Laura Shapiro by Julia Child Read Free Book Online Page B

(got to be cold-blooded and realistic, but retain appearance of sweetness and gentility).” At 9:30, the class was over, and Julia went home to practice on what would become lunch for herself and Paul. Then she returned to school for an afternoon demonstration class, watching intently as chefs prepared the thoroughly professional versions of soufflés, galantines, charlottes, and fondants that she planned to master. Then back to rue de l’Université, exhilarated, to make dinner. “After that one demonstration of Boeuf B, I came right home and made the most delicious one I ever ett,” she wrote home jubilantly.
    â€œMy cooking has been always on the experimental side, these courses will make them SURE.” She found she liked the demonstrations best, because she could learn so much from watching the chef make an entire dish from beginning to end, “giving the proportions and ingredients, and explaining everything he does, and making little remarks.”
    Julia’s particular mentor was Chef Max Bugnard, who was seventy-four when she met him and had started his career sixty years earlier as an apprentice, later moving to London to work under Escoffier himself. Bugnard was the teacher who made Julia a cook. This generous and knowledgeable chef became a kind of culinary archetype who would rule her imagination for the rest of her life. Bugnard had a gravitas about him that came from his learning, his experience, and his respect for the work; and for Julia, such a sensibility would forever mark the difference between the real cooks and the dabblers. “He has that wonderful old-timey ‘art for arts sake’ approach, and nothing short of perfection satisfies him at all,” she wrote to a friend. “It’s an inspiration to work with such a man.”
    Bugnard’s classes at the Cordon Bleu took place at a level far above the inadequate conditions of the school. He knew the repertoire intimately, and his standards were, as Julia often said, impeccable. As he demonstrated and explained the well-honed methods of French cookery, supervised and corrected her work, the doors she had been banging on so ineffectually swung open at last. After years of following recipes only to meet failure, enjoying a triumph only to see the same dish mysteriously go wrong the next time, planning lovely little dinners that didn’t get to the table until 10:00 p.m.—now she could understand what was happening and why. Now she could learn. Julia cooked all day, all evening, and all through the weekends; and when she wasn’t cooking, she was compulsively buying sieves and whisks and copper pots and larding needles. At the far end of an alley in the Paris flea market, she found a marble mortar and a pestle so massive Paul had to hoist them onto his shoulder to get them back to the car, which was parked two miles away. He was delighted to do it. “Julie’s cookery is actually improving!” Paul exclaimed to his brother. “I didn’t believe it would, just between us girls, but it really is. ”
    Ducks and rabbits and fish and eggs, every step of every dish, from the raw ingredients to the final garnish, everything performed by hand with only the most elemental equipment—Julia was rocketed to paradise. This was what she had needed without knowing it: a clear, rational guide to making every dish taste the way it should. No longer was she fortune’s fool in the kitchen. Her mind was on fire: every day, more mysteries fell away, and in their place was structure, system, and logic. The secret behind good cooking turned out to be that there were no secrets. There was only good teaching.
    Studying French cuisine wasn’t just a matter of absorbing traditional rules and methods: Julia was learning to cook with all her senses engaged, to cook with a visceral understanding of raw ingredients that was increasingly out of fashion in the American kitchen. Ever since the