Laura Shapiro by Julia Child Page A

different bouillabaisses, and they were all “real.” To Julia, traditional French cooking was resilient, a living thing that flowed this way and that across time and through one kitchen after another. But if that was the case, if authenticity wandered from this household to that, what held the tradition together? What made French cooking French?
    When it became apparent that this was how Julia was thinking about the project, and that work on the cookbook was going to be finicky, tedious, and research-driven, Louisette drifted away. Years later, she would produce cookbooks of her own, but she just didn’t think about the kitchen the way Simca and Julia did. From time to time she sent along a few ideas, but her participation was minimal. Julia wasn’t surprised. “I think the book is out of her depth,” she told Avis. “She is the charming ‘little woman’ with a talent and a taste for cooking, but a most disorganized and ultra feminine mind.” Still, the book had been Louisette’s idea in the first place; she was a good friend, and her home life was falling apart. Simca and Julia didn’t have the heart to turn their backs on her. Louisette’s name remained as coauthor, but she was allotted a smaller percentage of the royalties.
    So the working team became Simca and Julia, two loving colleagues who fought their way through every recipe in the book. Fundamentally, they were incompatible—Simca wielded her intuition, Julia her intellect—which made for an exhausting collaboration but did produce a manuscript true to both of them. Avis, who watched them cooking together in Julia’s kitchen in Provence one winter, said afterward that Simca was too excitable to win most of their arguments: she was constantly waving knives in the air, clashing pans around, and speaking floods of high-speed French. Julia used similar tactics but kept her wits about her and wore down her opponent by sheer tenacity. Paul thought that the reason they never actually tore each other’s hair out was that for all their differences, “both have their eyes on the target rather than on themselves.”
    The division of labor was clear from the start: Simca’s job was to be French, and Julia’s was to be American. Simca had no trouble with this assignment: her recipes and all her experience in the kitchen flowed from the culture in which she grew up. She had French cooking, as Avis put it, “in her blood and bones.” Many of her recipes were original, but they were all outcroppings from the culinary tradition she had inherited and tended with care. To stand back and scrutinize the tradition objectively did not come easily to her: it was like trying to diagram the flavor of apples.
    Julia, by contrast, was an American by temperament as well as birth who heartily believed in the scientific approach. To her, French culinary tradition was a frontier, not a religion, and the evidence of things unseen was no evidence at all. Although her favorite cookbook from home was Joy of Cooking, Julia had in her more than a touch of Fannie Farmer—the dedicated, charismatic cooking teacher who introduced level measurements in the late nineteenth century because her students wanted to know what “a pinch” of salt was, and how much flour was meant by “a handful.” Like Miss Farmer, who was a leader in the moral and culinary reform movement known as scientific cookery, Julia saw a higher realm waiting for those who mastered the skills of the kitchen; and she shared Miss Farmer’s certainty that painstaking methods and precise instructions had the power to transform both the cooking and the cook. To be sure, Julia’s vision of a higher realm was one rampant with pleasure, conviviality, and the free play of the senses. This was hardly what the pious founders of scientific cookery had in mind for their students and followers, whose lessons sometimes culminated in an