Laura Shapiro by Julia Child

impersonal stores left her free to select exactly the mushrooms she wanted, the very bunch of parsley that looked best to her. “It is so heavenly to go to the asparagus counter and pick out each individual spear yourself, or each single string bean,” she exclaimed to Simca. “The asparagus is perfectly delicious! This is the season where they come by rapid transit from California, and are great fat green spears, sweet, tender and perfect.” Back in France she had been sure that if produce had to be shipped cross-country, there was no hope for flavor, but now she was eating fine springtime asparagus and doing so with delight.
    At the same time, however, disappointments were piling up. Her quest for decent American chicken—whole or in parts, fresh or frozen, supermarket or butcher shop—went on for years. Butter, the most beloved ingredient in her kitchen, was tasteless compared with its French counterpart; and thick, matured cream with the nutty flavor of French cream was nowhere to be found. Shallots were expensive and rarely available; nobody would be able to buy a calf’s foot or a pig’s caul; the veal was inferior to French, and the only fresh herb in sight was parsley. What’s more, Americans had the irritating habit of not drinking wine. That was regrettable in itself, but if they didn’t drink wine regularly, they weren’t going to have it on hand for cooking, and wine was essential for flavor. Conceivably they might buy a bottle of inexpensive California red just for cooking, but the inexpensive California whites were dreadful, in Julia’s estimation. Avis wondered whether vermouth might be a substitute, since people tended to have it around for cocktails. Julia rejected the idea at first, because the “strong and herbal taste” would throw off the flavor of sauces. But after living in Washington for a while, she relented. “People just do not have bottles of white wine all the time to use in cooking,” she explained to Simca. “If they bought one for a bit of cooking, they wouldn’t know what to do with the rest of it. Therefore I think we must always specify the choice of White Vermouth, as everybody has that; and it will keep after having been opened.” She experimented with proportions and found that if she used vermouth more sparingly than wine in delicate sauces, the flavor was satisfactory.
    Clearly, there could be nothing rigid or pristine about the concept of ingredients in this book. That didn’t bother Julia at all. On the contrary, she thought it was in the very nature of ingredients to be pliable, to serve the cook no matter where the cook was heading. She had always hated that brand of wisdom about bouillabaisse that insisted the only proper versions came from grizzled French fishermen in certain coastal towns. She had had a terrible bouillabaisse in the coastal town of Le Lavandou—“very rough, and flavored with nothing but saffron”—and decided she was probably a better cook than most grizzled fishermen. She proceeded to make bouillabaisse everywhere she lived, from Maine to Norway, using the likeliest fresh fish available, and found the results not only delicious but impeccably French. A slew of freshly caught pollack was the basis for her Maine bouillabaisse: with potatoes, fennel, and saffron, she reported to Simca, “It was very good, and had the correct taste…the necessary flavor was there.” What made a dish French wasn’t the raw materials, it was what happened to them in the hands of the cook.
    Strawberries were dreamberries—she ate them with rapture every summer she found herself in France—but the key that unlocked French cooking for Julia was technique. Her lessons with Chef Bugnard had turned her toward a radiant future. In the logic and transparency of culinary method, each step a meaningful contribution to the complex beauty of the result, Julia had found her