Julia Child_ A Life - Laura Shapiro [30]
Simca would have been happy to rely on her own palate for the book she and Louisette had originally planned, but this book had far loftier aspirations, and they made her nervous. She and Julia were only a couple of home cooks, and women at that. How dare they contradict, in print, the old masters and professional chefs who constituted the priestly class in French cooking? The sight of the recipes she and Julia had worked so hard on, all typed up and ready for the publisher, filled her with anxiety. Often she demanded they go back and make changes in a recipe completed long ago, just because she’d come across a chef who had a different method—surely he knew better than the two of them. This stubborn diffidence made Julia impatient. “I consider ourselves just as much AUTHORITIES as anyone else,” she railed. What did the sages have that she and Simca lacked? The two women had training and experience, they consulted the sources, they did a vast amount of cooking, tasting, and testing. But the confidence Julia sported so comfortably was foreign to Simca. Though she could fight fiercely, she had a streak of what Julia called “obéissance,” or “obedience”—an instinct Julia thought was typical of Frenchwomen who tended to defer to men far too readily. A year and a half into their collaboration, Julia sent Simca—“Ma plusque chère Colleague”—three rules to live by:
Stand up for your opinions as an equal partner in this enterprise.
Keep the book French.
Follow the scientific method, respecting your own careful findings, after having studied the findings and recommendations of other authorities. Work with exact measurements, temperatures, etc. And, once having established a method, stick to it religiously unless you find it is not satisfactory.
(Then she tossed in a postscript: “Please, also, learn to cut professionally with a knife. Who knows, we may end up on television, and you must establish professional techniques.”)
For Julia, the moral barometer for this project was not fidelity to the old masters but fidelity to the food. Those first months in France, when she spent day after day plunging into flavors of an intensity she had never known before, had left a permanent stain on her senses. To have lived so long without this! Now she was determined to re-create that food by writing recipes so precise, so perfect, that each was a miniature version of the discovery that had transformed her. She was on a quest for le gout français—the very flavor of Frenchness. Like any flavor, this one was hard to describe in words, but instantly recognizable on the palate. Julia never doubted for a moment that the quintessential taste of France was portable, that it could be realized by any cook, anywhere, with the right instructions. She and Simca were going to capture that taste, press it like a butterfly onto every page of their book. And unlike Simca, she knew she would have no qualms about claiming victory. This was cooking, not alchemy; the only secrets were spread out on the kitchen counter for all to see: butter and eggs and string beans, whisks and saucepans and measuring spoons. Nothing mysterious, nothing unquantifiable. “If one is using French methods and French ingredients or as near an equivalent as can be found, one achieves GOUT FRANÇAIS,” she said flatly.
The moment she used the term French ingredients, of course, she had to qualify it. Many of the ingredients that Americans would have to use would be “as near an equivalent as can be found,” and some of them wouldn’t be all that near. But Julia was never the sort of gastronome who thought great cooking began and ended with perfect ingredients; she was far too pragmatic for that. It’s not that she was immune to their splendor: like every other American eating in Paris for the first time, she