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had been dazzled by the startlingly bright flavors of the fresh fruits and vegetables. “Strawberries, for instance, are dreamberries,” she wrote to Avis. “Beans are so deliciously beany. They haven’t yet gotten on to the system of growing a tough variety that will keep well in the markets.” Yet she quite forgot to include in the manuscript any mention of how important it was to use the best possible ingredients; and when she remembered, about a year before the book was published, she merely shrugged. Other errors in the manuscript—or worse, the index—dismayed her terribly, but not this one. It was far more important that the book fend off the popular assumption that every food item in France was superior to its American counterpart. Too many tourists came to Paris, swooned over the food, and went home convinced that meals so glorious must spring from wondrous ingredients unique to France. Not true, Julia insisted. Spinach was spinach, and even if it wasn’t, good cooking would make up for the difference.

Julia was so obsessively open-minded on the subject of American ingredients that she wouldn’t even exclude canned and frozen products, at least not without giving them a chance to prove themselves. French gastronomes thought packaged foods were barbaric, and sophisticated Americans were embarrassed by them, but Julia wanted her recipes to be within reach of every home cook who could summon the ambition to try them. If a box of frozen peas, or a can of bouillon, honestly merited a place in a traditional French recipe, the book should say so. There was nothing to be gained by snobbery. She shopped for such products at the embassy commissary and devoted long testing sessions to them, generally with grim results. “I have just served my poor husband the most miserable lunch of frozen haddock Dugléré, frozen ‘fresh’ string beans and ‘minute’ rice,” she wrote to Avis after an early effort in 1953. “It is just no fun to eat that stuff, no matter how many French touches and methods you put to it. It ain’t French, it ain’t good, and the hell with it.”

That afternoon, Julia went out for a restorative walk along one of her favorite streets, rue de Seine, and came home in a better mood. But she wasn’t going to quit: she would continue experimenting even though by their very nature these products threw a wet blanket over the kitchen. Where was the tactile pleasure of handling food, where were the smells, and where oh where were the flavors? “Got a frozen roasting chicken the other day,” she reported to Avis. “It was mushy, a bit chewy, and had very little taste. It had, also, a slightly rancid-fat overtone.” She tried warming half of it in a coq au vin sauce, which lent a little flavor but not enough to salvage the product or win it a mention in the book. “If things aint good, they aint; we are not in the frozen food lobby.” To her astonishment, instant potatoes turned out to be pretty good, though requiring quite a bit of butter, cream, and cheese. Uncle Ben’s Converted Brand Rice became such a favorite she took to calling it “l’Oncle Ben’s,” and she was so delighted with instant piecrust mix that she sent a box to Simca and told her she must try it. Simca was not impressed: she disliked the taste of vegetable shortening in place of butter. Julia admitted the flavor wasn’t really French. “However, they certainly are easy and certainly perfectly good. And certainly better for that average housewife, French or US, who would otherwise make a horrid crust,” she argued.

In a way, she was arguing with herself more than with Simca. At the time she tried piecrust mix, she was living in Washington, D.C., and taking careful note of how Americans behaved in the kitchen. So many of them lacked basic skills or were reluctant to take the time to do things well. Was the point of the book to get better-tasting food on the American table, by any means necessary? Or was the pur pose to make real changes, to move wonderful food to the center of American life? One day she was working on glacéed carrots and onions and decided to save time by using canned