Laura Shapiro by Julia Child

constant reference to the history of French culinary practice and style as she moved from soups to meats to vegetables to desserts with the wisdom of a professional. Yet she could look at any given recipe as if she were an everyday home cook with a penchant for disaster. Her discussion of scrambled eggs started with a detailed scrutiny of the proper pan, then considered several methods of beating the eggs and compared the merits of a whisk versus a wooden spoon, then specified the exact shape of the wooden spoon if that was the utensil chosen, and finally proceeded carefully through the cooking, with instructions on how to avoid crises and how to undertake rescues as necessary. She did all this in a voice so calm and cheerful that whatever she was describing sounded perfectly within the reach of any attentive cook. Julia’s precise debt to Madame Saint-Ange is hard to quantify—the Frenchwoman’s recipes stand behind Julia’s along with many other sources of inspiration—but if Madame Saint-Ange had lived long enough to translate, modernize, and fully Americanize her great work, she might well have come up with Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
    As soon as Julia started to focus on the manuscript in her sharply analytical fashion, she ran into a problem that would keep her in a simmering rage for years. In culinary France, women like Julia—ambitious, intellectual, and irreverent—were not supposed to exist. Madame Saint-Ange was a rare exception to the rule. Women’s place in French cuisine was an honored but quite specific one: it was back home in the provinces, where untutored mamans of legendary talent turned out the magnificent meals their sons remembered forever. This was not Julia’s view of her role. To make matters worse, she was an American; and everyone in France knew for a fact that Americans were pathetic dullards who subsisted on canned food and floppy bread and had never heard of garlic. Dearly though she loved the French, this curtain of smugness, condescension, and superiority that dropped into place whenever the conversation turned to food drove her wild. “There is just an enormous amount of dogmatism to be gotten through in this country,” she complained to Avis. “Cooking being a major art, there are all sorts of men’s gastronomical societies, and books, and great names, and ‘The real ways’ of doing things, many of which have become sacred cows.” Julia was painfully aware of how much she still had to learn, and she wasn’t about to put one word into print that hadn’t been backed up with research and testing. Yet this profound respect for accuracy seemed to count for nothing, compared with the airy certainties of Frenchmen whose culinary wisdom was based in sentiment, not science. “At the party was a dogmatic meatball who considers himself a gourmet but is just a big bag of wind,” she reported indignantly to Avis. “They were talking about Beurre Blanc, and how it was a mystery, and only a few people could do it, and how it could only be made with white shallots from Lorraine over a wood fire. Phoo. But that is so damned typical, making a damned mystery out of perfectly simple things just to puff themselves up. I didn’t say anything as, being a foreigner, I don’t know anything anyway.”
    Practical down to her toes, Julia did not believe that mysteries were in any way related to good cooking. The idea that wondrous and ineffable traditions were granted pride of place among French gastronomes, while her own rigorous testing was seen as the pleasant little pastime of an embassy wife, infuriated her. “Discuss—Dogmatism,” she scribbled on the Trois Gourmandes class schedule one day. She wanted the pupils to be aware that whenever they heard a French food lover talking about the “real” bouillabaisse, or the “real” cassoulet, they should be wary: different households made