Julia Child_ A Life - Laura Shapiro [71]
In the obituaries and remembrances that followed her death, she was often hailed as the person who led us out of the canned soup fifties into a land flowing with boutique wines and fusion cuisine—or, as her achievement was often summed up, the woman who introduced us to quiche. Nobody knew better than Julia that she had not, in fact, introduced us to quiche. As early as 1957, when she was living in Washington, she wrote to Simca to let her know that recipes for quiche lorraine and coquilles St. Jacques were circulating widely and had become “very well known here”—not like pizza, to be sure, but hardly novelties. Sophisticated home cooking had a decent constituency in the land of the cake mix long before Mastering appeared. What Julia did do first, and single-handedly, was to make sophisticated home cooking count. She made it impossible to ignore. Publishers, food editors, television executives, the food industry—everyone who believed that American women were pledged for all eternity to frozen chicken potpies had to rethink a great many assumptions in the wake of The French Chef. Cookbooks themselves changed, as publishers saw an eager readership developing for books that explained technique as well as offering recipes. True, most people in the 1960s and 1970s would no sooner have opened one of Julia’s books in search of dinner than they would have climbed on a unicycle to get to work. Family meals across the nation still centered on long-familiar recipes for meat loaf and pork chops; and dieting had established its own ceaseless track through the kitchen. But Julia’s startling leap to fame with cassoulet and white-wine fish sauces could not be dismissed. Apparently, some people really did want to buy whisks and shallots and food processors, and really did want to try lengthy recipes for French, or Chinese, or Italian, or Indian food. If that was the case, nobody in the culinary business was going to stand in the way. The success of her books and television programs created a permanent and ever-expanding niche market for good food in America.
The legacy Julia herself had in mind was not confined to the kitchen. In the last fifteen or twenty years of her life, she thought a great deal about what it would take to establish gastronomy as an academic discipline—“like architecture,” she told a reporter in 1989. “It took architects years to get established, to show that it was not just a purely artisanal affair, and that’s what I hope will happen. It would be a fine arts degree just like any other, but majoring in gastronomy.” Much of her time and energy, and an immense amount of her celebrity, were put to the service of this dream. She lobbied hard for Boston University to set up such a program, and was rewarded in 1991 when BU began offering a master of liberal arts degree in gastronomy through its Metropolitan College. In 1996, New York University established a program in food studies at both the undergraduate and graduate levels; and as the idea caught on around the country, food studies came to be recognized as one of the liveliest and fastest-growing disciplines in academia. Julia was