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stuff, and men are the people you want to feed.” And, she added, be sure to buy solid, high-quality knives. “Just because the housewife doesn’t know a great deal about equipment, she is often, unfortunately, taken in by glitter. If she went with her husband, he would not allow her to get a lot of this sort of flimsy junk, knives that are pretty.” Women were too easily intimidated in the kitchen, Julia believed; they panicked if the recipe called for three tablespoons of lemon juice and they had only two. Men were fearless—in fact, men were accustomed to bullying, she once noted, which could be a very useful trait when faced with a recipe.

But while she was confident that men would have a good influence on the American home kitchen, their growing visibility in the culinary profession was a touchier subject. Yes, an infusion of talented male chefs was exactly what the profession needed in order to gain stature and respectability. But the ambitious young men taking up cooking included a number of homosexuals, and Julia feared they would soon define the profession, keeping straight men away. “It is like the ballet filled with homosexuals, so no one else wants to go into it.” She urged a few close friends in the food world to encourage the “de-fagification” of cooking, but admitted that she had no idea how to go about it—and besides, “fags” bought plenty of cookbooks, including hers. “What to do!”

What she did, in the end, was generously support the career aspirations of every gifted cook who came her way—male or female, “normal” or not. Her devotion to “real male men” ran deep, but her appreciation for good cooking ran deeper still, and at this level she was entirely free of prejudice. Richard Olney, the moody American living on a Provençal hillside whose brilliant cooking impressed even the French, was a homosexual and not particularly friendly to Julia or most other people; she, in turn, never took to him personally. Yet she gave a press party when he published Simple French Food and used all her contacts to help him promote it, simply because his work was so outstanding. Another very skilled male cook of her acquaintance was “on the soft and wandlike side, feminine, but nicely so”: this was a rare instance when she praised such traits in a man. And though she distanced herself from the women’s movement in general, she spoke out readily against sex discrimination in the culinary profession. “You know, it wasn’t until I began thinking about it that I realized my field is closed to women,” she told a reporter in 1970. “It’s very unfair. It’s absolutely restricted. You can’t get into the Culinary Institute of America in New Haven! The big hotels, the fancy New York restaurants, don’t want women chefs.” Her remark drew indignant letters from the director and the dean of women at the institute, pointing out that there were fully a dozen women among some 650 students. (“Julia and her sister Women’s Lib advocates might also be pleased to hear that, if they don’t get married first, each female has at least five good job offers by graduation.”) By 1976, the institute had moved to Hyde Park, New York, and was doing so much better in regard to women that Julia agreed to speak at graduation. “Finally we have found out that women are people,” she told the crowd. “It’s a useful thing to know.” In her own profession, she was a feminist in spite of herself: she simply would not put up with any injustice that threatened to deprive the world of a good chef. Julia funded scholarships for female culinary students, encouraged them to write to her about their progress, did a great deal of networking on behalf of young women chefs, and dispensed quantities of advice and encouragement. For her Master Chefs programs, she made a point of inviting male and female chefs in equal numbers; and she worked her media connections tirelessly to help cookbook writers she admired.

Julia’s tangled sensibility about sex, gender, and food relaxed a good deal in the warmth of her friendship with James Beard, whom she loved and admired above anyone else in the