RULE ^No. 9:

MAKE THE WORLD YOUR OYSTER (STEW)

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Toujours Bon Appétit.

THE EPISODES OF THE FRENCH CHEF THAT I WATCHED WITH MY mother were only slightly more interesting than the 1968 presidential returns and, a few years later, the Watergate hearings, except for one episode, which I recall in detail: Julia Child’s Reine de Saba (Queen of Sheba) Cake. I’m sure it’s because it had the word cake in the title. I remember Julia cautioning us to make sure we had everything we needed before we began baking, and placing all the ingredients on a special tray, leveling the cup of flour with the back edge of the knife, and checking to see if the cake was done using a toothpick.* But my clearest memory occurs after the show is over, when my mother sighed loudly and flipped her steno book closed with an expression of dissatisfaction I couldn’t name. “Maybe we could make that!” I said. “We don’t bake,” she replied, then lit a cigarette and blew two streams of smoke through her nose. We don’t? All that grocery shopping she did, all that recipe clipping, all that menu planning, all those dinners that took hours to prepare and we didn’t bake? Then I thought a little more and realized that she was right. The Van de Kamp’s oatmeal cookies I was always trying to sneak were store bought, and so was my birthday cake.

Now I was interested.

In the movie version, at this moment there would be a smash cut to me, decades later, a grown woman, standing in my kitchen with a 7UP bottle inside a flour-covered tube sock, expertly rolling out the pastry dough for my much-celebrated lattice-top blackberry pie. I make one or two blackberry pies a week starting in early July, the week marionberries are available at the local farmers’ market.

A cross between the Chehalem and the Olallie berry, the Marion was cultivated at Oregon State University in 1956 and is considered the “cabernet of blackberries” for its complex taste, both sweet and earthy. It’s perfectly delicious, as Julia would say, and I prefer it to all other blackberries for my pies. I love making pies, because unlike whatever that thing is you’ve got stirring in the saucepan, a pie is a beautiful self-contained object that no one really needs, but that everyone, when presented with one, is delighted to have. When it comes to pies I’m not a Flimsie, and over the years I’ve developed the sort of seriousness about pie making of which Julia would approve. Baking one makes me tremble with joy.

The second thing I like to make, and which I am expert at making, is Julia’s Tarte Tatin, invented many years ago by the Tatin sisters in Lamotte-Beuvron, their restaurant in the Loire Valley. It’s a tricky and thrilling dish to pull off, because you construct it upside down, caramelizing the sliced apples on the stove top in a cast-iron skillet, then covering it with pastry dough. After baking it right in the skillet, you haul that baby out of the oven, flip it over onto a big plate, and if you’ve done it right, everything holds together, and the apples, once on the bottom, are now on top, a glistening rich brown. I make Tarte Tatins all fall, stopping only when I can no longer zip up my jeans.

I know a thing or two about making Julia’s Tarte Tatin, as does Kathy, who also considers herself an expert on the matter, and when Marcelline, our own Super-Française, finally granted us permission to use her oven, we decided that we must make one.

That day, once again, it was dreary and raining, and before we left our apartment the neighbor was already shrieking her head off. Who was she yelling at? The poor dog? The young lover she had chained to the hot water pipe? The deformed mother in the wheelchair? No one? The morning of the Tarte Tatin was especially dramatic. When we stood with our ears to the wall the only words we understood were “fucking fucking shit.” Also, the Brie de Meaux we’d gaily purchased the day of our arrival was beginning to stink to high heaven, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to be typically American and throw it out. We were both in a mood.

Marcelline has a small apartment in a high-rise in the 19th, one of the outlying arrondissements where everyday Parisians live, not far from the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, the big, hilly park where Napoleon planted all the exotic trees he could get his hands on—Siberian elms, lindens, ginkos, giant sequoias, and a few cedars of Lebanon.

Marcelline is tiny and brilliant, an English teacher and writer, and inasmuch as any French person falls into the food-as-fuel camp, she does. Her small, neat kitchen is equipped with only the basics; no million-dollar E. Dehillerin copper pots for her.

During most of our time in Paris, I was Kathy’s sous chef, mostly because a lot of what we cooked fell firmly in the sautéing/simmering/deglazing realm of my mother, and thus it was less interesting to me. But the Tarte Tatin was my territory.

Together we made the pastry dough, peeled and sliced the apples. She then arranged them in a pattern at the bottom of the skillet in the butter and sugar and dropped the circle of pastry dough on top.

“Wait!” I cried. “What about the caramelizing?”

“It happens when it bakes,” she said.

“You need to cook it on the stove first, before you put on the dough.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You cook it on the stove first, and baste it with the butter.”

“This is the way Julia does it,” she said.

“No, Julia cooks it on the stove first, then puts it in the oven.”

“No, she doesn’t!”

“Yes, she does!” I cried. A week before we came here I made two Tarte Tatins, and after you arrange the apples in the pan, you baste the apples with the butter to get it to caramelize before it goes in the oven. I’m positive.”

Kathy is half-Serbian and half-Albanian and is much more stubborn than I am, but I knew I was right, and she saw my certainty, and then said, “Well, I’m doing it my way,” and slid the skillet into the oven.

“But you can’t do it your way!” I shouted. “The whole reason we’re here is to cook Julia and this isn’t Julia cooking, it’s your cooking!”

“I’ve done it this way for years.”

“You can’t!”

“I’m doing it this way.”

“Well I’m the one writing the book, and I’m going to use your real name.”*

The Tarte turned out perfectly delicious, if a little pale, because it was under-caramelized, which made complete sense, since if you just throw it in the oven without monitoring the tricky caramelization process, you’re just baking on a wing and a prayer, something of which Julia would never approve. Later, because I couldn’t let it go, I did some research and discovered that in fact both methods were “Julia”; Kathy was making the Tarte Tatin from Mastering, and I was used to the recipe from The Way To Cook,* which is, according to Julia, the fourth iteration of the recipe, and, in her opinion, the final and correct one.

That night we took the Tarte Tatin back to the apartment. I held the plate on my lap in the Metro and was disappointed that no one commented on it. I was disappointed in general, because it turned out that cooking Julia was no guarantee that you would be infused with the magic of being Julia. We were just two old friends in Paris squabbling over how to bake a Tarte.

But when we turned onto rue de l’Exposition, we almost ran into our neighbor, out walking her dog. She was tall but thin and wore a short, chic brown wig. We’d caught her placing something just inside the gate at the Romanian embassy. We pretended to window-shop, looking with feigned interest at the shampoo on display in the Confidence beauty salon, waiting for her to go inside. Once she did, we ran across the street, careful not to drop our Tarte Tatin, to see what she’d left. It was a can of Ocean Spray Cranberry Sauce.

So absurd was this, we forgot our argument, went upstairs, and devoured the tart straight out of the baking dish.

FANFARE FOR THE MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN

By 1966, Julia was it. That year she won an Emmy and appeared on the cover of Time magazine. The illustration showed Julia with redder hair than she’d probably had in thirty years, surrounded by her glimmering copper pots; beneath her chin is a plate of some kind of cartoon-looking fish with orange spots, displayed on a bed of something green. “The Lady with the Ladle,” they called her, and saluted her for single-handedly rescuing Americans from their wretched Miracle Whip salads and gloppy frozen chicken pot pies.

The celebration of Julia as The One was simplistic and inaccurate. Julia’s friend M.F.K. Fisher had been writing about fine dining and gastronomy since the 1930s, Gourmet magazine had been around since 1941, and James Beard, while not a French cook, was a believer in all the things Julia championed: taking your time, cooking with love, having a care for the outcome. Craig Claiborne, who’d trained in French haute cuisine in Lausanne, Switzerland, and who brought major food coverage to the nation’s paper of record, had been reviewing cookbooks and restaurants, and writing columns about fine dining for years.

Still, none of them were Julia.

There is possibly no better middle-aged woman in twentieth-century history than Julia Child. That’s what Time magazine should have celebrated her for. Compared with the mundane yet agonizing minute-to-minute struggles of the regular fifty-four-year-old woman—her age when she was crowned Our Lady of the Ladle—anyone can write a three-pound cookbook and film thirty-four television episodes in a single take over a six-month period, not to mention cook for her husband every night of the Lord. (You didn’t think Paul grilled up his own lamb chops, did you?)

And speaking of Julia’s apple tarts, in an early episode of The French Chef,* watch the first few minutes, and you will see a close-up on Julia’s hands as she prepares the pastry crust, measuring out the flour and cutting in the cold butter. Do you see those spots on her hands? Those are age spots, Reader. And yet, there are her capable hands, working away, and her voice tootles and trills offscreen above them. Her hands have age spots, and yet Julia still thinks what she has to say has merit.

I’m willing to believe that this wasn’t so astounding in the mid-1960s. For one thing, Tina Fey hadn’t yet made the observation that in Hollywood older women (thirty-nine and up) are considered crazy because “the definition of crazy in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore.”

I want to say Fey’s observation wasn’t true in Julia’s day, or if it was no one admitted it. I want to say, “In Julia’s day people had more respect for their elders,” but Julia was so long-lived—she lived to be ninety-one, dying in her sleep two days before her ninety-second birthday *—it would be unclear the “day” to which I’m referring. Also, I remember a moment in 1968, in Laguna Beach, where we had a beach house for a time, when my father, having just come from work in his shirt and tie, was spit on by some hippies sitting on the sidewalk in front of a juice bar, and that’s not very respectful now, is it? But I won’t say those things because it’s the twenty-first century now, and anytime a woman references the past, she renders herself instantly irrelevant. Is this also true for men? I don’t know. Somewhere they have their own apologist tackling this issue.

Julia, the Best Middle-Aged Woman Ever, at least had the advantage of being famous during a time when being middle-aged wasn’t considered an embarrassing display of bad character worthy of shunning. Being an adult was still something to which children and teenagers aspired. Did they sit at the feet of their elders seeking wisdom? Of course not, but they saw that becoming an adult was a prison break. To be an adult meant staying up as late as you wanted, ignoring your chores, spending your money as you pleased, not having to wash your face and brush your teeth, and, best of all, getting stoned without having to roll up a towel and stuff it beneath the door.

Now, because everyone from toddlerhood on up is allowed not only to do whatever they please, but also encouraged to do so in the name of “being who they are,”* middle-aged people rightly see that life is much better when you’re underaged and your skin is rudely smooth, your torso is a taut, flexible stem, and your parents are still footing the bill. When you walk through the world, people admire you for being young and free, consumed with texting and hooking up. No one gazes upon the average fifty-year-old and admires her for supporting those children, for making sure there’s food in the house and on the table, and, possibly, for paying for that house. Wisdom is merely the consolation prize for aging. One could go on, but of course, in going on, one just reaffirms one’s status as a crazy woman in “mid-life,” the new euphemism for middle-age that’s meant to sound more like an expensive blue jean than the depressing reminder of mortality that it is.

No one told Julia that middle-aged women weren’t allowed to hog the spotlight, or that if they did, they could only do it if they passed as someone much younger. Maybe it was all that time spent in Europe, where women aren’t rendered instantly irrelevant at the first hot flash, or maybe it was because Julia was never the prettiest girl in the class, or even one of the pretty ones. “I learned the truth at seventeen/that love was meant for beauty queens,” Janis Ian crooned in 1975. The song won a Grammy and went on to top the billboard charts. Why? Because every record-buying girl between the ages of six and twenty-six knew this to be the Painful Truth of Life.

Except, it isn’t. Because one of the secrets of life, hiding there in plain sight, is that we’re “old,” i.e., not seventeen or eighteen or even twenty-two, for a very long time. So-called “mid-life” is the Sahara Desert of the human life span. It goes on for decades. If, like Julia, you were never a beauty queen—and who among us was, really? Consumer culture conspires to make sure pretty much every woman feels bad about her neck (thighs, hips, waist, hair, nose, lips, philtrum *)—middle-age is the great equalizer. The older you get, the less the great female currency of youth and beauty is worth. Trying to look like a hot twentysomething when you’re fifty is the modern woman’s comb-over: No one is fooled. Indeed, if you did not spend your formative years as a smokin’ hot babe, where the world was your oyster simply because you happened to be born with good looks, middle-age is for you.

All you women who suffered for having “great personalities,” please step forward.

Julia did, wielding her eccentric personality and joie de vivre like the fright knife she waved over her head on The French Chef.

Middle-age was the time of Julia’s life.

STILL, IT’S GOOD TO LOOK GOOD

It was never easy for Julia to find clothes that suited her. Her height limited her fashion options; no jeans or fetchingly sloppy boyfriend cardigan for Julia. Until the end of her life, her style read “woman.” She wore skirts, blouses, and her famous pearls. In a little seen black-and-white photo taken just after the publication of Mastering, she’s wearing what appears to be a classic Chanel suit with bouclé jacket and iconic Chanel hat.

The early episodes of The French Chef are so dear because Julia looks like exactly what she was, a slightly frazzled home cook with flat hair in the back of her head and bags under her eyes. Dissatisfied with the way she looked, she realized quickly that if you wanted to succeed in this new medium, you better look good.

She didn’t wear much makeup, believing that her eyes weren’t made for mascara, and solved the problem in a rather badass fashion with plastic surgery.

She had an “eye job” in the late 1960s. In 1971 she had a face-lift, and another in 1977, and yet another in 1989. The last one made her look like someone wearing a Julia Child rubber mask, but she was determined to stay in it as long as possible, and she knew viewers would prefer to learn to cook from someone fresh and vital-looking, than from an old bag with one foot in the grave.

For Julia, to give up on her looks meant to give up on living life to its fullest, and if it took a plastic surgeon’s knife, then so be it.

WHEN THE HITS JUST KEEP ON COMING

In addition to the basic indignities of aging, the strange forearm flab where no fat exists, the suddenly chubby armpits and propensity for weeping at the National Anthem, life tends to get deadly serious, fast. It happens to us all, and it happened to Julia.

The first hit came in May 1962, while she and Paul were preparing to film The French Chef pilot episodes. John McWilliams Jr., Julia’s cantankerous right-wing father, died. He was eighty-two, suffered from myriad ailments—a pesky virus, emphysema, perhaps leukemia—and the end was prolonged enough so that Julia could fly from Cambridge to Pasadena for the bedside vigil. She had dutifully written Pop a weekly letter while she and Paul lived abroad, and she sent him clippings and updates about her doings once Mastering had been published to acclaim. She’d never failed to send the yearly birthday and Christmas cards. It had never mattered. Her marriage to Paul, whom Pop found to be beneath contempt, as an intellectual and thus a communist, had sundered him from his daughter forever.

Julia’s sadness was tempered, as always, by the pragmatism that drove her character. If her father had lived to be a hundred and two there was never going to be a chance of reconciliation, something she’d managed to make peace with long ago. She was grateful Pop had enjoyed a happy second marriage, and that his death was mercifully quick. Except when it came to finding the proper casings with which to stuff a homemade saucisson, or whether it was okay to substitute cream for butter, Julia never overthought anything, and we are well-advised to do the same. She was saddened but was able to move on.

Then, a scant six years later, in 1968, while she and Simca were pushing to finish Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume Two, she discovered a lump in her left breast. The cancer wasn’t life-threatening, and the same diagnosis today would call for a lumpectomy. “Left breast off,” she wrote in her diary on February 28. The surgeon removed her lymph nodes, too. The surgery required a ten-day hospital stay, during which Paul, a lifelong hypochondriac, nearly required hospitalization himself. It is said that when it was over, Julia wept in private.*

Even in these times, when open heart surgery is practically an outpatient procedure, ten days in the hospital is a long time for the average person; may we stop for a moment and meditate on just how long that must have been for Julia, who was, let’s be honest, a manic workaholic?

Her recovery was not as speedy as she might have wished. She had to wear a plastic sleeve on the left arm and spend time getting outfitted with “a false titty,” as she confided to a friend. Cooking was difficult, but she felt lucky it wasn’t her right arm; that might have really tripped her up. She was anxious to get back to work on Volume Two, and at her weekly post-op doctor’s appointment, her only question was, When could she return to France?

Find your passion.

One of the standard-issue life lessons, which I’m sure I’ve posited along with everyone else who thinks about these things, is that one’s life is enriched immeasurably if you’re able to find an abiding passion. You don’t have to be good at it, it just has to be something that would consume every waking hour if you let it. A good friend, a New York book editor, discovered surfing in her forties and now spends her vacations at a house she built in Costa Rica, and on the weekends, at her apartment in Manhattan, she gets lost in surfing movies, videos, and books. The walls of her office are adorned with big pictures of cresting waves.

There is another, less often mentioned, advantage to possessing a lifelong passion: When you’re getting on in years and your parents are dying, and your body is reminding you in the least dignified manner possible that it, too, will fail you sometime, perhaps in the not too distant future, having something you care about deeply gives you hope, focus, and a reason not to dwell on the bad stuff. We don’t discuss this much, I think, because what could be more of a downer? Find your passion! It’ll keep you from jumping off a bridge when you’re middle-aged! But a deep passion for something outside yourself is money in the bank.

In drawing up the contract for Volume Two, Julia’s editor, Judith Jones, suggested Julia and Simca include a recipe for French bread, which Americans simply could not find even in so-called French bakeries. The ingredients are flour, yeast, water, and salt. What could be easier? Everything, as it turns out.

After spending two years producing pale, gummy loaves at home, Julia went to Paris and apprenticed herself to French bread-making expert Raymond Calvel. “It was like the sun in all his glory, breaking through the shades of gloom,” she would later write in her Foreword to Volume Two. Calvel set her on the right path. Paul took pictures of his hands at work. Back home in Cambridge, they were able to copy Calvel’s moves, but alas, not the necessary dampness in his baker’s oven.

Julia dubbed Paul “M. Paul Beck, Boulanger” after he got into the act, baking his own loaves, experimenting with how much and what kind of yeast to use, how best to get the dough to rise and for how long, how large the loaf should be, and how to moisten it while it was baking. M. Paul Beck squirted the top of the baking bread with the sprayer appropriated from his nasal decongestant, and Julia used a wet whisk broom. They made baguettes (translated as “the stick”), batards (half the size of a baguette), flutes (twice the size of a baguette), and ficelles (a glorified bread stick that must be eaten as soon as it comes out of the oven, or else risk breaking a tooth). They would nail the recipe, leap around with glee, then discover they couldn’t duplicate it. Two hundred and eighty-four pounds of white flour later, Julia felt confident she’d mastered Pain Français.* It was this kind of dedication and enthusiasm that kept her grounded and optimistic about the future.

I often wonder whether Julia ever experienced any dark nights of the soul. Paul was pretty much all dark nights, all the time, pessimistic and fretful and prone to depression. Did she ever sit in her kitchen with a cigarette—yes, she was a heavy smoker until after her mastectomy—and a glass of Beaujolais and remember her beloved mother, Caro, who died at sixty, not young, but certainly not old, and how she, Julia, with a bout of breast cancer behind her was only a few years younger? Did she think, I better make the most of this because who knows what the future holds, and wallowing about anything is pointless and a waste of time?

If at all possible, build an adorable vacation home in the south of France.

With Julia’s first two royalty checks * she and Paul built a small house in Provence, on the corner of a plot of land owned for generations by the family of Jean Fischbacher, Simca’s husband, and where Simca and Jean lived in a three-story house made of stone. Plascassier is a small village on the winding road between Valbonne and Grasse. For Julia, it was heaven: She was in France, yet the diffused golden light, the rolling green-gray hills, the smell of jasmine, orange blossom, and lavender in the air, reminded her of her California. It was possibly the most perfect place imaginable: a place that evokes all the glorious aspects of childhood, without the attendant traumatic reminders lurking in the actual place you grew up. For Paul it was perfect because he got to build a house to his specifications, using his flawless French.

The small house, called “La Pitchoune,” which Paul and Julia, those compulsive nicknamers, immediately re-dubbed La Peetch, was more or less a kitchen and a bedroom—Paul and Julia each had their own; Julia was a prodigious snorer—plus a living room. Then as now,* the kitchen is warm but not fancy, with slightly higher counters and the cream-colored pegboard with its black utensil outlines, and a fine collection of copper pots.

Outside, on the terrace, they built a concrete patio table that resembled a mushroom. “You could get the measure of someone’s character, sitting at that table,” Julia used to say.

James Beard was someone whose character Julia approved of, and he visited her often in Provence. She never forgot the generosity he showed her upon the publication of Mastering, and even though they championed different cuisines, Julia and Jim shared the belief that nothing was more fun than working hard in the kitchen, and that making good food was not only endlessly interesting but also life’s highest calling. Beard was also fun and forgiving. Once, in Cambridge, when they were first becoming friendly and Julia was enjoying Famous Cookbook Author status, she cooked him a terrible meal of flavorless veal scallops, underdone broccoli, and dusty-tasting chocolate cake, which he shrugged off with a laugh and an invitation to cook at his school. He descended on La Peetch the summer of 1969, where together they watched the moon landing.

The great advantage (and disadvantage) of living a stone’s throw away from Simca was living a stone’s throw away from Simca. Paul and Julia lived most of the year in Cambridge but spent the winter months in Provence.

Because Julia had been right on that awkward day in Boston when she tried to convince the people of Houghton Mifflin that cooking French food could fill several volumes, Julia and Simca had plenty of recipes to fill Volume Two. They restored some of the sauces and chicken recipes edited from Volume One, included more soups, bisques, and fish stews, and more vegetable recipes, including the “American vegetable” broccoli, of which Julia was quite fond, and more desserts, which were Simca’s specialty.

Fifteen years, give or take, had passed since Julia and Simca had met in Paris. They were not just older but significantly wiser, especially when it came to the highly specialized task of writing a cookbook of French recipes for American cooks. They’d made it up as they went along the first time around; now, with one book behind them, Julia was very clear about what worked and what didn’t and what needed to change. Her inner scientist was more finicky than ever. She demanded more operational proof than ever, particularly when it came to using American ingredients, which had turned out to be more than a little different from those found in France. American flour had more gluten than French flour; American chocolate had more butter fat; American sole filets were thicker; American chickens tasted “less chickeny.” This made a huge difference, and she and Simca would have to make sure to allow for these differences. On and on it went. Julia was a mad researching fool, more obsessed than ever about why and how recipes worked.

Simca was intuitive and improvisational. Most of their original recipes came from her family, and she could make them in her sleep. Julia had the considerably more complex task of interpreting Simca’s instructions for herself, then re-cooking the dish with American ingredients, then writing the recipe in a way that an American cook could follow, then presenting the dish to Simca for her “approval,” which rarely happened, because even though the original recipe had, say, required leeks, Simca had decided that maybe leeks were not such a good idea after all, and so Julia would return to her kitchen to remake the dish with no leeks. They were the Lennon-McCartney of cookery: For several halcyon years their differences combined to create an unprecedented work of genius, but those same differences guaranteed that it could never last.

Julia loved Simca with all her heart, and even though most days she wanted to clock her, she would never let anyone say a word against her. Once Paul wrote a letter to Charlie complaining about how bossy and irritating Simca could be, and Julia made him add a footnote that this was merely his personal opinion. Still, Volume Two was the end of their collaboration. Late in her life someone asked Julia her true feelings about Simone Beck, and Julia is said to have replied, “Well, we never worked together again, did we?”

The work that went into Volume Two was monumental. Julia was no longer a Foreign Service wife with time on her hands, but America’s reigning queen of cuisine, quoted in national magazines and invited to the White House by President Lyndon Johnson, which led to a PBS behind-the-scenes documentary about the White House kitchen. “The only national television female of real authority is Julia Child,” said TV Guide in 1968.*

Whether in Cambridge or Plascassier, Julia cooked and wrote seven days a week, ten to twelve hours a day, for months to make the deadline. Despite coming across as a little dotty when she misplaced an ingredient on The French Chef, Julia had become an astonishingly competent cook, a recipe-producing machine, often with at least three dishes going at once; the chops would be set aside to marinate while a sauce was being reduced on the stove, while the bones and trimming of some animal or another would be boiling in a big pot for stock, and she would notate and amend all three recipes as she moved forward. Was this cooking with proper love, care, and devotion? No, but it was the mixed-bag reality of being someone with something for which the world longed. After the book was completed, Julia said she would never do this kind of long encyclopedic book again, that she was tired of being locked up in the kitchen, or in her room, typing typing typing, and she wanted to cook with other people, and celebrate food with other chefs. Cooking was supposed to be fun and this was murder.

Still, their work paid off. Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume Two: A Classic Continued: A New Repertory of Dishes and Techniques Carries Us into New Areas was published in October 1970 to great acclaim. Newsweek thought it was even better than Volume One.

This time, Knopf ponied up for a book tour. A twenty-two-year-old publicist, newly hired, named Jane Becker,* had a thought: Why not send Julia and Simca to cities with PBS affiliates and large department stores? The store could take out a big advertisement in the newspaper announcing a demonstration by the authors of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume Two, and the night before the event PBS could host a party for the local media. The bigwigs thought it was worth a shot, and they chose Minneapolis as the guinea pig city and set up a demonstration at Dayton’s Department Store.

Jane cautioned Julia not to expect much. It seemed like a good idea, but there was also a good chance she and Simca would be making mayonnaise for a room full of empty seats. They were staying at a hotel near Dayton’s, and early on the morning of the demonstration, they looked out the window, and there was a line in front of the still-closed department store, snaking down the block and around the corner. Every person had in hand a copy of the new book.

Remember that being an expert doesn’t mean you know everything.

In 1972, a neighbor boy, the one whose orthodontist uncle put braces on his teeth so he could get out of going to Vietnam, drove an orange Ford Ranchero with a bumper sticker that said Love Animals Don’t Eat Them. I misread it every day until he moved away: Love animals don’t eat what? I thought. I didn’t know from vegetarianism. My friends’ mothers may have now made vegetarian sandwiches with homemade whole wheat bread, avocados, cheese, tomatoes, and sprouts, but at our house Julia Child still ruled. My mother still cooked from Mastering, still stood at the stove and sautéed, deglazed, reduced, and, above all, stirred. We still ate veal scallops with mushrooms and chicken fricassee. Had Julia known, she would have been pleased, because the rest of the nation seemed to have turned against her.

The American attitude about food and cooking, which Julia had helped realize, was changing. Overnight, it seemed average citizens had become unduly preoccupied with every bite that passed their lips. Were they eating enough fruits and vegetables, enough sprouted whole grains and legumes? Were they slowly killing themselves with porterhouse steaks and baked potatoes drenched in butter? Was it possible they were harming their souls eating creatures with four legs? Was the rumor true that broccoli could think, and did that make it wrong to eat it? What about factory farms? Could you possible enjoy an omelet knowing the eggs came from a chicken housed in a poultry gulag?

Even though Julia was an early adopter—she loved her gadgets, saw no problem with the microwave, had a desktop computer as early as 1982 and a laptop shortly thereafter—she would never change her mind about eating. Food was one of life’s greatest pleasures, and it should always be viewed that way. The only diet she believed in was one of moderation.

Given her insatiable curiosity and open-mindedness, her love of research and experimentation, you would think she would have been intrigued and perhaps more accepting of the new thinking about food, but the woman stood up for butter and cream as though they were her own children. She knew good and well what doctors were saying about cholesterol, and they were dead to her. She despised the idea that a cook should feel any anxiety over what her ingredients might be doing to her health. The idea of food as poison—or medicine for that matter—appalled her. She railed against the Food Police, she excoriated the Nervous Nellies, she howled at the self-imposed strictures of vegetarians. A little pâté never hurt anybody, she cried.

She was fundamentally right, of course. Decades later, people are more tortured and confused about food than ever. Where I live in Portland, any slob can be a vegetarian.* To really get right with the food god you must be a vegan … who occasionally slips up and binges on maple donuts topped with bacon.

Everything that goes into our mouths has become suspect: nonfat milk, conventionally grown red delicious apples, and grapes. A single portion of Dover sole can deliver enough mercury to make you forget your own name. A store-bought cookie will kill you as sure as an automatic weapon.

On the strength of Super Size Me, I gave up all fast food but recently read that even a “good” burger is comprised of at least eight DNA strands, meaning eight cows went into the making of that patty, along with whatever old Band-Aids and nail trimmings found their way into the mix. As of this writing, the only food that remains pure and blameless is kale; I expect some bad news to reach us about this holiest of leafy greens any day now.

In deep middle-age, Julia spoke her mind, even when it was out-of-step with the times, even when she was wrong. How different from the young woman newly enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu, all those years ago, who said, “Being the only woman I am being careful to sit back a bit, but am being very cold-blooded indeed in a quiet way.”

Over the years she would be forced to modify her position in her cookbooks and TV shows—times were changing and she knew if she was to remain relevant she had to keep up with them—but she would never fully capitulate; at the age of eighty-eight, in a radio interview, she disparaged “nutrition-type people,” and told the story of one nutrition-type person who insisted that vegetables should be cooked in the least amount of water possible. “Her beans were not only gray and lifeless,” said Julia, “she also died rather early.”

I often wonder if some part of her demanded that she refuse to alter her position because of the fate that befell Paul, who was diagnosed with arteriosclerosis. In 1974 he underwent coronary bypass surgery; several arteries were blocked, and the procedure was then in its infancy. When he came out of surgery he seemed to be fine, but over the weeks and months it became clear that something else had gone wrong. His thoughts were a mishmash. The letter he used to whip off to his brother Charlie every evening took him days to compose. His doctors thought that perhaps he had suffered a small stroke or two while he was under anesthesia. In any case, Julia noticed that the light had gone out of him. In a cruel twist his perfect French, which had helped define him in Julia’s eyes as a sophisticated man of elegance and worldliness, had completely deserted him. Now, he spoke not a word.