Stay interested (and stay young)
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The thing that keeps you young has nothing to do with discipline or optimization. It's something most of us stopped doing years ago.
On November 3, 1948, a 36-year-old woman walked into a restaurant in Rouen, France, and had no idea her life was about to start.
Her name was Julia McWilliams. She was 6’2”, a former spy for the OSS, and had spent the last few years doing things like helping develop shark repellent for the military and typing up classified documents. She’d never cooked a real meal in her life. The fanciest thing she’d eaten growing up in Pasadena was broiled mackerel on Fridays.
Her husband Paul picked the restaurant. La Couronne, a medieval place that had been serving meals since 1345. He ordered for both of them because Julia couldn’t read the menu and didn’t speak enough French to try. When the first smell hit her, something oniony sizzling in butter, she leaned over and whispered, “What’s a shallot?”
Then the sole meunière arrived. A whole Dover sole, browned and sputtering in a butter sauce with parsley on top. She took a bite, chewed slowly, and later wrote that she could taste the ocean blending with the browned butter in a way she didn’t know food could do. She and Paul split a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé and floated out into the afternoon sun.
She called it the most exciting meal of her life.
What happened next is the part I keep thinking about. Julia didn’t just enjoy that lunch and move on. Something caught. Some thread of genuine fascination that she couldn’t let go of. She enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu, one of the only women in her class, and spent the next decade testing recipes obsessively, writing letters, making so many egg dishes she once told her collaborator Simone Beck, “I’ve just poached two more eggs and thrown them down the toilet.”
She published her first cookbook at 49. Got her first TV show at 51. Was still launching new series at 87. She was on camera for over forty years.
All because a woman who didn’t know what a shallot was at 36 decided to follow the thing that fascinated her.
