JULIA WAS SO enthusiastic about the idea of the National Beef Cook-Off, an annual cooking contest sponsored by the beef industry, that, in 1979, she agreed to be a judge and flew to Omaha. There were forty-nine beef dishes in competition, each a prizewinner at the state level, and the judges sat in a closed-off dining room tasting and discussing two dishes every half hour for two days. At 10:45 a.m. the first day, Julia finally tasted something she liked (Greek Beef Stew with Herb Biscuits), but the rest of the day proved disappointing. “Good idea—bad cook,” she jotted on her scoring sheet after trying Pot ’n Cot Roast, and although she herself enjoyed Cantonese Beef Dinner, none of the other judges did. The next day started hopefully—Saucy Beef Taco Pizza was a success—but she let Mariachi Beefballs and Farmer Brown’s Steak Supreme pass without comment. Best in show, she decided, was Fiesta Crepes en Casserole: cornmeal crepes stuffed with a mixture of beef, canned tomato sauce, canned creamed corn, and readymade taco seasoning mix. A year later, Julia was back, enthusiasm undimmed, but after several rounds of tasting, she began to lose patience. “How to ruin a good piece of meat,” she wrote next to Grilled Hawaiian Chuck Steak. Looking over the recipe for Spicy and Saucy Stuffed Round Steak, she scribbled, “What is ‘beef sausage,’ what is ‘red cooking wine’?” One entry after another fell flat: “Tastes of the can.” “Dead ‘packaged’ taste.” “No real taste.” First prize that year went to Baked Beef Brisket, made with only salt, pepper, garlic, onions, cornstarch, and water. “Tastes like food!” Julia noted gratefully.
She never returned to the Cook-Off, but she never gave up, either. Julia had a long, complicated relationship, much like a marriage, with American food. She was committed to it, and genuinely attracted, but the shortcomings, the character flaws, the willful misbehavior, and the sorry failures were constantly greeting her at the door. Thanks to a nature wonderfully capable of absorbing bad news with goodwill, her faith remained strong; but it was tested often. And if Mariachi Beefballs constituted one sort of betrayal, a bare slab of grilled fish surrounded by undercooked baby vegetables constituted another, perhaps worse. Sometimes it seemed to her that the food was becoming less and less appealing, even as Americans grew more sophisticated. “I am getting very tired of kiwi fruit and little juliennes of leeks,” she said wearily in 1980. But she didn’t tire of tuna fish sandwiches on rye. Or canned corned beef hash. Or hot dogs or chocolate ice cream sodas. And though she blanched at the sight of one of the Cook-Off entries—flapjacks folded over ground beef, garnished with strawberries, and doused with maple syrup—she dutifully tasted it. Then she brightened up, pronounced it delicious, and devoured the whole serving.
Julia had always been restless within the confines of traditional French cooking, especially during the years when she was becoming famous for it. To be sure, whenever she was working on a recipe with a recognized French name and heritage, she remained as faithful as possible to “le vrai” or “the real thing.” Trying to re-create in Cambridge the Burgundian specialty of parslied ham in aspic, for instance, she found she had forgotten precisely how it should taste, and put the recipe aside until she could get back to France and restore her taste memory. But if she was simply pondering chicken, or dessert, or something good to eat, she relaxed. To her, French cooking wasn’t a list of rules and ingredients, it was a set of techniques and a certain frame of mind. “I will never do anything but French cooking,” she told Time in 1966, when she was being interviewed for the cover story. “It is much the most interesting and the most challenging and the best eating.” She made this declaration, the magazine reported, “with Francophilic fervor.” But a year or so earlier, for The French Chef she had invented a dessert she called fantasie bourbonnaise—peanuts, brown sugar, canned apricots, sliced bananas, and bourbon. “I just make up all the titles, as you can see,” she told Simca cheerfully. By this time she was also employing instant mashed potatoes on occasion, stuffing crepes with whatever sounded appealing and setting them on fire (“People always seem to like this”), and rooting around for a decent paella recipe, testing French, Spanish, and American versions before settling on what she termed paella à la Julia. It all tasted good, and to her way of thinking, it was all French even if it wasn’t “kweezeene.” She had been trained in France, her training shaped everything she did in the kitchen, and as long as she didn’t pass off her inventions as time-honored recipes, she felt confident she was being true to what was important about French food. One day on The French Chef, she tossed spaghetti with chopped walnuts, olives, pimiento, and basil and called it spaghetti Marco Polo, urging viewers to eat it with chopsticks. Authentic? Sure, she argued: it was an authentically French way to think about dinner. “Taking ordinary everyday ingredients, and with a little bit of love and imagination, turning them into something appealing”—that was how the French cooked, she said, and that was how she cooked.
Nevertheless, every time the “Lasagne” and “Paella” programs were shown, or the “Curry Dinner” program, viewers were aghast. “You should be requested with all possible speed to confine yourself to the type of cooking you know well and leave the cuisines of other countries to those who know and respect it,” wrote a typical distraught fan. Julia kept trying to explain—“It is the idea of lasagne, freed from ethnic restrictions and limitations,” she wrote back—but this satisfied nobody. After 1972, when the last series of French Chef programs was taped, the word French disappeared from the titles of her books and television shows.
When it came to culinary technique, however, Julia was firm: this had to be French. Nothing else would do, because, as she often explained, French cuisine was the only one that had precise terminology and definite rules, an actual body of knowledge to be taught. Once you learned the rules, you could apply them to any other cuisine in the world. This parochial attitude toward cooking was very different from her wide-open attitude toward eating. Cooking appealed to her when she could imagine herself working within a clear intellectual structure, like a scientist of the sensual, mind and hands and palate fully engaged. A cuisine based on fresh ingredients handled minimally might produce wonderful meals, but it had no kitchen interest for her; and a cuisine that claimed its own complex technique—Chinese, for instance—she figured had to be French at heart. Julia had come to know and love Chinese food during her OSS years, and it remained her second-favorite cuisine, but as far as she was concerned, the best way to become a Chinese cook was to become a French cook first. “You would have already learned the basic ways to chop things up, and you’d just have to change your technique a bit to chop it up Chinese,” she said blithely. As for Italian food, it could be very good to eat, but dropping pasta into boiling water was far too simple a procedure to result in what she called “food-type food.” It was the French who had turned lasagna into something truly delicious. In fact, Julia remarked, when-ever the French appropriated dishes from other countries, they always improved on the original. Like the chefs and Gourmettes who had been her guiding lights when she was learning to cook, Julia knew one true path and stuck to it. When aspiring chefs wrote her to ask where they should study, she always advised France, and she did her best to monitor French culinary schools so that her recommendations would be up-to-date. Here, in the realm of education, was the “Francophilic fervor” that Time had remarked upon. To learn cooking, to learn to dine with pleasure in a civilized manner, to learn the proper role of food in the life of a nation—France was the best classroom.
But it was very much a classroom and not a shrine. For all the rapture of her own introduction to France, and the pleasure she and Paul took in their beloved home in Provence, she had no patience with American food lovers who saw France through a fog of sentiment. The notion that French food, and French life, existed on some immeasurably blissful plateau unreachable by cloddish Americans was ridiculous to her. The whole point of learning the rules of French cooking was that they resulted in French food: there was nothing unreachable about the experience and no reason why home cooks couldn’t re-create it in Pittsburgh.
The standard for lyrical evocations of culinary France had been set by M. F. K. Fisher, whose passionate following among food lovers and devotees of distinctive prose gave her the aura of a literary saint, especially after her first five books were republished as The Art of Eating in 1954. Julia admired Fisher’s writing, and the two women were affectionate friends; but they had almost nothing in common except their fascination with food. Julia was a teacher: she liked clarity, facts, objectivity. Fisher was a writer from the school of impressionism: she liked artfulness, nuance, emotion. Their differences finally clashed in the mid-sixties, when Julia agreed to act as a “consultant and reader-over” on The Cooking of Provincial France, the first cookbook in a lavish new international series planned by Time-Life. M. F. K. Fisher had agreed to write the text. Her draft of the cookbook’s introductory chapter was swept through with idyllic imagery: French housewives cooking by the seasons, markets full of delectable fresh produce, the family gathering daily for a multicourse midday dinner, old and young embraced by a glowing tradition that was forever France. Julia couldn’t bear the rose-colored glasses. “She is seeing France from pre World War II eyes,” she complained to Simca. Worse, in Julia’s estimation, was the fact that France came off so splendidly in part because Fisher constantly compared it with America at its dreariest, as if nobody in the United States did anything at mealtimes but wolf down TV dinners. In her comments to Time-Life, Julia said Fisher was writing far too romantically. True, France was not yet enslaved to convenience, but changes were under way everywhere. “They are mechanizing in a French way, but those super markets, TV sets, dehydrated mashed potatoes and frozen fish are there to stay,” she told the editors. At Julia’s insistence, Fisher pulled back somewhat, but the final text was vivid with her conviction that French culinary tradition was rooted in French character and would never be fundamentally altered.
Julia didn’t think there was much that was immutable about the French except their dogmatism; and though she loved the way they revered gastronomy, she refused to posit America as the opposite camp. She had spent far too many Paris evenings listening to Frenchmen dismiss all Americans as gastronomic idiots to sit through the same insults from Americans themselves. Like wave after wave of her American colleagues, Julia had arrived in France as an innocent, eaten the food in a state of wonder, and returned home with a calling. But unlike others who had experienced that life-changing moment, she never used her epiphany as a club to attack everything she had left behind. It simply wasn’t in her to feel superior. “French cooking is not for the TV dinner and cake-mix set,” she acknowledged as she was working on Mastering, so for the rest of her life she kept her attention fixed on everyone else—millions of her compatriots who, through no fault of their own, had never been taught to puree cauliflower with watercress or line a ramekin with caramel. The notion that French housewives were all wonderful cooks merely by virtue of being French—that they had acquired their skills by instinct and turned out fine meals, as Fisher put it in the Time-Life book, “as naturally as they breathe”—Julia found preposterous. “French women don’t cook,” she said firmly, many times. Living in Paris after the war, she had been one of the few middle-class wives she knew who did her own cooking, since servants were so widely available. Younger French homemakers had no such luxury—and as Julia pointed out, they were embracing frozen foods and other conveniences as happily as Americans had done years earlier. The difference was that America now had “hobby” cooks: men and women who cooked at home for the fun of it, and were becoming very good at traditional French dishes. “American families know their way around a kitchen far better than most French—and as our kitchens are so much easier to work in there is no limit to what we can do,” she told a dubious Fisher. Julia liked to say that it would probably be Americans who kept alive the greatness of French cooking.
Even McDonald’s, the chief target of the most vehement food critics, didn’t strike Julia as all that bad. She and Paul had passed their first decade or so back in the United States largely ignoring the chain. As she told an interviewer in 1972, “We know where good food is located and we don’t believe good food is to be found at McDonald’s. So we don’t go.” But a year later, when Time asked for her opinion of the food, she went out for a meal and came back with a relatively benign review. “The buns are a little soft,” she told Time. “The Big Mac I like least because it’s all bread. But the French fries are surprisingly good. It’s remarkable that you can get that much food for under a dollar. It’s not what you would call a balanced meal; it’s nothing but calories. But it would keep you alive.” After that she spoke more and more positively about McDonald’s, singling out the Quarter Pounder for special praise, though she made it clear she thought it was a big mistake to stop cooking the french fries in beef tallow. “They were so good!” she protested in a letter to the company. She did have one suggestion for improving the menu: in light of all those hamburgers being passed across the counter, McDonald’s really should offer a decent red wine by the glass.
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.
Page 75. Green beans with poppy seed dressing—canned green beans steeped in a mess of 1½ cups sugar, mustard, salt, onion juice, vinegar and salad oil. Ugh. “Farewell to the departing minister” is the title of this dinner, and one realizes why he left town….
Page 133. Packaged lime gelatin mixed with water, melted marshmallows, canned pineapple, cottage cheese, whipping cream and nuts. This is a ghastly horrible disgraceful kind of dish that no one should hear of, even less eat. And to push this kind of food onto the American public should be considered a felony.
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.
Waters lavished attention and support upon the small farms, ranches, bakeries, and dairies that could supply her with jewellike products; and her chefs applied their considerable skills to showcasing the bounty that arrived in the kitchen each day. Chez Panisse was enormously influential, and chefs across the country began doing their own versions of what was happening in Berkeley, eventually calling it New American cooking. As often as not the watchwords associated with Chez Panisse—“local,” “seasonal,” “organic”—were honored only sporadically in the restaurants that came later. Nonetheless, a powerful new perspective on sophisticated cooking, one that gave pride of place to the freshness and quality of the raw materials, settled in among chefs, food writers, and adventurous home cooks.
Julia saw most of the elaborate innovations wrought in the name of nouvelle cuisine as an appalling insult to the logic and dignity of fine French cooking, and California cuisine struck her as an equally bad idea. She didn’t like the food, and she didn’t like the high-minded, purist approach to shopping and cooking. Great cooking meant, as she often said, doing something to the food, not serving a few slices of humanely raised veal on a plate with three perfect radishes and calling it dinner. She didn’t even like humanely raised veal; she thought it was tasteless. This worshipful approach to ingredients, she told a San Francisco magazine, “takes us away from cuisine as an art form into something that I believe is much too simple, too tiresome.” Worse, the emphasis on organic, artisanal ingredients put California cuisine far beyond the reach of most Americans, who shopped in supermarkets and had never seen a pea shoot or a leaf of baby arugula in their lives. Julia’s entire career was predicated on supermarkets, and she couldn’t see the point of promoting a cuisine that was too rarefied to be supplied by Safeway or Stop & Shop.
Many of Julia’s devoted followers could hardly believe what they were hearing when she voiced some of her most pro-industry opinions. “You, of all my favorite people!” exclaimed a fan who had discovered that Julia saw nothing wrong with irradiating the food supply. But in Julia’s view, her positions weren’t pro-industry, they were pro-food. Unless there was incontrovertible evidence of danger, she was wholly opposed to any measure that restricted food choices, or ruled out a particular category of food, or put any kind of food in a bad light. As she saw it, irradiation didn’t pose nearly the threat that, say, vegetarianism did. To find cruelty in every steak and cholesterol in every spoonful of cream, to sneer at the string beans because they came from a box in the freezer—this wall of suspicion between Americans and their meals was far worse than anything in the food itself. “If fear of food continues, it will be the death of gastronomy in the United States,” she told an interviewer in 1990. Julia could taste the difference between a free-range chicken and its factory counterpart, but she refused to believe good cooking called for a degree of wariness normally associated with managing a chronic disease.
Soon after she began on television in 1963, the venerable Boston company S. S. Pierce, which sold an extensive line of canned fruits, vegetables, and meats, asked her to write an article about cooking with such pantry items, to be published in the company catalog. Julia was pleased with the assignment—it would be another year before she made her decision to turn down all commercial offers—and set about testing dozens of S. S. Pierce products. Tiny Whole Carrots she found very good, especially when she cooked them in her own brown glazing sauce with parsley, but Chicken à la King needed quite a bit of help from chopped sautéed ham, scallions, hard-boiled eggs, tarragon, a bit of cornstarch for thickening, and some vermouth. No matter what she did to the cream of avocado soup, it was poor, and the canned chicken was undeniably stringy, though marinating it in a vinaigrette and adding homemade mayonnaise made it tastier.
If there was anything ironic about how hard she had to work in order to make these so-called convenience foods acceptable, Julia didn’t see it. To her, they were just fruits, vegetables, and meats; and like any other ingredients, they needed the best a cook could give them. Picking up a can of S. S. Pierce tuna, she decided to write a recipe for the most famously convenient, famously derided supper dish in the American repertoire—and to make a version worthy of any dinner table she knew, including her own.
Place about 2 cups of drained canned tuna in a bowl. Flake the fish, then fold in two thirds of your cream sauce. Fold in also, if you wish, 2 or 3 sliced hard-boiled eggs and 1/3 cup of coarsely grated Swiss cheese. Correct seasoning. Spread seasoned and buttered cooked rice or noodles in the bottom of a 2½-quart casserole, turn the sauced fish over it, and cover with the remaining sauce. Sprinkle with 2 or 3 tablespoons of grated Swiss cheese and a tablespoon of butter cut into dots. Half an hour before you are ready to serve, set the casserole in a pre-heated 375-degree oven until bubbling hot and the top has browned. This makes a delicious main course, and needs only a green salad and a nice white Bordeaux or rosé wine to make quite a feast.
Surely this was the only tuna casserole recipe ever devised that included the instruction “Correct seasoning.”