Laura Shapiro (18 page)

In the months following Julia's death, many people took down their old copies of
Mastering
and made farewell dinners; others offered their best imitations of her inimitable voice; and just about everyone who remembered her on television lifted a glass to send a heartfelt
“Bon appétit!”
in the general direction of paradise. Her fans, who had long ago stopped making veal Prince Orloff, if indeed they ever attempted it, never forgot what they absorbed from Julia about good cooking. Learn how to do this, she would say, picking up a knife or an egg or a wriggling lobster. Try this, you can do it. Determination was what mattered, skill was the only shortcut they would ever need, and anything taking a long time was probably worth it. The food industry was spending millions to hammer home precisely the opposite message, but Julia had a source of power greater even than a national ad budget could purchase: people trusted her. She was the rare celebrity who never fell from grace.

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 also a vigorous supporter of the Schlesinger Library at Harvard, which houses one of the nation's most substantial culinary collections. She donated her own papers and persuaded Simca and Avis to do the same, and her participation in library events brought it considerable visibility. She liked to think that someday all the culinary collections in the United States would be “connected by computer,” with the Schlesinger at the center of a national research network buzzing constantly with new findings and ideas. “Me, I am not an intellectual,” she had said ruefully to Avis years earlier. But of course she was—her passion for food raced through her whole body and fired her brain as well. One of her lasting gifts to the food world was to help make it a place where good minds could settle in for life.

French cooking, Julia style, flourished at countless dinner parties for a decade or so, but eventually gave way to simpler, lighter cuisines. Though
Mastering
remains the gold standard for learning French techniques and recipes, it's a rare host or hostess who makes an entire, head-spinning meal from Julia's repertoire the way her early fans sometimes did. By the time she died, American cooking reflected far more direct influences from California and Italy than from any of Julia's books, and the culinary stage she had once dominated was crowded with stars. Julia welcomed all of them; she was always looking for what she called “new blood” for the profession. Yet it's doubtful whether any of the prolific, telegenic cooking experts who came after Julia have ever touched an audience the way she did. Today there appear to be two kinds of good cooks: those who want to impress people and those who want to feed people. The meal may be delicious in either case, but you can always tell the difference, in part because it's written across the face of the cook when he or she presents the platter. “Admire me,” some of their expressions seem to say. “Here, this is for you, let's eat!” say the others. Julia's ego was never visible when she cooked: it seemed to flow directly into the food and emerge as a gift of herself. “Thank you!” people often wrote in their fan letters. It was the first thing they wanted to tell her. They understood—watching her ecstatically smell a vanilla bean, or nail an eel by the head to a board for easier peeling, or put a freshly baked baguette to her ear (“Now this
crackles
!”), or hold up a spoon with its miraculous cloud of beaten egg whites—that she was teaching them how to live.

J
ULIA
C
HILD
gave nearly all her personal and professional papers to the Schlesinger Library at Harvard; and in those dozens of cartons I found most of the material for the facts, inferences, and quotations in this book. The library also holds the papers of Avis DeVoto, whose correspondence provided details on the publishing of
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
as well as other insights into Julia's life and times.

Among secondary sources, the most important to me was Noel Riley Fitch's
Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child
(Doubleday, 1997), which I drew on especially in describing Julia's childhood in California, her education, and her life just after college.
Sisterhood of Spies: The Women of the OSS,
by Elizabeth P. McIntosh (Naval Institute Press, 1998), supplied information on Julia's wartime experiences. Hundreds of journalists interviewed Julia over the years, but the most substantive articles remain the
Time
cover story (November 25, 1966) and the profile by Calvin Tomkins in
The New Yorker
(December 23, 1974). I made use of both, and occasionally of other newspaper and magazine stories as well.

To describe and quote from Julia's television programs, I used notes and transcripts in the Schlesinger archives, and the DVDs of
The French Chef
produced by WGBH Boston Video.

I'm sorry that the Penguin Lives format does not include footnotes, but researchers who would like to track down specific references are invited to write to me care of the publisher.

I
AM INDEBTED
first and forever to Fern Berman, who called me one day with a really good idea for a book. In the course of the research that followed, I received generous help from Marilyn Mellowes, Stephanie Hersh, Joan Reardon, Clark Wolf, Patty Unterman, Linda McJannet, Rebecca Alssid, Fran Carpentier, Judith Jones, and Ken Schneider, and librarians at the Boston Public Library and the Smithsonian Institution. As always, the staff at the Schlesinger Library supported my research with assistance that was not only efficient but constantly enlightening.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to publish excerpts from letters and other writings:

Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts, William A. Truslow, Trustee.

Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

Mark DeVoto for the Avis DeVoto letters in the Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.