Laura Shapiro by Julia Child Page A

lifelong faith. She was a believer, not in the dogma set down by the sages, but in the notion of French cooking as a great master plan—fundamental procedures that could be applied to all the cuisines of the world. Learning to cook, moreover, had unleashed her imagination, her powers of analysis, her scholarly skills, and her addiction to hard work. Simple dishes, well prepared, would always win her respect; but Julia liked cooking best when it was akin to mountain climbing, not a stroll in the park. She went into the kitchen because that was the place where her mind was engaged most happily and energetically. Years later, when her friend Anne Willan was planning the curriculum for La Varenne, the Paris cooking school, Julia urged her to establish a place early in the schedule for “difficult or advanced items, like puff pastry.” The size and scope of the demand constituted, to Julia, the very essence of her chosen work. As she put it to Willan, “The sooner one gets to pastry, the more of a cook one begins to feel.” By contrast, the whole question of ingredients was negotiable. Canned and frozen foods, vermouth instead of wine—these couldn’t erode or undermine the Frenchness of the cooking. But when a French cookbook devoted to shortcut recipes appeared— Cuisine d’Urgence, or “Hurry-up Cooking”—Julia read doom on every page. If technique was lost, if careful methods gave way to speed for its own sake, the end was nigh. “I find the sauce-making methods horrifying, and also disturbing, and hope that too many people will not take to it,” she wrote to Simca. “It will be the death of La Cuisine Fcse.”
    Yet even on the subject of technique, she was willing to consider modern innovations if they achieved the right results. At the Cordon Bleu she had learned to whip egg whites with a balloon whisk, to beat butter by hand, to keep constant watch over the egg yolks while making hollandaise to be sure they were thickening properly and absorbing the right amount of butter, and to employ hours of pounding and sieving and beating to make quenelles. Now she bought a blender and an electric mixer and started to experiment. “This whole field is wide open, that of using the electric aids for a lot of fancy French stuff, and we’ll be presenting something entirely new,” she told Avis. “No sacred cows for us.” She was delighted to outdo the old masters by using a mixer to beat cream into the quenelle paste, or using a blender instead of a mortar and pestle to make shellfish butter. But even when the electric aids did a good job, she was careful about how she expressed her approval. If a machine saved the cook from a truly laborious chore, she recommended it outright. But when machines became a substitute for the cook’s skill, for her practiced hand and her powers of observation—when they made it possible for someone to cook as if she, too, were a machine—Julia hedged. Yes, you can make hollandaise and mayonnaise in the blender, she assured readers, and included recipes for both the traditional and machine versions. But she begged readers to become adept at making these sauces by hand so they could examine close-up what was happening to the egg yolks. Even an eight-year-old could make blender hollandaise, she added—a remark that wasn’t necessarily an endorsement. Julia never believed good cooking was child’s play. As she scribbled in her notes while writing the introduction to the book, “Life is hard & earnest. Most pains—most results. If know what doing—half battle is won.”
    Long hours in the kitchen, hard labor, page after page of instructions, unfamiliar food—Julia did wonder occasionally whether American homemakers were going to be as enthusiastic as she was about these recipes. American newspapers and magazines were constantly running stories about how modern women didn’t know how to