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mound of wet rice, lay several large, bony, yellowish pieces of thoroughly boiled fowl, each portion partially masked by a thickish white paste through which protruded chicken hairs, slowly waving.” Every moment of that bleak meal lived up to its reputation, and she cherished the experience. On another occasion, at their house in Provence, she dipped a madeleine into a tisane, or French herbal tea, and nearly swooned with delight. It wasn’t that she loved the taste—the madeleine was a mediocre one from a shop—but that she loved tasting exactly what Proust was talking about. The combination really did produce a unique flavor, one that might well linger beyond memory until released by the dip of another madeleine decades later. “She couldn’t get over it,” Avis told friends afterward.

Food was a restorative, too, the only one she knew. Julia’s preferred treatment for her rare colds was to climb into bed with a bourbon on ice; but if emotions were at issue, she turned immediately to the kitchen. Working with food was more than a source of comfort, it was how she prodded herself to keep moving forward. In 1968, she discovered a lump in her breast, and when she woke up in the hospital after the biopsy, she found she had been given a radical mastectomy. The doctor had warned her of the possibility, but it was still a shock. At first she just sat in the bathtub and cried. “The first view of that mutilated side is far from pleasant,” she recalled later. But as soon as she could, she went straight to work on tripe. What better way to recuperate? As long as she was stuck at home, she might as well figure out how to get squeamish Americans to eat the lining of a cow’s stomach. The very thought of those delectable morsels simmering away for twelve hours with carrots, leeks, garlic, wine, and a few pig’s feet lifted her spirits.

Whatever she was cooking, the chief ingredient was her joyful fanaticism. She relished every opportunity to eviscerate and cut up a whole chicken or a fish—“I time myself every time just to see how fast,” she told Avis—and Paul often described hearing “my tender little wifelet” crash around the kitchen whacking and chopping with enthusiasm, occasionally chastising the cat in French. She gloried in a meal of foie gras marinated in Madeira and cognac, stuck with truffles, wrapped in a pig’s caul, and poached—“We all ate it with a spoon, 8 of us, and we ate every bit of it”—and she just as happily anticipated the long span of lunches following Christmas because she would get to have her favorite leftovers every single day (cold turkey, Virginia ham, homemade mayonnaise, and cherry tomatoes). Eggplant, she once mused to her editor Judith Jones, should always be purchased young, firm, and unwrinkled, like “the lovely nubile elbows, arms and knees of Radcliffe freshmen.” Years after completing the exhaustive recipe research for both volumes of Mastering, she could still throw herself into a culinary challenge as rapturously as a dog chasing a Frisbee. To spend days ferreting out the best way to prepare the lemons for a lemon tart exhilarated her; after a marathon of twenty-five strawberry soufflés, she couldn’t wait to try one more that she thought would be better. Even late in her career, she made a point of developing new recipes every time she gave a class or demonstration. Her audiences wouldn’t have minded if she did a recipe she had already published, but Julia wanted to keep challenging herself, keep pushing forward on what she called “the life work.” There were only two things she hated doing in the kitchen: deep-fat frying, because of the mess and the smell, and making hors d’oeuvres, which were just too dainty for her liking. Julia’s idea of cocktail party food was a good, thick ham sandwich.

Once a writer for Cosmopolitan asked her to name her favorite “binge” foods. Julia said she didn’t have any: “Maybe life itself is the proper binge,” she remarked. When she said this, in 1975, she was nearly a year into the most stressful period of her life: Paul’s long slow deterioration following heart surgery and