Julia Child_ A Life - Laura Shapiro [62]
Even McDonald’s, the chief target of the most vehement food critics, didn’t strike Julia as all that bad. She and Paul had passed their first decade or so back in the United States largely ignoring the chain. As she told an interviewer in 1972, “We know where good food is located and we don’t believe good food is to be found at McDonald’s. So we don’t go.” But a year later, when Time asked for her opinion of the food, she went out for a meal and came back with a relatively benign review. “The buns are a little soft,” she told Time. “The Big Mac I like least because it’s all bread. But the French fries are surprisingly good. It’s remarkable that you can get that much food for under a dollar. It’s not what you would call a balanced meal; it’s nothing but calories. But it would keep you alive.” After that she spoke more and more positively about McDonald’s, singling out the Quarter Pounder for special praise, though she made it clear she thought it was a big mistake to stop cooking the french fries in beef tallow. “They were so good!” she protested in a letter to the company. She did have one suggestion for improving the menu: in light of all those hamburgers being passed across the counter, McDonald’s really should offer a decent red wine by the glass.
When it came to more ambitious restaurants, however, Julia put France firmly in the lead. She and Paul ate out very little during their first fifteen or twenty years in Cambridge, because the experience was so crushingly disappointing. They liked having lunch at the Ritz, in downtown Boston, and they welcomed Joyce Chen’s, acclaimed as the first restaurant in the area to offer refined, authentic Chinese cooking. But for the most part, they ate at home, until a new generation of young American chefs—many inspired by Julia herself—began coming of age. The first local restaurant she was genuinely impressed by was the Harvest, on Brattle Street in Cambridge, where chef Lydia Shire started cooking in the mid-seventies. Julia was pleased to see a woman chef making good progress, and loved the food. But every time she and Paul returned to France, they were captivated all over again by the charm and professionalism of the restaurants, especially the informal bistros they liked best. They always had the traditional dishes they had ordered for years—“Simple things, like a soupe de poissons and a sole meunière”—and they basked in the atmosphere. “There is a seriousness of the cooking and serving, as well as an essential gaiety in the air that are like nothing else.” At the three-star level, she thought French restaurants were much like their equivalents in New York; but the smaller places, to her, represented everything she loved about France.
French markets, on the other hand, couldn’t begin to compare with what Julia fondly referred to as “my nice clean Star Market on Beacon St.” When American food writers complained about pallid tomatoes and yellow plastic cheeses, or when chefs visiting from France told the press they couldn’t buy what they needed in American markets because the quality was so poor, Julia was indignant. “Yesterday we did a quick shopping at San Peyre,” she wrote to her family from Provence in 1977. “I thought to myself what a really disgusting market it was. The canned goods no one could complain of, but the meat was so revolting. Beef all dark red with limp yellow surrounding fat, no marbling, dried up edges. (The flies one is used to.) Everything looked simply disgusting…. Now that they can get everything from everywhere, we get just the same rock hard peaches, plums, pears and nectarines here as you get at home, that rot before they ripen.” In the same letter she rejoiced in what was just coming into season—“We are finally getting local tomatoes, that yummy fresh garlic, and big white fresh onions, and those baby melons!