had been trying to read Serious News Articles— a Harper’s essay about post-war England, a Fortune article about free trade—and to remember their facts and lines of argument in order to discuss them intelligently at dinner parties. But it was a struggle. My sievelike mind didn’t want to lock away dates and details; it wanted to float and meander. If I mixed all those facts and theses up with a little gelatin and egg white, I wondered, would they stick together better? (139)

Of course, no one can be serious all the time, nor about everything. But the full appeal of this book—and of Julia herself—is in the ease with which they allow food and research, writing and cooking, pleasure and appetite to settle into their weight. 

It may seem reductive for Julie to put on a pearl necklace in emulation of Julia Child, symptomatic of the attitude that earned Julia’s disapproval (we learn in the movie that she considered the blog project a gimmick). Julia’s voice is lighthearted and the food she teaches us to make may be ephemeral, but it is, emphatically, not frivolous. It may seem like Julie is aiming to caricature her hero rather than engage with her in depth, like it’s not enough to wear pearls in the kitchen. But the gesture picks up on the contrasts that innervate Julia Child’s story: its serious but playful, central but implicit treatment of substance and style.

Though there isn’t a single mention of pearls in My Life in France, the book cannot escape associations with traditional femininity or its taint of (relative) lack of substance. To follow this thread is to find a series of apparent contradictions. Cooking, like fashion, has provisions for seriousness in its highest form, especially when French. Julia operates within this loophole—and doesn’t. Though the country’s cultural cache makes “French cooking” sound elevated, what Julia researched and taught was not haute cuisine, but la cuisine bourgeois. Moreover, her book sits on the shelves of all kinds of households. For decades, her voice floated across America’s living rooms. Julia wrote for a broad audience. She was both professional chef and home cook; a public figure and a domestic one. 

Pearls don’t belong in the kitchen. This is what makes the conceit interesting. It’s what made Julia’s use of them remarkable to Julie. Both elements are nostalgic, but kitchens evoke warmth, family, and the familiar. Pearls, the cool glamour of an old world, a particular kind of sophistication. The stereotype of a mid-to-early 20^th century housewife who sought to straddle traditional femininity and the demands of a newly staffless kitchen by wearing pearls in this space may seem to us no more than quaint, but it makes quite a statement. It joins labor and luxury, tradition and modernity.

Though the image is pregnant with contradiction, the contrast between style and substance itself is illusory, a knot I can’t untie because it’s made not of discrete strands, but of a densely compressed spectrum of ways to pair the two—an irritant fit to drift into an oyster's shell, asking to be coated it in layers of nacre, to become smooth, tolerable, beautiful. As pearls make their way from one’s neck to one’s soup bowl, to want them to be edible is to want the dissonance to resolve in a way that is not just substantive, but also pleasurable.

In my head, I sit at the table set with silk scarfs. I pick up a spoon, scoop. The pearls click and clatter. They settle. I ease them into my mouth. Their luminous off-white melts on my tongue, a clever glaze. Between my molars, one gives with a familiar snap. I taste dark chocolate.

Bibliography

Child, Julia, and Alex Prud’homme. My Life in France. Kindle Edition. Anchor, 2006.

Child, Julia, and Alex Prud’homme. My Life in France. Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 2006.

Julie & Julia. Nora Ephron, Sony Pictures Releasing, 2009.

Spencer. Pablo Larraín, Neon Studios and Topic Studios, 2020.

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About the Author

Sofía is a writer and English PhD candidate at Harvard University. While her academic work focuses on dress and the supernatural in medieval literature, her interest in the sartorial, the strange, and the glamorous ranges more broadly. She is originally from Mexico City.