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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