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By Root 238 0

about hither and yon,” she told Koshland. “The line is sometimes difficult to see, but I know where I mean it to be.” Anytime she accepted a fee for a cooking demonstration or a special appearance, she donated the money to WGBH. If viewers wrote to ask where she bought her mixer, or what brand of rum she was using, she wrote back with the information, but she never mentioned a brand name in public. Thanks to the success of her books, as well as an inheritance, she and Paul didn’t need the money; and she often said how grateful she was to be able to turn down such offers. But she made her stance for another reason as well. Commercial endorsements were demeaning: they tarnished the reputation of the cook. James Beard lent his name to many food companies, always justifying it by saying he needed the money, and Julia felt that his standing in the profession was suffering as a result. Audiences understood the difference between paid-for and unfettered speech; they loved her for staying on the right side of the line, and she had no intention of letting them down by muddying what she called “the purest of noncommercial images.”

With the help of her lawyer when necessary, Julia kept her name free of commercial taint throughout her career. But other aspects of her public image had a way of tripping her up, often right on air. Scrupulous though she was about how she looked and how she taught, Julia was so comfortably at home whenever she was handling food that she moved around the TV kitchen as if she were in her own house. She stashed away the colander and then forgot where it was, hunted about for the mixing fork, lost track of a casserole; once she snatched up a huge handful of paper towels and swabbed her face, explaining, “I’ve got so many burners on here, I’m hot.” No matter how well she planned a program, moreover, reality had a way of breaking over the proceedings like a raw egg. Julia’s equanimity in the face of a crisis was dazzling—repairing the molded potatoes that stuck to the bottom of the pan, withstanding a series of electrical shocks from the microphone tucked in her blouse (she did keep fiddling anxiously with the mic, but she never stopped teaching), shoving aside a spoon holder that had fallen over with a crash, ignoring a scraper that flew from her grasp, and dismissing the collapse of a frosting-laden “twig” in the Yule log by remarking, “Well, I guess that would happen in a forest, anyway. Things sitting there a long time, and they begin losing their strength.” When she unmolded a tarte tatin, only to see it collapse into a messy heap of apples with the crust slipping off to the side, she simply said, “That was a little loose. But I’ll just have to show you that it’s not going to make too much of a difference, because it’s all going to fix up.” Rapidly she tucked the apples together on top of the crust, then carried the disheveled tart into the dining room along with another “ready” tart that had been unmolded perfectly earlier in the day. “Now everybody can get one of each tart,” she said as she cut slices, managing despite everything to sound like a chemistry teacher showing the results of an experiment that went off just as it was supposed to. “There. I think that actually makes a more interesting dessert.”

One day Julia taped a program with four different potato recipes, trying to move through them at a good pace. Standing at the stove over a large mashed potato cake in a skillet, she waited a little impatiently for the cake to brown on the bottom. She eyed the pan and shook it dubiously, then decided to try to flip the cake over anyway. Clearly she knew she was taking a chance. “When you flip anything, you just have to have the courage of your convictions, particularly if it’s sort of a loose mass, like this.” She gave the pan a swift, practiced jerk. The potato cake rose heavily into the air and disintegrated, half of it spilling in shreds onto the stove. “Well, that didn’t go very well,” she observed steadily. “You see, when I flipped it, I didn’t have the courage to do it the way I should have.” Quickly