Laura Shapiro by Julia Child Page B

cook and refused to learn, preferring to make dinner by opening boxes and cans. Even a gourmet meal, the magazines crowed, could now be put on the table in a half hour. “The advertisers have made people feel like fools if they even wanted to take time over things,” Julia wrote to Simca. “There are loads and loads and loads of books and articles on how to do things quickly, and very very very few on how to make things taste good.” Americans just didn’t think about cooking the way the French did. Homemakers looked at recipes and worried about how many pots and pans were going to get dirty; they liked to economize by using margarine and never dreamed it could affect the flavor of the dish; they put three or four ill-matched ingredients together and served it up as a casserole. “Casseroles,” Julia groaned to Avis. “I even hate the name, as it always implies to me some god awful mess.” Nor could she abide the way Americans made a fetish of nutrition. “I think one should get one’s vitamins in salads, and raw fruits, and what is cooked should be absolutely delicious and to hell with the vitamins.” At a luncheon meeting of the American Embassy Wives Club in Oslo, Julia was served what she described to Simca as “the most horrible meal I have ever had”—a particularly lurid example of what was going on back home. “As we sat down each guest was served a big plate on which there was a tower of pink stuff posed on a piece of lettuce. This tower turned out to be about ½ litre of frozen whipped cream mixed with mayonnaise, frozen strawberries, bananas, peaches, and grapes…everything as hard as a rock. And the lettuce leaf was so small one couldn’t hide anything under it. The next and final course was a banana and nut cake–mix cake, an enormous piece for each guest. Cake was surrounded with a very thick tan-colored frosting, also a mix I suppose, because I can’t imagine anyone making it. Ugh.”
    But she refused to believe that frozen fruit salad had permanently numbed the American palate. Surely, if she and Simca could make their recipes clear and foolproof, American homemakers would convert. How could they resist the food, once they had tasted the first perfectly prepared chicken breasts of their lives? The first true omelets? The first cakes made light by their own billowing egg whites, not baking powder? The greater challenge would be to persuade homemakers to undertake such lengthy recipes, given their lackadaisical approach to cooking and the tremendous bugaboo of time. One solution was to do as much as possible ahead of zero hour, and Julia had long made a specialty of this strategy. The clock ticking inexorably toward dinnertime, the sense of panic, the bevy of details frantic for her attention—all this was deeply familiar to her. Throughout her work on the book, the needs of what she called “the chef-hostess” were at the forefront of her thinking. Every recipe, she told Avis, would include directions on how to prepare as much as possible of the dish ahead of time, and how to store and reheat it without sacrificing flavor or texture. “There are so many many things which can be done that way—green veg, fish in sauce, roasts, braises, sautés in sauce—etc.,” she explained. “There is no reason why one has to serve those bloody casseroles all the time.”
    Toward the end of 1957, while Julia was living in Washington, she decided it would be a good idea to publish a few articles in American magazines. She and Simca were in the final stages of their work, readying the manuscript for delivery to Houghton Mifflin, and a little advance publicity would certainly benefit the book. After much thought about what might appeal to Americans, she prepared an article featuring the Belgian specialty waterzoï de poulet. It would be timely, since the 1958 World’s Fair was about to open in Brussels,