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their agendas. As a foreign service wife, of course, she was invited to countless ladies’ luncheons and tea parties; they drove her wild with boredom, especially when the cookbook manuscript was waiting back home. “I just cannot stand to waste a day like that anymore,” she told Simca after an endless afternoon of female socializing. “And if there is anything I HATE, it is a ladies tea parlor.” The only women’s events she approved of were meetings of Les Gourmettes, because everyone was busy with the important work of cooking and eating. Otherwise, “Cackle-cackle…sounds like a hen house” was her invariable reaction to being in a room full of females. In 1973, she was one of a dozen Women of the Century honored at a lavish dinner and spent the evening talking with Lillian Hellman, Marya Mannes, Louise Nevelson, and Pauline Trigère, among others. It was very nice, she remarked later, but they should have invited some men. She said the spark was missing.

Not surprisingly, when clubs and restaurants that excluded women came under pressure from feminists to change their policies, Julia sided with the men. “I am very much against the new policy at the Ritz of allowing unaccompanied women into the Grill,” she told an audience at the all-male St. Botolph Club in Boston, where she had been invited to give a talk. “They’ll turn it into a clacking hen house sure enough, and then no one will want to go there. So, stick to your guns, gentlemen.”

One of her longtime ambitions was to attract more men to the food world. In France, where cooking had the status of a high art, men were the chief players whether or not they actually cooked: it was their talking, writing, and gourmandizing that put cuisine at the center of domestic and national life. In America, by contrast, cooking was traditionally defined as a female preoccupation, hence unworthy of serious attention. Julia had spent years in France trying to win the respect of male culinary authorities, self-appointed and otherwise, and had met with little success on account of her two handicaps: she was American and she was female. Yet the experience didn’t turn her into a culinary feminist—quite the opposite. She was inclined to see men the way the French did: natural masters in the kitchen, born with an easy confidence at the stove, graced with an understanding of science and logic that guided them smoothly through the preparation of a meal. No matter that most American men couldn’t cook. An aura of maleness in the world of American cookery would be enough to ennoble the whole enterprise, or so she hoped. When William Rice was appointed food editor of the Washington Post in 1972, she cheered. “I’m all for having MEN in these positions; it immediately lifts it out of the housewifery Dullsville category and into the important things of life!” Receiving fan letters from men gave her tremendous satisfaction, and she regularly assured her male correspondents that men made the best cooks.

Julia was adamant that her programs be aired in prime time, not only for the prestige but because having men in the audience made her work legitimate in her own eyes. Daytime television attracted only housewives—“And that’s not our audience,” she often said. Her audience, of course, was overwhelmingly female and packed with housewives, but when Julia said “housewife,” she meant someone who didn’t take food and cooking seriously. She knew very well there were countless women who weren’t “housewives” in this sense; nonetheless, all “housewives” were women. If improvements were under way in American cooking and eating habits, it had to be men who deserved the credit. “Thank heaven for the men in our TV audience,” she remarked in 1966. “They are responsible for stimulating interest in cooking. The women would just pass it over.” When an interviewer asked her what she would say to young brides starting to cook, Julia’s advice was to think about what men like to eat. “It will keep you away from those horrible gooky casseroles covered with canned mushroom soup and cornflakes,” she went on. “Men don’t like that