Free Laura Shapiro by Julia Child Page B

because it had happened to her. Now she envisioned a culinary America where it happened to everyone: where ordinary home cooks made perfect creamy omelets, kept a useful supply of mirepoix on hand, boned the duck themselves, and always served a welcoming little first course when friends came to dinner. Alas, most Americans would never encounter the Cordon Bleu. The homemaker who wanted to cook something French had nothing to help her but recipes; and how miserably they could fail a hopeful cook, Julia knew well. She had spent years floundering in the awkward gap between the cookbook and the cook, until good teaching set her free. The book she would deliver to Houghton Mifflin must be just that teacher. There was no precedent for such a thing: a guide to authentic French cooking that sat on the kitchen counter calmly issuing instructions and advice in English on what to do, and what problems to expect, and how to fix them. Over the next seven years, as she worked on the manuscript, she circled round and round the core message she wanted to convey, phrasing it this way and that in an effort to pin down a heretical idea that kept prodding at her. What she wanted to tell everyone was this: French food is uniquely French, but a sure and precise route to it can be mapped in any language.
    Julia’s approach to the cookbook project was simple and vast: she would look at every dish in the traditional home repertoire from every perspective she could think of, testing and revising until she came up with a recipe that was absolutely foolproof and irreproachably true to its origins. When Avis asked her once why the book was taking so long, Julia described a typical day’s work, in this instance a day devoted to cabbage soups. She had climbed upstairs to the kitchen with an armful of recipes: Simca’s cabbage soup, numerous other cabbage soups that Julia had gathered from authoritative French cookbooks, and several regional variations. After studying all of them, she decided to try three, following two of them exactly as written and adapting the third for a pressure cooker. Obviously pressure cookers were not traditional, and Julia disliked them on aesthetic grounds (“Stinking, nasty bloody pressure cookers, I hate them!”), but if they could be made to produce good soups, she wanted to know about it. This particular experiment was a flop; the soup had an overprocessed flavor she had come to associate with pressure cookers. Nonetheless, she would keep trying: “Maybe I don’t use it right, but I will persist with an open if distasteful mind.” The conventionally made soups were better, but she was still a long way from having a usable recipe. “I feel 1) there has got to be a good stock of veg. and ham before the cabbage is put in, and that that is one of the ‘secrets’ 2) that the cabbage must not be cooked too long.” Maybe the cabbage would behave better if it were blanched first. Or maybe a different variety of cabbage would be an improvement. “So, all these questions of how and why and what’s the point of it, have to be ironed out,” she concluded. “Otherwise, you get just an ordinary recipe, and that’s not the point of the book.”
    One of the reference books she kept close at hand was La Bonne Cuisine de Madame E. Saint-Ange, first published in 1927 and a bible in millions of French households. Julia often said it was her favorite French cookbook, and she would have been very pleased to see the English translation that finally appeared in 2005. Little is known about Madame Saint-Ange, except that her remarkable expertise ranged from restaurant haute cuisine to economical family cookery; but whenever Julia opened this volume, she found a mission and a sensibility exactly like her own. The recipes didn’t just parade through the book: Madame Saint-Ange was teaching fundamental techniques as well as some thirteen hundred specific dishes, and she made