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failure after another, and that’s how you finally learn,” she told the audience while she stirred the caramel. “You’ve got to have what the French call ‘je m’enfoutisme,’ or ‘I don’t care what happens—the sky can fall and omelets can go all over the stove, I’m going to learn.’” It was the chief lesson she had gleaned from her own cooking failures, which dogged her long after she had learned to cook. “I must say I find myself often in the embarrassing position of being the much publicized visiting supreme authority on culinary matters, and then laying an egg on top of it,” she wrote to Avis in 1953, after a Christmas visit to friends during which she botched the timing of a turkey. The next year she truffled and stuffed a turkey, then overcooked it, burned the broiled endive, nearly forgot the salad dressing, and was late with the coffee. “How miserable, depressing, and slapping-down such a fiasco is, is it not?” Nearly a decade later, living in Cambridge as the lionized author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, she entertained her new friend James Beard and, she told Simca, “cooked the worst dinner of my life.” An elaborate preparation of veal scallops—cognac, Madeira, truffles—lacked flavor, and she didn’t know why; the broccoli was underdone, and so were the sautéed potatoes; and the chocolate cake tasted terrible. (“Don’t ever use Baker’s unsweetened chocolate for anything!”) Beard didn’t seem to mind the meal: he promptly invited her to teach at his school in New York.

Mistakes were bad enough at a dinner party for friends, but when she fumbled on television, the moment was captured forever on tape—and shown over and over in reruns. She knew audiences cherished the near disasters, but she longed for more control; she longed to present a more polished performance. “If we had more money, it would be so useful to overshoot and be able to edit out with dissolves to indicate time lapses—and no pretense that it is a live show,” she told Ruth Lockwood. The French Chef never progressed to that level, in part because the production team was determined to keep the show from becoming too slick, although with the advent of color and a new studio kitchen, the show looked far more dressed up by the time the last programs were taped in 1972. With the two series that followed—Julia Child & Company and Julia Child & More Company—Julia was able to move a good deal closer to the image she preferred. These programs, produced on a bigger budget with all the benefits of technology, were staged in a bright, chic kitchen without a trace of home to it: the sheen was pure television, and Julia herself seemed to revel in the artificiality. Perhaps because it was possible at last to do retakes, she was more relaxed and never looked as though she were lunging for her next words. Her relationship with the food remained as high spirited as ever—shaking a pan of cucumbers, slapping the dough on the counter, admiring the teeth on a gigantic monkfish, adding “homemade chicken stock, as you can see” as she poured it from a can. But if the tension that often marked The French Chef was gone, so, alas, was the gratifying sight of the unpredictable, leaping out of a bowl or skillet to test the mettle of the heroine.

For reasons nobody seemed able to explain, the Company series didn’t make much of an impact when they were first aired. WGBH admitted later that it had done a poor job of promoting and distributing More Company, which wasn’t seen at all in New York until it went into re runs. Julia had been a familiar presence on television for more than fifteen years and was considered a national treasure, but while critics and many of her fans were happy with the new shows—and the reruns went on forever—the initial ratings and publicity came nowhere near those of The French Chef. “I am quite aware that there comes a time when one is frankly out of style, out of step, and had better fold up and steal away,” Julia had acknowledged years earlier, as she foresaw The French Chef drawing to a close. “However, I shall certainly hang on with full vigor for the