Laura Shapiro (16 page)

When it came to more ambitious restaurants, however, Julia put France firmly in the lead. She and Paul ate out very little during their first fifteen or twenty years in Cambridge, because the experience was so crushingly disappointing. They liked having lunch at the Ritz, in downtown Boston, and they welcomed Joyce Chen's, acclaimed as the first restaurant in the area to offer refined, authentic Chinese cooking. But for the most part, they ate at home, until a new generation of young American chefs—many inspired by Julia herself—began coming of age. The first local restaurant she was genuinely impressed by was the Harvest, on Brattle Street in Cambridge, where chef Lydia Shire started cooking in the mid-seventies. Julia was pleased to see a woman chef making good progress, and loved the food. But every time she and Paul returned to France, they were captivated all over again by the charm and professionalism of the restaurants, especially the informal bistros they liked best. They always had the traditional dishes they had ordered for years—“Simple things, like a soupe de poissons and a sole meunière”—and they basked in the atmosphere. “There is a seriousness of the cooking and serving, as well as an essential gaiety in the air that are like nothing else.” At the three-star level, she thought French restaurants were much like their equivalents in New York; but the smaller places, to her, represented everything she loved about France.

French markets, on the other hand, couldn't begin to compare with what Julia fondly referred to as “my nice clean Star Market on Beacon St.” When American food writers complained about pallid tomatoes and yellow plastic cheeses, or when chefs visiting from France told the press they couldn't buy what they needed in American markets because the quality was so poor, Julia was indignant. “Yesterday we did a quick shopping at San Peyre,” she wrote to her family from Provence in 1977. “I thought to myself what a really disgusting market it was. The canned goods no one could complain of, but the meat was so revolting. Beef all dark red with limp yellow surrounding fat, no marbling, dried up edges. (The flies one is used to.) Everything looked simply disgusting…. Now that they can get everything from everywhere, we get just the same rock hard peaches, plums, pears and nectarines here as you get at home, that rot before they ripen.” In the same letter she rejoiced in what was just coming into season—“We are finally getting local tomatoes, that yummy fresh garlic, and big white fresh onions, and those baby melons!” The moral was clear, and she preached it often: you have to shop carefully wherever you are.

That year, at home in Cambridge, she invited the innovative and widely admired French chef Michel Guérard to dinner and made lobster mayonnaise, saddle of lamb, broccoli, and a tarte tatin. It was a triumph of a meal, and as she told Simca proudly, “All this good food came from plain old markets.” For the tart she had used Golden Delicious apples, which critics of the food system often singled out as representing the worst of American industrial farming: always available, always sturdy, always utterly bland. Guérard had praised everything, including the apples. “And I was interested that Guérard had no complaints about shopping, about butter, or cream, or vegetables, meat or fish,” she added. She was particularly pleased that Guérard and his wife had raved about the broccoli, one of her favorite American vegetables and one unknown in France. He told her that he was going to plant some himself when he got home. Meanwhile, she fumed, writers such as Karen Hess and Waverly Root—two of the most prominent, and searing, critics of the food industry—were claiming that Americans ate nothing but slop. “What are these people talking about?” Julia demanded. “You can get disgusting things anywhere.” If high-quality ingredients weren't available, she instructed, choose another recipe. Or buy the ingredients frozen or canned, and work them over until they tasted right.

The very idea that convenience products might have a role in good cooking appalled purists, but Julia never rejected food just because it came from a factory. She thought bottled lemon juice was perfectly fine, and she liked the flavored salt sent to her by the manufacturer so much that she wrote back suggesting the company next put up a traditional
épices fines,
or French spice mixture, using the recipe from
Larousse Gastronomique.
“I always have to grind this up myself, but would love to have the exact copy in a bottle,” she said—a statement so unabashedly American it would have made some of her colleagues in French cookery cringe. What mattered in most recipes was the cooking, Julia believed: a sloppy, mindless approach to the kitchen was far more damaging than any convenience product could possibly be. The reason she detested canned soup casseroles wasn't just that they tasted definitively of canned soup, but that they elevated speed over all other considerations. Real cooking took time. Real cooking took effort. Real cooking took a bit of intelligence. These particular ingredients were fundamental, and they were the very ones that tended to be missing from many American recipes, certainly those aimed at housewives. Once, as a favor to a longtime family friend, she agreed to look over the recipes in a church-affiliated cookbook and give her opinion on whether the book deserved wider distribution. Julia always tried to be honest when asked for an opinion; this time she was blunt as well. Any further distribution of this book would be a disservice to the entire country, she told her friend, and offered a few examples of what she meant.

It was probably the Jell-O that set her off—one of the few products that Julia held to be beyond redemption. But if she made common cause here with critics of American food and cooking, she broke with them on nearly every other issue. Julia didn't adopt any of her political positions automatically, any more than she would have praised a new cookbook without giving it careful study. By temperament and belief she was a liberal, but never a knee-jerk one. Gun control, censorship, abortion rights—on issues like these she was staunchly aligned with the left. But when food became a political issue, as it did during the 1970s, she carved out a position of her own that puzzled a good many of her colleagues and admirers. These were the years when journalists, food writers, and environmental activists began zeroing in on modern American agriculture and the food industry. In books, articles, and lawsuits they publicized the threat to human health and the damage to soil, water, and biodiversity posed by chemical-heavy factory farming; and they vociferously mourned the loss of taste and texture in fruits, vegetables, and meats. Other aspects of the American way of culinary life—convenience products, overpackaging, artificial ingredients, the supermarket system itself—tumbled into disrepute as well. Gastronomes had never admired the technological sheen of the American food supply, and now it was a full-fledged object of scorn.

Julia had little sympathy with this movement, in part because she refused to think of the food industry as an enemy. Since the earliest years of her career, whenever she wanted reliable information on anything from flour to seafood, she habitually wrote to the major food companies or to such trade organizations as the Dairy Council, the Meat and Livestock Board, and the Egg Board. “I don't know as much as I would like to know about rice, and would very much appreciate any documentation you might be so kind as to give,” she once wrote to the Rice Council, adding that she wanted “deeply technical documentation (
not
typical housewife stuff which doesn't go deeply enough into things).” Such queries brought a steady supply of industry-generated literature to her mailbox (including, in this case, “Reduction of Cohesion in Canned Pearl Rice by Use of Edible Oil Emulsions and Surfactants”), which she pored over eagerly. When it came to a standoff between these long-trusted sources and the activists who were assailing them, she sided with her sources. Pesticides? Hormones in beef cattle? Antibiotics in chickens? She researched these problems by going to the same sorts of experts she had always trusted in the past, and took their word as objective.

Her distrust of health-minded reformers in the food world also went back many years. She had been battling nutritionists ever since she described in
Mastering,
and then demonstrated on television, the proper French way to cook green vegetables—namely, in a large quantity of rapidly boiling water. Nutritionists and home economists wrote to complain that all the vitamins went down the drain, and that the approved method was to cook vegetables in as little water as possible. Julia always countered that the vegetables were so much tastier when prepared by her method that people ate more, and thus took in many more vitamins. But the criticism irritated her: she called the early health-food advocate Adele Davis “that dreadful woman” and said that Davis's vegetables were so limp and gray, no wonder she had to take vitamin pills. The very idea that people could look upon food as medicine, that they might sit down to eat thinking only about their arteries or their risk of cancer, appalled Julia; and she fought it long and hard. “The dinner table is becoming a trap rather than a pleasure,” she often said, and she once pointed out that she'd never met a “healthy, normal nutritionist who loves to eat.” When articles about cholesterol began appearing in the sixties, she made a firm decision not to believe them. Even after she finally conceded the importance of cutting down on fat, and began devising lighter recipes, she retained a sacred place for butter and cream in her cooking. “In this book, I am very conscious of calories and fat,” she assured readers in
The Way to Cook,
her magnum opus published in 1989. Sure enough she included “low-fat cookery” in the index and listed some two dozen recipes under that heading. Every time she offered a dish such as Broiled Fish Steaks au Natural, however, she suggested a few good ways to perk it up: namely, Lemon-Butter Sauce, “1½ to 2 Tbs soft butter, optional.”

As for organic food, as far as Julia was concerned it was even worse than health food. In 1971, she received a newsletter from the United Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Association, a trade group, which featured an essay titled “The ‘Organic Food' Kick,” by R. A. Seelig. Julia read it, photocopied it, often quoted it, and used it as the basis of much of her thinking about food reformers. “In the real world of farming today there is no room for the cult that regards ‘natural methods' as good, and all improvements on nature as bad,” Seelig wrote. “Many of the organic food cultists, who go arm in arm with the ‘health food' faddists, appear to have a semi-religious conviction that what is natural is a manifestation of God's purpose, while what is scientific is a denial of God's plan.” This was the sort of language guaranteed to set Julia squarely against advocates of organic farming. She and Paul avoided all manifestations of organized religion; and the lesson Julia had drawn from her own conversion experience, back at the Cordon Bleu, was that science and logic easily trumped instinct and faith at every stage of cooking. “I just do not want to be allied to any cultist type of operation, which this could well turn out to be,” she told a group called CHEFS (Chefs Helping to Enhance Food Safety), which was enlisting chefs to promote organic farming. “I am for hard scientific facts.”

The scientific facts that most appealed to her were those offered up by such organizations as the American Council on Science and Health, a group funded in part by the food industry and notorious among reformers for taking the industry's point of view on everything from sugar-laden breakfast cereals to genetically modified tomatoes. Julia became a financial supporter of the council and appeared at one of its press events. She called the genetic engineering of food “one of the greatest discoveries” of the twentieth century, spoke out in favor of irradiation as a food safety measure while terming opponents “Nervous Nellies,” and agreed to provide a testimonial in favor of monosodium glutamate when it came under attack in 1991. Since she had always disliked MSG, she rejected the wording offered by the industry (“Like all chefs, I have used MSG as an ingredient in recipes for years”) and instead called MSG “a harmless food additive that can make good food taste even better.” What was truly “evil,” she added, was to frighten the public with misinformation.

The one area of food safety in which she readily sided with the reform organizations was the problem of contamination in shellfish. When a subcommittee of the House of Representatives held hearings on the subject, Julia agreed to supply written testimony, and she discussed the issue in public on other occasions as well. “Only a small percentage of the fish and shellfish sold in this country is inspected for wholesomeness by government agents,” she told a meeting of the Newspaper Food Editors and Writers Association in 1988. The solution was supposed to be thorough cooking, “but who wants to cook an oyster till it's a piece of cement?” Fish cookery was dear to her heart, and anything that interfered with a lovely poached oyster garnish for sole
à la Normande
in her estimation plainly deserved a major public outcry.

For the most part, however, Julia was unable to make the connection between enjoying food and working to radically overhaul the food system. To forge precisely such a connection was the aim of the second wave of culinary enthusiasts, the ones inspired by Alice Waters, whose Chez Panisse restaurant opened in Berkeley in 1971 and spawned the revolution known as California cuisine. Though Waters and her colleagues shared some of the philosophy behind nouvelle cuisine, the much-hyped effort on the part of French chefs to invigorate classic cooking by making it lighter, less formulaic, and more sharply focused on fresh ingredients, the spirit of the California movement was very different. The burden of the past wasn't an issue for American restaurants. Waters had been dazzled by the clarity and depth, the almost voluptuous simplicity of the home cooking she tasted in the French countryside. She opened Chez Panisse with a dream of re-creating that food in Berkeley—which meant her chefs had to start, as those countryside cooks started, with the ingredients around them. This emphasis on ingredients was what made America's newest cuisine a political movement as well as a gastronomic one. Its aim was to reduce the reach of agribusiness while promoting the incomparable flavors of ingredients that came directly from nearby growers—to put a fresh, local chicken in every pot.