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Beef Stew with Herb Biscuits), but the rest of the day proved disappointing. “Good idea—bad cook,” she jotted on her scoring sheet after trying Pot ’n Cot Roast, and although she herself enjoyed Cantonese Beef Dinner, none of the other judges did. The next day started hopefully—Saucy Beef Taco Pizza was a success—but she let Mariachi Beefballs and Farmer Brown’s Steak Supreme pass without comment. Best in show, she decided, was Fiesta Crepes en Casserole: cornmeal crepes stuffed with a mixture of beef, canned tomato sauce, canned creamed corn, and readymade taco seasoning mix. A year later, Julia was back, enthusiasm undimmed, but after several rounds of tasting, she began to lose patience. “How to ruin a good piece of meat,” she wrote next to Grilled Hawaiian Chuck Steak. Looking over the recipe for Spicy and Saucy Stuffed Round Steak, she scribbled, “What is ‘beef sausage,’ what is ‘red cooking wine’?” One entry after another fell flat: “Tastes of the can.” “Dead ‘packaged’ taste.” “No real taste.” First prize that year went to Baked Beef Brisket, made with only salt, pepper, garlic, onions, cornstarch, and water. “Tastes like food!” Julia noted gratefully.

She never returned to the Cook-Off, but she never gave up, either. Julia had a long, complicated relationship, much like a marriage, with American food. She was committed to it, and genuinely attracted, but the shortcomings, the character flaws, the willful misbehavior, and the sorry failures were constantly greeting her at the door. Thanks to a nature wonderfully capable of absorbing bad news with goodwill, her faith remained strong; but it was tested often. And if Mariachi Beefballs constituted one sort of betrayal, a bare slab of grilled fish surrounded by undercooked baby vegetables constituted another, perhaps worse. Sometimes it seemed to her that the food was becoming less and less appealing, even as Americans grew more sophisticated. “I am getting very tired of kiwi fruit and little juliennes of leeks,” she said wearily in 1980. But she didn’t tire of tuna fish sandwiches on rye. Or canned corned beef hash. Or hot dogs or chocolate ice cream sodas. And though she blanched at the sight of one of the Cook-Off entries—flapjacks folded over ground beef, garnished with strawberries, and doused with maple syrup—she dutifully tasted it. Then she brightened up, pronounced it delicious, and devoured the whole serving.

Julia had always been restless within the confines of traditional French cooking, especially during the years when she was becoming famous for it. To be sure, whenever she was working on a recipe with a recognized French name and heritage, she remained as faithful as possible to “le vrai” or “the real thing.” Trying to re-create in Cambridge the Burgundian specialty of parslied ham in aspic, for instance, she found she had forgotten precisely how it should taste, and put the recipe aside until she could get back to France and restore her taste memory. But if she was simply pondering chicken, or dessert, or something good to eat, she relaxed. To her, French cooking wasn’t a list of rules and ingredients, it was a set of techniques and a certain frame of mind. “I will never do anything but French cooking,” she told Time in 1966, when she was being interviewed for the cover story. “It is much the most interesting and the most challenging and the best eating.” She made this declaration, the magazine reported, “with Francophilic fervor.” But a year or so earlier, for The French Chef she had invented a dessert she called fantasie bourbonnaise—peanuts, brown sugar, canned apricots, sliced bananas, and bourbon. “I just make up all the titles, as you can see,” she told Simca cheerfully. By this time she was also employing instant mashed potatoes on occasion, stuffing crepes with whatever sounded appealing and setting them on fire (“People always seem to like this”), and rooting around for a decent paella recipe, testing French, Spanish, and American versions before settling on what she termed paella à la Julia. It all tasted good, and to her way of thinking, it