Julia Child_ A Life - Laura Shapiro [63]
That year, at home in Cambridge, she invited the innovative and widely admired French chef Michel Guérard to dinner and made lobster mayonnaise, saddle of lamb, broccoli, and a tarte tatin. It was a triumph of a meal, and as she told Simca proudly, “All this good food came from plain old markets.” For the tart she had used Golden Delicious apples, which critics of the food system often singled out as representing the worst of American industrial farming: always available, always sturdy, always utterly bland. Guérard had praised everything, including the apples. “And I was interested that Guérard had no complaints about shopping, about butter, or cream, or vegetables, meat or fish,” she added. She was particularly pleased that Guérard and his wife had raved about the broccoli, one of her favorite American vegetables and one unknown in France. He told her that he was going to plant some himself when he got home. Meanwhile, she fumed, writers such as Karen Hess and Waverly Root—two of the most prominent, and searing, critics of the food industry—were claiming that Americans ate nothing but slop. “What are these people talking about?” Julia demanded. “You can get disgusting things anywhere.” If high-quality ingredients weren’t available, she instructed, choose another recipe. Or buy the ingredients frozen or canned, and work them over until they tasted right.
The very idea that convenience products might have a role in good cooking appalled purists, but Julia never rejected food just because it came from a factory. She thought bottled lemon juice was perfectly fine, and she liked the flavored salt sent to her by the manufacturer so much that she wrote back suggesting the company next put up a traditional épices fines, or French spice mixture, using the recipe from Larousse Gastronomique. “I always have to grind this up myself, but would love to have the exact copy in a bottle,” she said—a statement so unabashedly American it would have made some of her colleagues in French cookery cringe. What mattered in most recipes was the cooking, Julia believed: a sloppy, mindless approach to the kitchen was far more damaging than any convenience product could possibly be. The reason she detested canned soup casseroles wasn’t just that they tasted definitively of canned soup, but that they elevated speed over all other considerations. Real cooking took time. Real cooking took effort. Real cooking took a bit of intelligence. These particular ingredients were fundamental, and they were the very ones that tended to be missing from many American recipes, certainly those aimed at housewives. Once, as a favor to a longtime family friend, she agreed to look over the recipes in a church-affiliated cookbook and give her opinion on whether the book deserved wider distribution. Julia always tried to be honest when asked for an opinion; this time she was blunt as well. Any further distribution of this book would be a disservice to the entire country, she told her friend, and offered a few examples of what she meant.
Page 75. Green beans with poppy seed dressing—canned green beans steeped in a mess of 1½ cups sugar, mustard, salt, onion juice, vinegar and salad oil. Ugh. “Farewell to the departing minister” is the title of this dinner, and one realizes why he left town….
Page 133. Packaged lime gelatin mixed with water, melted marshmallows, canned pineapple, cottage cheese, whipping cream and nuts. This is a ghastly horrible disgraceful kind of dish that no one should hear of, even less eat. And to push this kind of food onto the American public should be considered a felony.
It was probably the Jell-O that set her off—one of the few products that Julia held to be beyond redemption. But if she made common cause here with critics of American food and cooking, she broke with them on nearly every other issue. Julia didn’t adopt any of her political positions automatically, any more than she would have praised a new cookbook without giving it careful study.