Laura Shapiro (7 page)

F
RENCH COOKING
for American cooks? It had to be an oxymoron. How could these two incompatible beasts ever be yoked together? But Julia knew it was possible, because it had happened to her. Now she envisioned a culinary America where it happened to everyone: where ordinary home cooks made perfect creamy omelets, kept a useful supply of mirepoix on hand, boned the duck themselves, and always served a welcoming little first course when friends came to dinner. Alas, most Americans would never encounter the Cordon Bleu. The homemaker who wanted to cook something French had nothing to help her but recipes; and how miserably they could fail a hopeful cook, Julia knew well. She had spent years floundering in the awkward gap between the cookbook and the cook, until good teaching set her free. The book she would deliver to Houghton Mifflin must be just that teacher. There was no precedent for such a thing: a guide to authentic French cooking that sat on the kitchen counter calmly issuing instructions and advice in English on what to do, and what problems to expect, and how to fix them. Over the next seven years, as she worked on the manuscript, she circled round and round the core message she wanted to convey, phrasing it this way and that in an effort to pin down a heretical idea that kept prodding at her. What she wanted to tell everyone was this: French food is uniquely French, but a sure and precise route to it can be mapped in any language.

Julia's approach to the cookbook project was simple and vast: she would look at every dish in the traditional home repertoire from every perspective she could think of, testing and revising until she came up with a recipe that was absolutely foolproof and irreproachably true to its origins. When Avis asked her once why the book was taking so long, Julia described a typical day's work, in this instance a day devoted to cabbage soups. She had climbed upstairs to the kitchen with an armful of recipes: Simca's cabbage soup, numerous other cabbage soups that Julia had gathered from authoritative French cookbooks, and several regional variations. After studying all of them, she decided to try three, following two of them exactly as written and adapting the third for a pressure cooker. Obviously pressure cookers were not traditional, and Julia disliked them on aesthetic grounds (“Stinking, nasty bloody pressure cookers, I hate them!”), but if they could be made to produce good soups, she wanted to know about it. This particular experiment was a flop; the soup had an overprocessed flavor she had come to associate with pressure cookers. Nonetheless, she would keep trying: “Maybe I don't use it right, but I
will
persist with an open if distasteful mind.” The conventionally made soups were better, but she was still a long way from having a usable recipe. “I feel 1) there has got to be a good stock of veg. and ham before the cabbage is put in, and that that is one of the ‘secrets' 2) that the cabbage must not be cooked too long.” Maybe the cabbage would behave better if it were blanched first. Or maybe a different variety of cabbage would be an improvement. “So, all these questions of how and why and what's the point of it, have to be ironed out,” she concluded. “Otherwise, you get just an ordinary recipe, and that's not the point of the book.”

One of the reference books she kept close at hand was
La Bonne Cuisine de Madame E. Saint-Ange,
first published in 1927 and a bible in millions of French households. Julia often said it was her favorite French cookbook, and she would have been very pleased to see the English translation that finally appeared in 2005. Little is known about Madame Saint-Ange, except that her remarkable expertise ranged from restaurant haute cuisine to economical family cookery; but whenever Julia opened this volume, she found a mission and a sensibility exactly like her own. The recipes didn't just parade through the book: Madame Saint-Ange was teaching fundamental techniques as well as some thirteen hundred specific dishes, and she made constant reference to the history of French culinary practice and style as she moved from soups to meats to vegetables to desserts with the wisdom of a professional. Yet she could look at any given recipe as if she were an everyday home cook with a penchant for disaster. Her discussion of scrambled eggs started with a detailed scrutiny of the proper pan, then considered several methods of beating the eggs and compared the merits of a whisk versus a wooden spoon, then specified the exact shape of the wooden spoon if that was the utensil chosen, and finally proceeded carefully through the cooking, with instructions on how to avoid crises and how to undertake rescues as necessary. She did all this in a voice so calm and cheerful that whatever she was describing sounded perfectly within the reach of any attentive cook. Julia's precise debt to Madame Saint-Ange is hard to quantify—the Frenchwoman's recipes stand behind Julia's along with many other sources of inspiration—but if Madame Saint-Ange had lived long enough to translate, modernize, and fully Americanize her great work, she might well have come up with
Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

As soon as Julia started to focus on the manuscript in her sharply analytical fashion, she ran into a problem that would keep her in a simmering rage for years. In culinary France, women like Julia—ambitious, intellectual, and irreverent—were not supposed to exist. Madame Saint-Ange was a rare exception to the rule. Women's place in French cuisine was an honored but quite specific one: it was back home in the provinces, where untutored
mamans
of legendary talent turned out the magnificent meals their sons remembered forever. This was not Julia's view of her role. To make matters worse, she was an American; and everyone in France knew for a fact that Americans were pathetic dullards who subsisted on canned food and floppy bread and had never heard of garlic. Dearly though she loved the French, this curtain of smugness, condescension, and superiority that dropped into place whenever the conversation turned to food drove her wild. “There is just an enormous amount of dogmatism to be gotten through in this country,” she complained to Avis. “Cooking being a major art, there are all sorts of men's gastronomical societies, and books, and great names, and ‘The real ways' of doing things, many of which have become sacred cows.” Julia was painfully aware of how much she still had to learn, and she wasn't about to put one word into print that hadn't been backed up with research and testing. Yet this profound respect for accuracy seemed to count for nothing, compared with the airy certainties of Frenchmen whose culinary wisdom was based in sentiment, not science. “At the party was a dogmatic meatball who considers himself a gourmet but is just a big bag of wind,” she reported indignantly to Avis. “They were talking about Beurre Blanc, and how it was a mystery, and only a few people could do it, and how it could only be made with white shallots from Lorraine over a
wood fire.
Phoo. But that is so damned typical, making a damned mystery out of perfectly simple things just to puff themselves up. I didn't say anything as, being a foreigner, I don't know anything anyway.”

Practical down to her toes, Julia did not believe that mysteries were in any way related to good cooking. The idea that wondrous and ineffable traditions were granted pride of place among French gastronomes, while her own rigorous testing was seen as the pleasant little pastime of an embassy wife, infuriated her. “Discuss—Dogmatism,” she scribbled on the Trois Gourmandes class schedule one day. She wanted the pupils to be aware that whenever they heard a French food lover talking about the “real” bouillabaisse, or the “real” cassoulet, they should be wary: different households made different bouillabaisses, and they were all “real.” To Julia, traditional French cooking was resilient, a living thing that flowed this way and that across time and through one kitchen after another. But if that was the case, if authenticity wandered from this household to that, what held the tradition together? What made French cooking French?

When it became apparent that this was how Julia was thinking about the project, and that work on the cookbook was going to be finicky, tedious, and research-driven, Louisette drifted away. Years later, she would produce cookbooks of her own, but she just didn't think about the kitchen the way Simca and Julia did. From time to time she sent along a few ideas, but her participation was minimal. Julia wasn't surprised. “I think the book is out of her depth,” she told Avis. “She is the charming ‘little woman' with a talent and a taste for cooking, but a most disorganized and ultra feminine mind.” Still, the book had been Louisette's idea in the first place; she was a good friend, and her home life was falling apart. Simca and Julia didn't have the heart to turn their backs on her. Louisette's name remained as coauthor, but she was allotted a smaller percentage of the royalties.

So the working team became Simca and Julia, two loving colleagues who fought their way through every recipe in the book. Fundamentally, they were incompatible—Simca wielded her intuition, Julia her intellect—which made for an exhausting collaboration but did produce a manuscript true to both of them. Avis, who watched them cooking together in Julia's kitchen in Provence one winter, said afterward that Simca was too excitable to win most of their arguments: she was constantly waving knives in the air, clashing pans around, and speaking floods of high-speed French. Julia used similar tactics but kept her wits about her and wore down her opponent by sheer tenacity. Paul thought that the reason they never actually tore each other's hair out was that for all their differences, “both have their eyes on the target rather than on themselves.”

The division of labor was clear from the start: Simca's job was to be French, and Julia's was to be American. Simca had no trouble with this assignment: her recipes and all her experience in the kitchen flowed from the culture in which she grew up. She had French cooking, as Avis put it, “in her blood and bones.” Many of her recipes were original, but they were all outcroppings from the culinary tradition she had inherited and tended with care. To stand back and scrutinize the tradition objectively did not come easily to her: it was like trying to diagram the flavor of apples.

Julia, by contrast, was an American by temperament as well as birth who heartily believed in the scientific approach. To her, French culinary tradition was a frontier, not a religion, and the evidence of things unseen was no evidence at all. Although her favorite cookbook from home was
Joy of Cooking,
Julia had in her more than a touch of Fannie Farmer—the dedicated, charismatic cooking teacher who introduced level measurements in the late nineteenth century because her students wanted to know what “a pinch” of salt was, and how much flour was meant by “a handful.” Like Miss Farmer, who was a leader in the moral and culinary reform movement known as scientific cookery, Julia saw a higher realm waiting for those who mastered the skills of the kitchen; and she shared Miss Farmer's certainty that painstaking methods and precise instructions had the power to transform both the cooking and the cook. To be sure, Julia's vision of a higher realm was one rampant with pleasure, conviviality, and the free play of the senses. This was hardly what the pious founders of scientific cookery had in mind for their students and followers, whose lessons sometimes culminated in an all-white dinner evoking a temple of purity. But Julia believed as they did that good cooking was pragmatic cooking, a matter of forming the right habits and using them daily—a discipline, not a burst of inspiration. One day she took a piece of notepaper and wrote “A good cook” at the top of it. Then she jotted down a definition: “is consistently good—not just a little flair here & there—She can turn out a good meal either simple or complicated, can adapt herself to conditions, and has enough exp. to change a failure into a success. If the fish doesn't moose [mousse]—it becomes a soup. Matter of practice & passion.” Practice and passion: Julia put them together and kept them there in all her teaching and writing, twin imperatives that were useless when separated.

During the years that she and Simca were working on the book, they rarely inhabited the same kitchen. Paul was posted to Marseille in 1954, then to Bonn, then back home to Washington, and finally to Oslo before retiring in 1961. Although the two women were able to visit each other occasionally for marathon cooking sessions, most of their discussions and fights were carried on by letter. Recipes, notes, suggestions, additions, revisions, and corrections flew back and forth, sometimes in quantities that would have merited a doctoral degree in any other discipline. When Julia launched an assault on cassoulet—a rich and hefty assortment of beans, meats, and sausages that could take up to three days to prepare—she first rounded up twenty-eight recipes, all authentic from reputable sources, many of them contradictory. She and Simca winnowed them down, combining and refining and rewriting until they reached a single, triumphant version, all the while carrying on a blazing argument about preserved goose. Few American households were likely to have access to preserved goose, but Simca insisted it was essential: without it, they couldn't call the dish cassoulet. Mutton stew, perhaps. But not cassoulet. Julia pounded her with source after source that omitted preserved goose. At length Julia won, though the two families ate many more cassoulets than anyone wished before a truce was declared.

Other recipes were simpler, but everything required numerous tweaks and tinkerings before both women were satisfied. Working on spinach, Julia picked up an idea from a book and dashed off a note in the scramble of French and English with which she always wrote to Simca. “Suggestion which comes from A. Suzanne, a contemporary of Escoffier, which is to put une pointe d'ail in les epinards, especially ‘au jus,' and even à la crème. So small it is hardly noticeable, it does a certain amount of relevement which is very agreeable. Please try.” Every nuance counted; every minor shift in method had to be recorded. “I want every detail from you that you can think of,” Julia begged. “Whether or not I use the detail is of no matter, I want it anyway. People must say of this book, A MARVELOUS BOOK. I've never been able to make cake before, but now I can.”