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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