Julia Child_ A Life - Laura Shapiro [61]
The standard for lyrical evocations of culinary France had been set by M. F. K. Fisher, whose passionate following among food lovers and devotees of distinctive prose gave her the aura of a literary saint, especially after her first five books were republished as The Art of Eating in 1954. Julia admired Fisher’s writing, and the two women were affectionate friends; but they had almost nothing in common except their fascination with food. Julia was a teacher: she liked clarity, facts, objectivity. Fisher was a writer from the school of impressionism: she liked artfulness, nuance, emotion. Their differences finally clashed in the mid-sixties, when Julia agreed to act as a “consultant and reader-over” on The Cooking of Provincial France, the first cookbook in a lavish new international series planned by Time-Life. M. F. K. Fisher had agreed to write the text. Her draft of the cookbook’s introductory chapter was swept through with idyllic imagery: French housewives cooking by the seasons, markets full of delectable fresh produce, the family gathering daily for a multicourse midday dinner, old and young embraced by a glowing tradition that was forever France. Julia couldn’t bear the rose-colored glasses. “She is seeing France from pre World War II eyes,” she complained to Simca. Worse, in Julia’s estimation, was the fact that France came off so splendidly in part because Fisher constantly compared it with America at its dreariest, as if nobody in the United States did anything at mealtimes but wolf down TV dinners. In her comments to Time-Life, Julia said Fisher was writing far too romantically. True, France was not yet enslaved to convenience, but changes were under way everywhere. “They are mechanizing in a French way, but those super markets, TV sets, dehydrated mashed potatoes and frozen fish are there to stay,” she told the editors. At Julia’s insistence, Fisher pulled back somewhat, but the final text was vivid with her conviction that French culinary tradition was rooted in French character and would never be fundamentally altered.
Julia didn’t think there was much that was immutable about the French except their dogmatism; and though she loved the way they revered gastronomy, she refused to posit America as the opposite camp. She had spent far too many Paris evenings listening to Frenchmen dismiss all Americans as gastronomic idiots to sit through the same insults from Americans themselves. Like wave after wave of her American colleagues, Julia had arrived in France as an innocent, eaten the food in a state of wonder, and returned home with a calling. But unlike others who had experienced that life-changing moment, she never used her epiphany as a club to attack everything she had left behind. It simply wasn’t in her to feel superior. “French cooking is not for the TV dinner and cake-mix set,” she acknowledged as she was working on Mastering, so for the rest of her life she kept her attention fixed on everyone else—millions of her compatriots who, through no fault of their own, had never been taught to puree cauliflower with watercress or line a ramekin with caramel. The notion that French housewives were all wonderful cooks merely by virtue of being French—that they had acquired their skills by instinct and turned out fine meals, as Fisher put it in the Time-Life book, “as naturally as they breathe”—Julia found preposterous. “French women don’t cook,” she said firmly, many times. Living in Paris after the war, she had been one of the few middle-class wives she knew who did her own cooking, since servants were so widely available. Younger French homemakers had no such luxury—and as Julia pointed out, they were embracing frozen foods and other conveniences as happily as Americans had done years earlier. The difference was that America now had “hobby” cooks: men and women who cooked at home for the fun of it, and were becoming very good at traditional French dishes. “American families know their way around a kitchen far