Julia Child_ A Life - Laura Shapiro [40]
Serious interest in food and its preparation
Tradition of good cooking…which forms French tastes from youth
Enjoyment of cooking for its own sake—LOVE
Willingness to take the few extra minutes to be sure things are done as they should be done
Nothing on this list, except for “French tastes,” distinguishes French cooking from any other noteworthy cuisine. On the contrary, it’s a list that perfectly sums up Julia’s outlook on food even when she was most deeply committed to le gout français, as she was when she wrote this. Her highest term of culinary praise was never French, or professional, or delicious, though she regularly used such words to describe wonderful food. Her highest praise was the word serious—the very first word that came to her fingertips when she started to type these principles. A “serious” cook, to Julia, was a careful, mindful, thoroughly knowledgeable cook, whose pleasure you could taste in the food. Thus her great admiration for Diana Kennedy and Madhur Jaffrey in later years, though she had little interest in Mexican or Indian cooking.
And at the opposite end of the spectrum from the serious cook was the dark angel who hovered over the last principle in the list, the cook who refused to put in those extra minutes it took to reach perfection. This cook—male or female, French or American, famous name or anonymous homebody—was fatally associated with the term housewife. Julia never did recover from her early, bruising experiences with that word, and she consistently refused to be associated with such creatures. As she put it many times over the years, whenever the subject of housewives came up, “We are aiming at PEOPLE WHO LIKE TO COOK.” Yes, supermarket ingredients could be transformed into authentic French dishes, but not without two ingredients for which there were no substitutes, and Julia named them often: time and love.
Chapter 4
The Performance of Me
WHEN GUESTS CAME to dinner at 103 Irving Street in Cambridge, they spent the whole evening in the kitchen. The table was big and comfortable, and Julia liked having everyone around while she cooked: sometimes she invited people to pick up a knife or a whisk and join in. She would play culinary solos if necessary, but what she really enjoyed was chamber music—everyone on an instrument, chopping garlic or pouring wine or chatting, while a kind of Concerto for Food and Company rose up warm and fragrant in their midst. Cooking alone was very different, though in truth Julia was never really alone at the stove. Long before she cooked on television, she was aware of an audience—first her father and sister, impatient for breakfast as she frantically tossed pancakes and spilled coffee, and later the guests sitting politely in the living room, while she probed the beef with anguish and wondered if it was done, or overdone, or raw. As a bride, she practiced and practiced the role she called chef-hostess until she could give a dinner party without a glitch, or at least without any glitch she couldn’t smoothly mend, smiling and conversing all the while. “I always feel it is like putting on a performance, or like live TV or theater—it’s got to be right, as there can be no retakes,” she told Avis in 1953, nearly a decade before she saw a television camera for the first time. Testing recipes for the book, making the same dish over and over and over, she liked to pretend she was cooking in front of an audience. In part it was a form of culinary discipline, to keep herself from lapsing into casual, unprofessional methods; and in part she just enjoyed the company. When Julia did start cooking in front of a camera, her earliest fans constantly exclaimed over how “natural” she seemed on television, how “real,” how “honest,” how “homelike.” They were right. Performance had long