Julia Child_ A Life - Laura Shapiro [67]
If there was anything ironic about how hard she had to work in order to make these so-called convenience foods acceptable, Julia didn’t see it. To her, they were just fruits, vegetables, and meats; and like any other ingredients, they needed the best a cook could give them. Picking up a can of S. S. Pierce tuna, she decided to write a recipe for the most famously convenient, famously derided supper dish in the American repertoire—and to make a version worthy of any dinner table she knew, including her own.
Place about 2 cups of drained canned tuna in a bowl. Flake the fish, then fold in two thirds of your cream sauce. Fold in also, if you wish, 2 or 3 sliced hard-boiled eggs and 1/3 cup of coarsely grated Swiss cheese. Correct seasoning. Spread seasoned and buttered cooked rice or noodles in the bottom of a 2½-quart casserole, turn the sauced fish over it, and cover with the remaining sauce. Sprinkle with 2 or 3 tablespoons of grated Swiss cheese and a tablespoon of butter cut into dots. Half an hour before you are ready to serve, set the casserole in a pre-heated 375-degree oven until bubbling hot and the top has browned. This makes a delicious main course, and needs only a green salad and a nice white Bordeaux or rosé wine to make quite a feast.
Surely this was the only tuna casserole recipe ever devised that included the instruction “Correct seasoning.”
Chapter 7
She Likes to Eat
JULIA NEVER USED the word gourmet. She did have a soft spot for gourmette, at least when it was associated with her favorite organization of food-minded women in Paris; but gourmet as most Americans paraded around the term conjured to Julia an odious mix of pretension, snobbery, and ignorance. When she and Simca and Louisette were trying to think up a name for their school, they decided to call themselves “gourmandes” instead. A gourmand, Julia explained, was “one who knows good food thoroughly and has a fine appetite.” Later, working on the introduction to Mastering, she experimented with the phrasing of a theme she would return to again and again, whenever anyone asked who her audience was, or precisely which Americans were out there roasting squabs and setting them atop liver canapés. “We’ve visualized our readers simply as those who love to eat and love to cook & want a working knowledge of French techniques,” she wrote in the draft. Here and forever, the operative word was love. In other notes for the introduction, she called the book “serious & loving,” and she said it was aimed at “people who love to eat, for they are the great cooks of this world.” Or, as she put it to Avis early in their friendship, “People who love to eat are always the best people.” Eagerness, appetite, a willingness to work, and the constant delight of discovery—for Julia, loving food and loving life were the same. “Why is French cooking so good?” she asked herself once, composing the beginning of a magazine article as she sat surrounded by the notes, recipes, and reference books that abundantly fed her workdays. “It is love that makes it so.”
Julia loved food in many ways, and for many reasons. Deliciousness was always a good reason to love something she had just tasted, but awfulness had charms as well. The first time she encountered English food in all its legendary misery, she was entranced: “There, on an immense white platter, sprawling over a