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reading classical greats at Wadham College, Oxford, and the onset of classics graduate school back at Harvard.
    Our apartment was in student housing, across Kirkland Street from the home of Julia Child. I saw the already legendary Julia from time to time in the neighborhood. We even shared a butcher, Jack Savenor, a genial sort eventually accused of overstating the weight of his meat.
    Julia and I didn’t meet then, but I had her book,
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
, volume one. And I had the time to try its most challenging recipe, cassoulet, the Provençal bean stew with its numerous meats. In following through with more determination than finesse every one of its densely hortatory six pages, Margaret and I joined an avant-garde of ambitious home cooks whisking their way to authenticity with Julia as their chef.
    Oh, yes, that cassoulet was a delicious success, and its combination of deliciousness and technical perfection, made possible by a recipe with consummate completeness and authoritative manner, reinforced my belief that great food was food prepared in the most traditionally accurate manner, with no crass substitutions like dried mushroom soup as a sauce base or inert mayonnaise spooned out of a bottle, and, on a higher plane, no deviations from tradition.
    Long before the political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared that history had come to an end, every serious disciple of Julia’s already had concluded (actually, without any specific instruction on this point from Mrs. Child) that the history of food had ground to a halt at some point before World War II. Culinary classics were a heritage we could study, but neither we nor the great chefs of Europe, who had learned the classic repertoire during long authoritarian apprenticeships, were going to tamper with the treasures in this edible museum.

    Julia Child and her Cambridge butcher, Jack Savenor, 1966. I bought meat there when I was a Harvard graduate student in 1965, but I was too shy to introduce myself to my favorite cookbook author. ( illustration credit 1.3 )
    There was, for example, only one basic way to assemble a roastof veal Prince Orloff. Julia’s recipe starts with a reference to the master recipe earlier in the book for casserole-roasted veal. For veal Orloff the finished roast is sliced and then reassembled after being coated with a mixture of two sauces: soubise (pureed onions and rice) and duxelles (minced mushrooms). The reassembled roast is then coated with a third sauce: Mornay, which is a béchamel, or white sauce, thickened with cream and then flavored with grated Swiss cheese.
    Julia spent a total of three detailed pages on this, but the professional chef’s manual
Le repertoire de la cuisine
of Théodore Gringoire and Louis Saulnier (1914), a shorthand aide-mémoire based on Escoffier’s Le
guide culinaire
(1903), which was still very much in use in later-twentieth-century French restaurant kitchens, dispatched the dish in four lines. But Gringoire and Saulnier prescribed intercalating the sauced slices with black truffle slices, and you were also sent scurrying to the specifications for
garniture Orloff
, a bevy of four intricate side dishes to be arrayed around the roast. Change any of this and you might as well have tried to pass off a cat as a dog.
    What now sounds like stultifying fidelity to a tradition dating back not to the time of Vercingetorix, after all, but merely to the nineteenth century (to some point between 1856, when Czar Alexander II made Alexei Fedorovitch Orloff a prince in gratitude for his services as a diplomat in France, and Orloff’s death, in 1862, when a celebrated French chef working in the princely kitchen in St. Petersburg invented veal Orloff) was universally accepted as the primordial state of French cuisine, immutable and for the ages. Perhaps no one ever said such a thing, but that is my point. Questions of historical change simply didn’t come up. When they did, the notion of tradition and