Laura Shapiro (17 page)

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 items, to be published in the company catalog. Julia was pleased with the assignment—it would be another year before she made her decision to turn down all commercial offers—and set about testing dozens of S. S. Pierce products. Tiny Whole Carrots she found very good, especially when she cooked them in her own brown glazing sauce with parsley, but Chicken à la King needed quite a bit of help from chopped sautéed ham, scallions, hard-boiled eggs, tarragon, a bit of cornstarch for thickening, and some vermouth. No matter what she did to the cream of avocado soup, it was poor, and the canned chicken was undeniably stringy, though marinating it in a vinaigrette and adding homemade mayonnaise made it tastier.

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.

Surely this was the only tuna casserole recipe ever devised that included the instruction “Correct seasoning.”

J
ULIA 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 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 a series of strokes. For some fifteen years he gradually lost stamina and mental functioning, as well as much of his personality. It was the end of the team as a working enterprise, but Julia honored what remained as long as she possibly could. Wherever she went—to a television rehearsal or taping, a business meeting, a reception in her honor, a dinner party—Paul accompanied her just as he always had. On a trip to Washington in 1976, he participated in all the publicity events including radio programs. “Even if he answered quite other things than the questions posed, it made little difference,” Julia reported. “So we shall just go on as usual, as long as he is happy.” He still looked over the mail and jotted comments on it, but his once-graceful handwriting was shaky, and his notes in the margins were plaintive: “I find this impossible to understand.” “What is this about!” Sometimes he dozed off at the dinner table or became confused or angry because he couldn't follow the conversation; often the two of them left social events early. Julia never made apologies for her silent, sometimes difficult companion, though she used to poke him when he dropped off at dinner. “He is generally happy and says people just don't think or talk clearly and no wonder nobody understands what's going on!” she told Simca in 1985. “As long as he feels that way, we're saved.”

Two years later his condition had worsened so markedly that Julia was forced to admit he was “truly on the downhill grade,” but even then she was incapable of dwelling on the dark side. “Fortunately he does not know the state he is in, and remains in good humor with, so far, good enough appetite,” she told Simca. “And thank heaven I have plenty of work to do.” France dropped away from their life during these years, and they traded in the long Cambridge winters for Santa Barbara, where Julia bought an apartment by the sea. Finally, in 1989, she was forced to put him in a nursing home, where she visited several times a day and called between visits. He died five years later.

Julia cried readily, when life warranted it, but she never felt sorry for herself. Her own death was an event she rarely contemplated—“May we all go out like rockets, rather than delayed fuses!”—though she thought it was sensible to plan for old age. Long before she needed it, she made sure she had a place reserved at a retirement complex in Santa Barbara for what she called “the final days.” She knew she would outlive Paul, and she had no intention of being “old Mrs. Non-compos in a big Cantabridgian mansion.” As Paul faded from her, however, she found she was increasingly aware of what it meant to grow old without children. She had never poured a great deal of regret into the fact that she couldn't have children; she simply accepted it. But now, as she told Simca, she could see the difference between childless women like themselves, and someone like Avis, who had children and grandchildren around her in her last years. “Eh bien, we shall take care of ourselves,” was the characteristic way Julia wound up this train of thought. As it turned out, her last years overflowed with family, friends, and colleagues, including—to her delight—a tall, engaging widower named John McJannet, with whom she kept company for several years in the 1990s.

Reporters frequently asked what she would eat if she were sitting down to her last meal. Oysters, she often said, and roast duck. A delicious salad, a perfectly ripe pear, a taste of chocolate. Once an interviewer wanted to know what she would prepare if she were cooking a meal for God. Julia was a devout atheist, but not where food was concerned. She was happy to contemplate a meal so exquisite the creator of the world would be very glad he had gone to all the trouble. “To show him the wonders of the earth?” she asked. “Well, we did a lovely dish of poached fresh artichoke bottoms filled with oysters in a white butter sauce and that was awfully nice. You could add some truffles, too. Then, I would make one of my duck recipes, some lovely fresh asparagus, and some braised Belgian endive, and some of my fresh French rolls.” A puff pastry dessert with raspberries, and then a little sherbet completed this offering, which to Julia constituted a fine definition of the sacred.

But on one occasion, when it was the food lover and restaurateur George Lang who asked her the last-meal question for a magazine column, she wrote out a response in such thoughtful detail that she really did seem to be imagining life's farewell banquet. She began with the most important element of all: “My last meal would be cooked at home with a friend or two that I like to cook with.” There would be six at table, always the number she considered just right for a dinner party, and they would start with Cotuit oysters, “accompanied by very thinly sliced homemade rye bread, lightly buttered.” Caviar and vodka next, then “some very fresh, fine, green California asparagus,” and for the main course one of her favorite duck dishes—“the one in which you roast the duck until the breast is rare and then cook the legs and wings separately en confit, with a very nice light port wine sauce.” Peas and
pommes Anna
would be served, and a great wine, “probably a light Burgundy or a St. Émilion.” The salad would be just lettuce and endive, with lemon and French olive oil in the dressing, and she might give it a sprinkling of walnuts. “I like salad and cheese together, but we would also have wine because the salad would have practically no acid in it,” she explained. A Burgundy might be just right, depending on the cheeses, and she specified not only the bread but the bakery—“really good French bread, probably from Les Belles Miches and some of the Santa Barbara sour dough.” For dessert, her own beloved charlotte Malakoff and a Château d'Yquem. Ripe grapes and a Comice pear, perhaps chocolate truffles with coffee, and “a fine selection of great liqueurs”—calvados, framboise, prune, and marc de Bourgogne—would round out the dinner. “At least that meal would suit me now,” she reflected, “and probably would then, at the very end, before we all slipped off the raft.”

The meal that suited her at the very end was quite a bit simpler. In 2004, Julia was living in Santa Barbara, increasingly frail after a year marked by knee surgery, a bout of postoperative complications and infections, kidney failure, more knee surgery, and a stroke. Recuperating from the knee surgery had been agonizing: it was so painful to stand up, and she was still so weak from the stroke that for the first time in her life she refused to try. Her longtime assistant, Stephanie Hersh, told the rehabilitation staff to move Julia's wheelchair to a kitchen and ask her to chop some onions. It worked—the kitchen counter itself seem to draw her to her feet, and rehab could begin. But over the next months, her world shrank and her days became meager. She had liked going for drives and to the movies, but these became impossible; she could no longer sit at the computer and work; she slept a great deal. Friends came by for short visits, which she enjoyed; and food was a source of delight to the end. Stephanie knew Julia's appetite very well after so many years together, and on August 11, she made a pot of onion soup, using the recipe from
Mastering.
The aroma of a rich onion soup was always one of Julia's favorites—“That's a wonderful smell and a very appetizing one,” she had declared on
The French Chef,
breathing in the heady fragrance of onions, butter, bouillon, and wine. She had the soup for dinner that August night, and ate with pleasure. The next day, her doctor called to report that Julia had picked up an infection and had to be hospitalized for treatment. Julia was reluctant. Would it make her better? she asked. No, he said, not really. She decided against treatment. It was time to leave: she had had all she wanted, she was grateful, and she was full. Stephanie settled her into bed for a nap, with the cat on the covers next to her, and Julia never woke up. She died early in the morning of August 13, two days before her ninety-second birthday.