Laura Shapiro (10 page)

But after thinking about the new book for a few weeks, she had to pull back. Canned soup sauces? Casseroles bulging with frozen vegetables? Convenience first, flavor and texture last? Julia just couldn't bring herself to write for home cooks who bore such ill will toward food that they kept their contact with it to a minimum even while they were making dinner. If she and Simca were going to publish a cookbook, it had to have cooking in it; and if that meant the housewife would be frightened off, then the book would have to reach somebody else. By the time she wrote to De Santillana to confirm the new proposal, she had come up with a working formula for a book she and Simca could produce in good faith—a book that would be realistic about American life, but never cross over to the dark side. “This is to be a collection of good French dishes of the simpler sort, directed quite frankly to those who enjoy cooking and have a feeling for food,” she told her editor. Thus began the writing of the manuscript that would be titled, eventually,
Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

The goal remained the same—to reach
le gout français
by means of clear, precise recipes and supermarket ingredients—but Escoffier and the other old masters who had been peering over Julia's shoulder as she typed were now banished. No longer was she flogging herself to be “complete and exhaustive and immortal,” she told Avis. The challenge was to cut down the number and size of the recipes and reduce the verbiage, while keeping the results pristine. “I can't get oven-roasted chicken down to less than 2 pages,” she complained. “If you leave out the basting and turning, it ain't a French roast.” But she did it—roast chicken ran just over two pages in the published book, complete with basting, turning, sauce making, and ahead-of-time note. The new freedom in their approach also meant they could include some of Simca's own recipes for cakes and desserts, which would turn out to be among the most popular in the book.

It took about a year and a half to produce the new version, and they sent it to De Santillana in September 1959 with a great deal of confidence. She had been reading the chapters as they were finished and after poring over the entire manuscript for four days, she wrote to say that she was stunned and thrilled. “I surely do not know of any other compendium so amazingly, startlingly accurate or so inclusive,” she told Julia. The good news sent Julia, Simca, and Avis soaring, but two months later they were brought back to earth with a thud. Paul Brooks, the editor in chief of Houghton Mifflin, had consulted with the business side of the company and could see no way to publish the book without losing a massive amount of money. Julia had promised a “short, simple book directed to the housewife chauffeur,” Brooks reminded her. What she had delivered was very different—a book so huge, expensive, and elaborate that it was certain to seem formidable “to the American housewife.”

The housewife. There she was again. Brooks assured Julia that if she wanted to give it another try, he would be glad to look at a much-reduced version of the manuscript; but Julia had gone as far into housewife territory as she was willing to go. No pressed duck, complete with history and folklore? Fine. But she wouldn't cut back on the essentials in the roast chicken recipe. She wouldn't write for any “chauffeur den-mother” who wasn't willing to meet her halfway. Defeated, dejected, and feeling guilty about letting down Simca, Julia took herself into the kitchen and started to cook. Pastry skills—here was a whole area of French cooking she knew little about and really should study. She began with
tuiles,
those very delicate cookies that must be shaped into a curve around a rolling pin as soon as they come out of the oven. “Terribly simple batter to prepare, but in none of the French recipes have I found quite the exact explanation of what is what, so I must start out blind,” she told Avis eagerly. So many pitfalls! How hot should the oven be? What was the right consistency for the batter? What would keep the cookies from breaking as they were transferred from the oven to the rolling pin? Cooking—especially exploratory cooking, in search of the perfect recipe—was always the comfort zone. Now she returned to it.

While Julia was cooking, Avis was plotting. For the last several years, she had been talking about the book with her friend William Koshland, who recently had been made an executive at Alfred A. Knopf, one of the most distinguished publishing houses in the country. Koshland was a food lover and had been following the travails of the manuscript with interest. As a New Yorker with many friends in the culinary world, he was sure that Houghton Mifflin was being shortsighted and that this was exactly the right time for a good, definitive work on French cooking. Housewives might not have the time for long, unfamiliar recipes; but there were, he believed, “real cooks and hobby cooks” everywhere who would be fascinated. People were traveling, they were taking cooking lessons, they were subscribing to
Gourmet,
and they were buying the huge tomes on high-class cooking published by the magazine—“Never before has this country been so gourmet-minded,” he told Avis. Most of the soothsayers in publishing saw this trend as negligible, at least compared with all the high-speed cooking that was being promoted so adamantly in the media. But something told Koshland that this book, a genuine teaching tool, had the potential to create a market of its own. As the fortunes of the manuscript rose and fell at Houghton Mifflin, Koshland kept reminding Avis he wanted Knopf to be next in line. The moment Julia heard the bad news from Houghton Mifflin, Avis had the manuscript sent directly to Alfred Knopf himself, who—like everyone else in publishing—was a friend of hers. “Do not despair,” she wrote to Julia. “We have only begun to fight.”

Neither Alfred Knopf nor his wife, Blanche, who ran the company with him, had any interest in bringing out a new French cookbook. They had just published
Classic French Cooking
by Joseph Donon, a protégé of Escoffier. Surely that was enough of a nod to the emerging gourmet market. Alfred didn't even glance at the manuscript, but as a courtesy to Avis he passed it along to Koshland, who was regarded as the in-house food expert. Koshland promptly handed it to a young editor named Judith Jones, who had lived in France and was a talented cook. The two of them, along with Angus Cameron—the editor who had helped launch
Joy of Cooking
years earlier at Bobbs-Merrill—worked their way through one recipe after another and grew more excited with every dish they turned out. Jones found the manuscript to be an extraordinary achievement, the first book she had ever seen that made it possible to reproduce the flavors she had loved in France. In Julia's text, Jones could recognize not only an expert cook but a personable writer and brilliant teacher. Americans would respond to this book. But they wouldn't even see it unless the Knopfs agreed, and Koshland knew what an obstacle that was. The book would be expensive to put out, he admitted to Avis, but he told her he was ready to “ram it through the board,” no matter how reluctant Alfred and Blanche might be. Julia had refused to let herself feel optimistic about Knopf, especially because of the Donon book, but when she heard this—and when she learned that several editors had actually gone to their stoves and used the recipes and loved them—she allowed the tiniest “coal of hope” to begin to glow.

Koshland won, and the book was formally accepted in May 1960 with Judith Jones at the head of the immense project. For the rest of Julia's career, Jones would be the editor who counseled, inspired, steadied, and rescued her in countless ways, not only while they worked on books together but in the course of Julia's work in television, magazines, and public life. It was Jones who came up with the title
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
—nixing “French Food at Last!,” “French Kitchen Pleasure,” and “Love and French Cooking,” among other contestants—and it was Jones who knew that even Americans might venture on board for a long, tumultuous voyage to cassoulet or French bread if Julia was piloting the ship.

Mastering the Art of French Cooking
came out with a gratifying splash in October 1961. Craig Claiborne of the
New York Times
called it “glorious,” “comprehensive,” “laudable,” and “monumental,” and New York's culinary elite swarmed to a publication party hosted by Dione Lucas, who had reigned since the 1940s as the nation's leading expert in French cooking. But there was significant competition that fall, even in the small category of definitive French cookbooks.
Gourmet
brought out a fat volume called
Gourmet's Basic French Cookbook
by Louis Diat, the chef at New York's Ritz-Carlton Hotel, whose columns in the magazine Julia had admired for years. The first American edition of the famous culinary encyclopedia
Larousse Gastronomique
also turned up, with one of Julia's classmates from Smith, Charlotte Turgeon, as coeditor. And while Claiborne's own book,
The New York Times Cookbook,
wasn't specifically French, it was certainly sophisticated enough to appeal to many of the passionate home cooks Julia had counted on to buy
Mastering.
Earlier French cookbooks, including Samuel Chamberlain's beloved
Clementine in the Kitchen
and his 619-page
Bouquet de France,
were still on people's shelves, along with Dione Lucas's two books and the first
Gourmet
cookbook, which had come out in 1950 and continued to sell nicely. There did seem to be talented, ambitious home cooks in America, but perhaps they were happy with the books they already owned. Despite rapturous reviews and an exhilarating cross-country publicity tour—which Julia and Simca organized and paid for themselves—
Mastering
sold only a modest sixteen thousand copies the first year it was out.

“The sales may not be spectacular, but I have complete confidence that word of mouth will keep this going forever,” Koshland assured Julia. “Word of mouth” did not impress her too much; she'd have preferred to see some advertising. Knopf had produced a splendid-looking book but didn't seem to be doing much to push it. Most of what the public knew about
Mastering
came from media attention she and Simca had generated on their tour. “Our publishers really are about as unbusinesslike as any I have encountered,” she fumed to Simca. “They remind me of the little café I used to go to after my morning courses at the Cord. Bleu. One of the boys introduced me to the proprietress saying: I've brought you a new customer. Oh, she said, I have enough customers already!”

But Koshland was right, in a sense. The sales did have a life of their own, independent of Knopf's genteel way with promotion. The target population of enthusiastic home cooks may have been slow to get to bookstores, but to everyone's surprise there seemed to be a hidden population very willing to take a stab at elaborate French cooking. In the fall of 1962, the Book-of-the-Month Club made
Mastering
a dividend selection, expecting to distribute around twelve thousand copies. By March, sixty-five thousand books had gone out, orders were still pouring in, and
Mastering
had become the most popular dividend in the history of the club. Meanwhile,
The French Chef
, which began in 1963, was making Julia a television star. As the program reached one public television station after another, bookstore sales boomed; and in 1974,
Mastering
appeared on the
New York Times
list of the century's best-selling cookbooks, with 1.3 million copies sold. Nearly a half century after publication, the book had been revised once—to introduce the food processor, among other updates—and reprinted dozens of times. It was still selling steadily at the rate of some eighteen thousand copies a year.

Once the success of the book was established in the mid-1960s, Julia and Simca started thinking about a second volume. By this time Julia was beginning to wriggle free of what she would finally term the
straitjacket
of traditional French cooking; and Volume II reflects her willingness to take liberties she didn't allow herself earlier. On the whole, Volume II was devoted to characteristic French food, including charcuterie and pastries, as well as a nineteen-page recipe for French bread, but the section on broccoli shows Julia's new frame of mind. She had always loved broccoli and couldn't resist including it in Volume I, even though it was rarely eaten in France. But she had confined herself to just a few instructions, almost apologetic in tone. In Volume II she stood up and gave it a trumpet fanfare: eight pages of French recipes from
à la polonaise
to timbales—“because this is a book for Americans, and broccoli is one of our best vegetables, and the treatment is à la française,” she explained firmly to Simca. (In truth, the charcuterie, the pastries, and the French bread also identify the book as American—nobody in France would dream of making such things at home.) In her next book,
From Julia Child's Kitchen,
she gave herself a truly free hand, right down to an apple betty she christened
pommes Rosemarie,
and she often said this was her favorite book. “Now I don't have to be so damned classic and ‘French,'” she exclaimed to Jones. “To hell with that. I am French trained, and I do what I want with my background.” Although she continued to trust French technique as the best starting point for any sort of cookery, the distinction between “French” and “not-so-French” was no longer fundamental to her thinking about food. What emerged in its stead were two categories that had been lurking in the shadows until her career caught up with them.