Julia Child_ A Life - Laura Shapiro [66]
Waters lavished attention and support upon the small farms, ranches, bakeries, and dairies that could supply her with jewellike products; and her chefs applied their considerable skills to showcasing the bounty that arrived in the kitchen each day. Chez Panisse was enormously influential, and chefs across the country began doing their own versions of what was happening in Berkeley, eventually calling it New American cooking. As often as not the watchwords associated with Chez Panisse—“local,” “seasonal,” “organic”—were honored only sporadically in the restaurants that came later. Nonetheless, a powerful new perspective on sophisticated cooking, one that gave pride of place to the freshness and quality of the raw materials, settled in among chefs, food writers, and adventurous home cooks.
Julia saw most of the elaborate innovations wrought in the name of nouvelle cuisine as an appalling insult to the logic and dignity of fine French cooking, and California cuisine struck her as an equally bad idea. She didn’t like the food, and she didn’t like the high-minded, purist approach to shopping and cooking. Great cooking meant, as she often said, doing something to the food, not serving a few slices of humanely raised veal on a plate with three perfect radishes and calling it dinner. She didn’t even like humanely raised veal; she thought it was tasteless. This worshipful approach to ingredients, she told a San Francisco magazine, “takes us away from cuisine as an art form into something that I believe is much too simple, too tiresome.” Worse, the emphasis on organic, artisanal ingredients put California cuisine far beyond the reach of most Americans, who shopped in supermarkets and had never seen a pea shoot or a leaf of baby arugula in their lives. Julia’s entire career was predicated on supermarkets, and she couldn’t see the point of promoting a cuisine that was too rarefied to be supplied by Safeway or Stop & Shop.
Many of Julia’s devoted followers could hardly believe what they were hearing when she voiced some of her most pro-industry opinions. “You, of all my favorite people!” exclaimed a fan who had discovered that Julia saw nothing wrong with irradiating the food supply. But in Julia’s view, her positions weren’t pro-industry, they were pro-food. Unless there was incontrovertible evidence of danger, she was wholly opposed to any measure that restricted food choices, or ruled out a particular category of food, or put any kind of food in a bad light. As she saw it, irradiation didn’t pose nearly the threat that, say, vegetarianism did. To find cruelty in every steak and cholesterol in every spoonful of cream, to sneer at the string beans because they came from a box in the freezer—this wall of suspicion between Americans and their meals was far worse than anything in the food itself. “If fear of food continues, it will be the death of gastronomy in the United States,” she told an interviewer in 1990. Julia could taste the difference between a free-range chicken and its factory counterpart, but she refused to believe good cooking called for a degree of wariness normally associated with managing a chronic disease.
Soon after she began on television in 1963, the venerable Boston company S. S. Pierce, which sold an extensive line of canned fruits, vegetables, and meats, asked her to write an article about cooking with such pantry