Laura Shapiro by Julia Child Page B

who thought Julia might like to meet another food-struck woman introduced her to Simone Beck Fischbacher—a meeting as momentous for Julia as the day she encountered Paul. Here was her first culinary soul mate and a woman who could balance Julia’s classroom cuisine with real-life French home cooking. Simca, as everyone called her, had grown up in Normandy in a wealthy household with servants, but as a child she found the kitchen irresistible and soon began trying her hand. She became a brilliant, intuitive home cook, self-taught apart from a brief period of study at the Cordon Bleu, with a vast repertoire of recipes and techniques that she was continually expanding. Everything she tasted seemed to inspire her; Julia used to say she threw off ideas like a fountain. Like Julia, she was married and had no children, and cooking was at the center of her life. As soon as they were introduced, the two women started talking about French food and didn’t let up until Simca’s death forty years later. Their friendship, renewed year after year on the hillside in Provence where they both made second homes, launched both of their careers and spawned a huge correspondence that dissected every aspect of French cookery. They were “ma sœur” and “ma grande chérie” to each other, sisters whose volcanic arguments never quite shattered their bond. To Julia, in those early years, Simca was France itself—beloved, inspiring, wildly irritating, and fundamental to everything.
    Simca belonged to a women’s gastronomical club, the only one of its kind in a country where haute cuisine was a well-guarded male preserve. No women cooked or even waited on tables in the great three-star restaurants; no women were invited to join the elite dining clubs that met over grand lunches and elaborate banquets; and the most revered authorities on classic cuisine were male. Out in the provinces, of course, women did some of the most distinguished and characteristic cooking of France; and it was a reflex among chefs to honor their mothers’ cooking above all other influences. But if women’s cooking was the sentimental favorite, men’s had the prestige, the exclusivity, and the cash value.
    The lone exception to this gender divide was Le Cercle des Gourmettes, a group of food-loving women who began meeting in 1927, prompted by an incident at a sumptuous banquet held by one of the men’s gastronomical societies. Women were sometimes allowed to attend these feasts as guests, and on this occasion both men and women were at the table when a man was heard declaiming the ancient truism that women, of course, understood nothing about fine food and wine. A certain Madame Ethel Ettlinger—an American who had been living for decades in France but clearly hadn’t adapted—jumped up in fury to remind the men that in all their homes it was women who ran the kitchens, ordered the meals, and trained the cooks. The women then got the idea to stage a magnificent banquet of their own and invite the men. They held the dinner in a borrowed château, arranged to have each course introduced with a trumpet fanfare, and easily demonstrated that women could spend money on glorious food and wine just as knowledgeably as men could. (The women themselves didn’t cook, any more than the members of the male club would have.) After that, the women chose a name for themselves and met regularly for decades, most often at an elaborate lunch prepared by a chef. Any Gourmettes who wanted to come at 10:00 a.m. to watch the chef and act as his assistants were invited to do so. Simca showed up regularly for these cooking sessions; and Julia, who joined the group soon after meeting Simca, never missed one if she could help it.
    These lunches glowed in her memory long afterward. She once said they marked “the real beginning of French gastronomical life for me.” The tradition she had been pursuing so ardently now