Julia learned "proper" French cuisine and wanted to bring that authentic experience to Americans.
The thing about cooking at home is that each dish can be a labor of love. On the other hand, when you're cooking for a large crowd over the course of an evening, each dish must be consistent in both quality and execution time, and can't afford to spend all day in the kitchen working on it.
Two different approaches, for two very different audiences. Neither is right or wrong, in the context of what they are trying to achieve.
But anyway, no I was surely obviously not responding purely to the camping anecdote, nor was other commenter making it solely about that, thread is about pizza, not backpacking.
You still have to think of it ahead of time but this removes need for coordination and lets you do it in batches.
Also I just make one kind of starter bread dough in batches and then make everything out of it, some things as-is (bread for first ~4 days, bread dough pizzas for 14 days), some by mixing it with fresh dough (bread afterwards, everything else). But i'm specifically after the heavily fermented dark dough taste.
Doesn't really save having to know in advance because it needs to defrost and prove, but it does save having to be in the mood again within just a few days for another one. (It's difficult/annoying to make so little dough as for one pizza, IMO.)
Oh, and another thing i should have mentioned is that if the dough is older i make sure to fold it few times more and work a bit more fresh flour into it. And i use high hydration (as high as i can make it, about 72~75%), when i pull it out from the fridge it's _wet_ so even when it's as old as it should be (2~7 days) the crust will be mostly fresh flour.
The trick is that there is no trick and you just let it overferment but pick style that will work well with it. You need savory toppings to go with the taste, e.g. salami and maybe sharper tasting cheese. Making very thin pie will be difficult with dough so weak so don't do that, it won't rise very high so don't make it too thick either.
And 14 days is the furthest i recommend taking it. As i wrote above two to seven days is best, of course it tastes differently after seven than after two days but both are good and perfectly within the canon of 'pizza' and you can prepare it anyhow you want.
Beyond that you're pushing it, but since the topic is what shortcuts you can take i'll still recommend more than you need and using it longer than you'd think to over trying to make it the same day. 30~40 minutes from a decision to a pizza, it does taste right too.
And I find high hydration such a pain with pizza especially, which seems only to get worse over time in the fridge (some things seem to dry out, others to get wetter, what a machine!), 75% for 14d, I don't know how you do it. It must take on a lot of extra flour when you get it out to stretch it out to shape?
We all want to make something and pick methods in pursuit of that. I always liked light, airy, bubbly, crispy things which drove me to high hydration and savory, beery, bready things which drove me to long fermentation. For pizza this means i liked bubbly high crusts and savory thin as a pancake pizza bassa, so that's what i tried to make.
When it's getting old i deliberately fold in extra flour. Notice it doesn't take that much to push it down because the quantities are quite small -- i've settled on 144g flour, ignoring everything else at ×1.75 it's 252g of dough, it'll take 18g of extra flour to push it all the way down to classic 66%, that's a heaping tablespoon. And i rarely really reach 75%, i aim for just under 75% and generally end up making 72~74% after including what it absorbs as i work it.
Has a 1 hour normal pizza recipe as well. Haven't tried his pizza recipe but he used to work at a bakery and his bread recipe worked well for me.
Today we tent to view Mastering the Art of the French Cooking as fussy (and her forward does acknowledge that ones schedule must be free), in no small part due to works like Julie & Julia, but the opening lines in the forward are counter to that (Key phrase being "servantless American.")- on the contrary _not_ fussy but demonstrative of good foundational technique. Pepin's La Methode and La Technique are comparable, if not more formal, though of course very much aimed at a different audience. Both chefs published more casual, everyday recipes later in their career.