Julia Child_ A Life - Laura Shapiro [60]
Nevertheless, every time the “Lasagne” and “Paella” programs were shown, or the “Curry Dinner” program, viewers were aghast. “You should be requested with all possible speed to confine yourself to the type of cooking you know well and leave the cuisines of other countries to those who know and respect it,” wrote a typical distraught fan. Julia kept trying to explain—“It is the idea of lasagne, freed from ethnic restrictions and limitations,” she wrote back—but this satisfied nobody. After 1972, when the last series of French Chef programs was taped, the word French disappeared from the titles of her books and television shows.
When it came to culinary technique, however, Julia was firm: this had to be French. Nothing else would do, because, as she often explained, French cuisine was the only one that had precise terminology and definite rules, an actual body of knowledge to be taught. Once you learned the rules, you could apply them to any other cuisine in the world. This parochial attitude toward cooking was very different from her wide-open attitude toward eating. Cooking appealed to her when she could imagine herself working within a clear intellectual structure, like a scientist of the sensual, mind and hands and palate fully engaged. A cuisine based on fresh ingredients handled minimally might produce wonderful meals, but it had no kitchen interest for her; and a cuisine that claimed its own complex technique—Chinese, for instance—she figured had to be French at heart. Julia had come to know and love Chinese food during her OSS years, and it remained her second-favorite cuisine, but as far as she was concerned, the best way to become a Chinese cook was to become a French cook first. “You would have already learned the basic ways to chop things up, and you’d just have to change your technique a bit to chop it up Chinese,” she said blithely. As for Italian food, it could be very good to eat, but dropping pasta into boiling water was far too simple a procedure to result in what she called “food-type food.” It was the French who had turned lasagna into something truly delicious. In fact, Julia remarked, when-ever the French appropriated dishes from other countries, they always improved on the original. Like the chefs and Gourmettes who had been her guiding lights when she was learning to cook, Julia knew one true path and stuck to it. When aspiring chefs wrote her to ask where they should study, she always advised France, and she did her best to monitor French culinary schools so that her recommendations would be up-to-date. Here, in the realm of education, was the “Francophilic fervor” that Time had remarked upon. To learn cooking, to learn to dine with pleasure in a civilized manner, to learn the proper role of food in the life of a nation—France was the best classroom.
But it was very much a classroom and not a shrine. For all the rapture of her own introduction to France, and the pleasure she and Paul took in their beloved home in Provence, she had no patience with American food lovers who saw France through a fog of sentiment. The notion that French food, and French life, existed on some immeasurably blissful plateau unreachable by cloddish Americans was ridiculous to her. The whole point of learning the rules of French cooking was that they resulted in French food: there was nothing