Laura Shapiro by Julia Child

late-nineteenth century, each generation had been purchasing more and more food that had been cleaned, cut, packaged, and sometimes partially cooked in a factory. The convenience was addictive, and so was the impressive rationale created by the advertising industry: these uniform, sterile products, “untouched by human hands” as one slogan put it, made cooking modern and far more sanitary. Why fumble around with messy, smelly chicken parts and carrot peelings the way poor Grandma had to do?
    Cooking from scratch remained the standard in most households, but what women meant by “scratch” was continually changing. By the time Julia enrolled at the Cordon Bleu, an American dinner made from scratch might include beef that had been ground into hamburger before it arrived in the kitchen, bottled ketchup, fresh potatoes, canned peas, and a Jell-O dessert in the most popular flavor, namely red. In France, by contrast, to cook meant to sustain an intimate relationship with ingredients. Julia had to learn how to feel her way through a recipe even while she was following written directions, how to leave enough space from step to step to let the food itself tell her what to do next. How should the rice smell when it came out of the oven after its long baking in milk? How would the egg whites look when they had been beaten just enough? How much nutmeg would make the dish taste right—with no taste of nutmeg? She took to this approach avidly. She may have lacked the instincts of a born cook, but she was blessed with an excellent palate and skillful hands. And she loved the feel of food, loved letting her senses run riot at the kitchen counter, loved handling raw meats and vegetables and inhaling the aromas as they cooked. Learning to cook was an intoxicant; she could have been sipping her first glass of champagne. “It is beginning to take effect,” she wrote home after three months at the Cordon Bleu. “I feel it in my hands, my stomach, my soul.”
    Yet the more she learned, the more she could see what a long way she had to go. If she were trying to play the violin, she reflected, the challenge would be the same: training and practice, training and practice. The fishmongers and butchers were nerve-rackingly good at identifying customers who didn’t know what they were buying (“Bluff is no good, you’ve got to KNOW,” she wrote home) and she was determined to “KNOW” every single thing about market and kitchen. One day she spent four hours on a lobster recipe—at the typewriter, not the stove. She had already worked on the cooking; she could prepare it just as it should be, and now she wanted to put the whole procedure into words. “Good practice, to make it absolutely exact and water-tight,” she wrote the family. She did a massive round of research on mayonnaise and wrote it up in more detail than any of her sources had, then went to work on béarnaise. These mini dissertations were for herself. She wanted to have in front of her the most explicit, flawless recipes ever written, so that she would never lose touch with what she had mastered. Failure still had a horrible way of seizing control of a meal. One day, after she had been several weeks at the Cordon Bleu, she made lunch for a friend and ended up serving “the most VILE eggs Florentine I have ever imagined could be made outside of England.” She didn’t measure the flour, which made the sauce thick and horrid; she couldn’t find spinach so she substituted chicory, and the whole mess was disgusting. Would she ever outgrow these bursts of ineptitude? Maybe not, but she wasn’t about to share her guilt and misery with the guests. It was bad enough that they had to eat the stuff; they shouldn’t be forced to claim it was delicious. “I carefully didn’t say a word, while they painfully ate it, because I don’t believe in these women who are always apologizing for their