I am reading My Life in France, the autobiography of Julia Child, who was a very remarkable woman. Despite being vaguely aware of her as a prominent influential force in shaping serious cooking in America, I had never really paid much attention to her even when I started studying cookery myself. But when I heard that her autobiography was interesting and charmingly written, full of musings on food and cooking, I thought it might be good to pick up. It turned out to be a great read, chronicling her journey, undertaken unusually late in life, from unserious socialite with no strong direction in life to discovering a passion for the French style of cooking so great that she ended up writing the definitive encyclopedia on bringing that French cuisine to the American kitchen.
She is a remarkably modern-sounding person, despite having chronicled herself so many decades past. She and her husband are adorable, utterly in love and totally supportive of one another's efforts; she moved all around the world for the sake of her husband Paul's work, and he was there helping her every step of the way as her fame and career took off. What I think makes her most special is that she brought real French cuisine to the American public; she was the first person to suggest to average Americans that if they were willing to put in a little effort they could produce dishes from scratch that had that real French character and quality to them. Before her, people did not really think they could learn to cook like that, that it was some mysterious alchemy that only French chefs could enact. In fact, as she was writing her most famous work, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, her publishers at first said no housewife would be interested in learning so much or in doing anything so difficult. What they didn't see was that there are people for whom cooking is more than just the cheapest way to get a dinner in your belly, but Julia gave them what they needed to elevate their cooking to art.
After finishing her autobiography I then found it necessary to examine her seminal work, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which is not so much a recipe book as a reference text for the techniques and theories of French cuisine. I can see why people took to it the way they did, especially those who wanted to really do it right. She explains French kitchen process remarkably well, from how they select their produce to how they pair their meals with wine to a most excellent breakdown of the interrelation of the classic sauces. That section is particularly good, explaining the mechanics of each mother sauce before carrying on into descriptions of the most important small sauces that can be made from them.
As you may know, I am really interested in the process of the artist, how they came to put their work together. I believe by understanding process we can improve our product. So it was particularly interesting to me to see Julia's process of putting the cookbook together-- breaking down French cuisine to the essential principals a chef must understand, deciding which recipes best exemplified those principals and the flavor profiles she wanted to represent, and then the steps of recipe design, painstakingly writing out each recipe then an endless series of testing and retesting for reproducibility in the home kitchen. It was this rigorous process that allowed her to deliver the remarkably high quality product she did, that has been so useful and instructive to so many generations of cooks.
My mom is giving me her copy of the book to take back with me. I will probably not make many of the recipes from it. Even putting kosher concerns aside, I don't want to introduce that much cream, butter, and starch into my diet. Only on special occasions, perhaps. But I will be glad to have it for reference for when I am trying to understand the building blocks of outing together great dishes, which is the real trick to becoming a great cook.
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