Laura Shapiro by Julia Child Page B

all-white dinner evoking a temple of purity. But Julia believed as they did that good cooking was pragmatic cooking, a matter of forming the right habits and using them daily—a discipline, not a burst of inspiration. One day she took a piece of notepaper and wrote “A good cook” at the top of it. Then she jotted down a definition: “is consistently good—not just a little flair here & there—She can turn out a good meal either simple or complicated, can adapt herself to conditions, and has enough exp. to change a failure into a success. If the fish doesn’t moose [mousse]—it becomes a soup. Matter of practice & passion.” Practice and passion: Julia put them together and kept them there in all her teaching and writing, twin imperatives that were useless when separated.
    During the years that she and Simca were working on the book, they rarely inhabited the same kitchen. Paul was posted to Marseille in 1954, then to Bonn, then back home to Washington, and finally to Oslo before retiring in 1961. Although the two women were able to visit each other occasionally for marathon cooking sessions, most of their discussions and fights were carried on by letter. Recipes, notes, suggestions, additions, revisions, and corrections flew back and forth, sometimes in quantities that would have merited a doctoral degree in any other discipline. When Julia launched an assault on cassoulet—a rich and hefty assortment of beans, meats, and sausages that could take up to three days to prepare—she first rounded up twenty-eight recipes, all authentic from reputable sources, many of them contradictory. She and Simca winnowed them down, combining and refining and rewriting until they reached a single, triumphant version, all the while carrying on a blazing argument about preserved goose. Few American households were likely to have access to preserved goose, but Simca insisted it was essential: without it, they couldn’t call the dish cassoulet. Mutton stew, perhaps. But not cassoulet. Julia pounded her with source after source that omitted preserved goose. At length Julia won, though the two families ate many more cassoulets than anyone wished before a truce was declared.
    Other recipes were simpler, but everything required numerous tweaks and tinkerings before both women were satisfied. Working on spinach, Julia picked up an idea from a book and dashed off a note in the scramble of French and English with which she always wrote to Simca. “Suggestion which comes from A. Suzanne, a contemporary of Escoffier, which is to put une pointe d’ail in les epinards, especially ‘au jus,’ and even à la crème. So small it is hardly noticeable, it does a certain amount of relevement which is very agreeable. Please try.” Every nuance counted; every minor shift in method had to be recorded. “I want every detail from you that you can think of,” Julia begged. “Whether or not I use the detail is of no matter, I want it anyway. People must say of this book, A MARVELOUS BOOK. I’ve never been able to make cake before, but now I can.”
    This imagined reader, the desperate homemaker who couldn’t cook until the right book fell into her hands, had a permanent place in Julia’s consciousness and directly inspired the immense amount of detail that characterized her recipes. Like a ghost from Julia’s own past, she trailed Julia from kitchen to desk and back again, forever trying to figure out whether the roast was done, why the chops were steaming in the pan instead of browning properly, what made the cream puffs soggy, and exactly how thick the beef slices should be: a quarter inch? an eighth of an inch? Julia often called her “the young bride.” Simca, of course, had no such creature haunting her—she had been a young bride who cooked splendidly from the first day—and Julia had to plead with her to measure and test with scientific rigor.