Julia Child_ A Life - Laura Shapiro [29]
Other recipes were simpler, but everything required numerous tweaks and tinkerings before both women were satisfied. Working on spinach, Julia picked up an idea from a book and dashed off a note in the scramble of French and English with which she always wrote to Simca. “Suggestion which comes from A. Suzanne, a contemporary of Escoffier, which is to put une pointe d’ail in les epinards, especially ‘au jus,’ and even à la crème. So small it is hardly noticeable, it does a certain amount of relevement which is very agreeable. Please try.” Every nuance counted; every minor shift in method had to be recorded. “I want every detail from you that you can think of,” Julia begged. “Whether or not I use the detail is of no matter, I want it anyway. People must say of this book, A MARVELOUS BOOK. I’ve never been able to make cake before, but now I can.”
This imagined reader, the desperate homemaker who couldn’t cook until the right book fell into her hands, had a permanent place in Julia’s consciousness and directly inspired the immense amount of detail that characterized her recipes. Like a ghost from Julia’s own past, she trailed Julia from kitchen to desk and back again, forever trying to figure out whether the roast was done, why the chops were steaming in the pan instead of browning properly, what made the cream puffs soggy, and exactly how thick the beef slices should be: a quarter inch? an eighth of an inch? Julia often called her “the young bride.” Simca, of course, had no such creature haunting her—she had been a young bride who cooked splendidly from the first day—and Julia had to plead with her to measure and test with scientific rigor. Take nothing for granted, she counseled Simca over and over. Don’t ever make a statement of fact until it has been tested so many times we “absolutely know” it is true. She sent Simca a meat thermometer and measuring cups, and issued constant bulletins on her own experiments. “I have just poached two more eggs,” she reported from deep within the egg chapter. “Well, the eggs weighed 60 grams or two ounces, and they do, effectivement, need 4 minutes. I also found, measuring everything again, that there should be but 1½ to 2 inches water, and the pan should be but 8 inches in diameter. Thank heaven I did it again to catch these two awful errors.” Simca had a hard time keeping up with this degree of microscopic fussing, and as she moved from recipe to recipe, she kept forgetting to use the methods they had worked out so exhaustively.
Simca was an extraordinary cook, and Julia knew it, but the recipes Simca contributed from her own repertoire were far too personal to go into the book without extensive testing and revision. Not only did they need to be made scientifically precise, but Julia wanted to be sure they represented the mainstream of French tradition. What horrified Julia about many French cookbooks, especially the ones written by Americans, was that the authors seemed to feel they were free to rewrite standard recipes in any fashion they chose, and then present the result as completely classic. She was frantic with worry that the recipes she received from Simca had been Simca-fied, made delicious in Simca’s hands but allowed to wander significantly off course. “It is not, my dear, that I do not have confidence in you!” she insisted in the course of a quarrel about clafoutis. “I think we are both interested, in this book, in making sure it is La Veritable Cuisine Française, and not just La Cuisine Simca/ Julia.” The book would have to depart from tradition at times, for instance when certain ingredients weren’t available in America, but Julia was adamant that whenever she and Simca altered a template, they had to say so up front. Once, when they were working together in Marseille on sauce à la rouille, Simca casually referred to the recipe they had developed as “Rouille Julia”—idiosyncratic, that is, and not traditional. Julia was aghast. “That is a SHOCKING remark coming from you,” she wrote after the visit. “It means