Laura Shapiro (6 page)

For each two-hour class, Julia typed up and distributed all the recipes they would be working on; and she also prepared a detailed teaching plan so that each instructor—“Prof. Julia,” “Prof. Simca,” and “Prof. Louisette”—would know exactly what she was supposed to do, and when. On March 12, 1952, for instance, the lesson for the day included
blanquette de veau,
or veal stew; risotto and plain rice;
salade mimosa;
and two tarts, banana and fruit. First came the introductory remarks by “Prof. Julia.” Then work on the
blanquette
began, with Prof. Julia teaching the meat, the shallots, and the parsley, and Prof. Simca working with the onions and mushrooms. (Prof. Louisette, who was caught in a terrible marriage and was trying to get out, did less teaching than the others in the early years of the school.) “During this time, Prof. Julia cleans up, puts rice water to boil,” the schedule read. Prof. Simca took charge of the
crème pâtissière,
or pastry cream; Prof. Julia, the salad and the
velouté
sauce for the veal; and Prof. Simca the final liaison of cream and egg yolks. (Apparently the lesson went very well—Julia scribbled “good menu” on the sheet.) On the day the plan featured quiche lorraine, puff pastry, steak
à la bordelaise,
and the meringue layer cake known as a
dacquoise,
Julia admitted the menu had been “too rich”; and on another occasion she decided the recipes were just too complicated for beginners. No matter what problems may have plagued the cooking, however, every class ended with a triumphant lunch for the teachers, the students, and their guests, typically a husband or two. When school was not in session, Julia and Simca got together in the kitchen to put their teaching recipes into what Julia called “scientific workability.” They had to be “painfully exact,” she told her family—“viz: exactly how much gelatine in exactly how much liquid per exactly how much mayonnaise so you can make pretty curlicues on a fish.” At her request, the family sent over a set of measuring cups and spoons, which were unknown in France.

Julia also gave solo lessons, the first to a French woman who wanted to learn puff pastry. Though Julia had made it dozens of times and thought she understood it, she gave herself a practice session before the class and analyzed every step of the teaching to make sure it would be clear and accurate. Even so, there were two mistakes in the course of the lesson. Afterward, she decided she still lacked the “divine self-confidence” that identified a fine cook. “I want every technique to be perfect,” she told the family with determination, “and if there are errors, they must be made on purpose.” More and more, she could envision teaching at her own school, which she pictured in the kitchen of their Washington house.

Many of the recipes used at L'Ecole des Trois Gourmandes originated with Simca and Louisette, who had been working for years on a French cookbook for Americans. Their idea was to produce a wide-ranging collection of recipes with sections on wines, cheeses, and regional specialties, all authentically French, but written in English and published in the United States. Louisette, who was half American and had a number of friends and contacts in the United States, had taken the manuscript with her on one of her trips to New York and offered it to Sumner Putnam, head of a publishing company called Ives Washburn. Putnam was interested, but he had no experience with cookbooks and was unsure of the market. The manuscript, moreover, was in poor shape. Simca and Louisette had written it in French, and although they had come up with a rough English translation, it needed a great deal of work. Putnam hired a translator and cookbook author, Helmut Ripperger, for the job and asked him to produce a kind of teaser for the book—a little recipe collection drawn from the manuscript and titled “What's Cooking in France.” Simca and Louisette had signed a contract for the teaser but never saw “What's Cooking” before it was published. It turned out to be an embarrassment, full of errors, and the women were distraught. In August 1952, they turned to Julia for help. The original manuscript had to be put into decent English before anything else could happen with the book—Would she take a look? Julia sat down with the sauce chapter and started to read with a pen in her hand. She had been teaching from some of these recipes, reworking them whenever necessary; and she also had done a good deal of research and recipe writing for herself. Now she tried to take the point of view of an American homemaker opening a new cookbook. She went into the kitchen and tested a few, exactly as they were written, and found them unusable. Some recipes were too abbreviated, others ran on forever with needless complications, and the instructions were infuriatingly vague. She couldn't see anything worth saving and said exactly that to Simca and Louisette. By the end of November, the three women had worked up an entirely new plan for the book, and Julia wrote to Putnam to explain what they wanted to do.

They would produce a teaching manual, she told Putnam, not just a recipe collection, and they would build it around fundamental themes and their variations. It would be written in what Julia called “the informal human approach”—a natural speaking voice, as opposed to the cloying tones of so many food writers whenever the subject was France. There were other French cookbooks for Americans, she conceded, but none was logical; none emphasized what Julia called “the ‘whys,' the pitfalls, the remedies, the keeping, the serving”; none was specifically dedicated to rescuing the hapless and setting them on the right path. The new book would do all this while spanning the entire territory of basic and elaborate French cooking. She told Putnam to expect the revised chapter on sauces very shortly, and said the rest of the manuscript might take another six months.

Julia quickly became the de facto head of the project. The whole idea thrilled her: she would be a professional writer and culinary authority, Prof. Julia on a larger stage. The more she identified with this new public persona, the more eager she was to get a lawyer involved with the project in order to put it on a businesslike basis and help them deal with Ives Washburn. She had heard a lot of horror stories about writers' experiences with their publishers. “I've gathered it's a cut-throat game and that if you don't get a lawyer or agent on your side who knows all the ropes, you can get your face peeled and all your efforts bring in the mazuma only for the publisher,” she explained to Paul Sheeline, a lawyer she trusted because he was a nephew of Paul's.

Julia didn't write this book or any other primarily for the money, but she hated to feel she was being cheated or exploited, and from the beginning of her career, she made a point of being involved in the finances. She was already dubious about Ives Washburn because of the way it had botched “What's Cooking in France,” and since Simca and Louisette had no formal contract with the company, she decided they should jump ship and look for a better publisher. Their book was going to be a definitive contribution to French cookery, and she was adamant that the stature and dignity of the enterprise be taken seriously. For Julia, it was the same as being taken seriously herself. “Now I've started in writing, I intend to keep at it for years and years,” she told Sheeline. “So I think it wise to start out on a very firm footing.” Sheeline was no specialist in cook-books, but he did know how hard it was for first-time authors to get published, and he tried to get Julia to put the situation in perspective. “Almost any deal that can be made by a budding writer with a publisher is a good one,” he counseled, and said Julia should consider herself lucky to have any publisher at all interested in her work, even Ives Washburn. This sort of thinking infuriated her. “I quite appreciate the fact that unknown authors are unknown authors,” she retorted. “However, we have a good product to sell, which I think will sell itself, and I see no reason to crawl about on our stomach. This is no amateur affair written by some little women who just love to cook, but a professional job written by professionals; and, I would say without modesty, even a ‘major work' on the principles of French Cooking. I therefore have no intention of wasting it on a no-account firm.”

At the time Julia was taking this magisterial stand, the three authors had little in hand except the revised chapter on sauces and some early work on poultry. Even a “no-account” firm wouldn't have signed up a trio of unknown women on the basis of their hollandaise recipe. What they needed was somebody knowledgeable about cookbook publishing who would fall in love with the project and steer this cumbersome, audacious dream toward the real world; and in the spring of 1952, that very person came into Julia's life. Avis DeVoto was a writer, editor, and literary agent who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband, Bernard DeVoto, a political journalist and historian with a regular column in
Harper's
called “The Easy Chair.” One of his columns caught Julia's attention because he was complaining about American knives. Why were they so inadequate? he demanded. Stainless steel knives were beautiful but useless; they wouldn't hold an edge. Julia agreed wholeheartedly and went out and bought a good French knife, which she mailed to him. Avis, a sophisticated cook who had suggested the column in the first place, was delighted. She wrote a thank-you letter, Julia wrote back, and the two of them fell into an absorbing correspondence.

Since moving to Paris and discovering the passion that would shape her future, Julia had been growing into herself, experiencing more and more of the sense of rightness that had started to emerge back in the OSS. It was in the course of this evolution that Avis became her chief confidante, a wonderfully witty and perceptive recipient for all Julia's musings, rants, and bouts of philosophy. Julia would type on and on, astonishing herself by how much she had to say to this faraway friend whom she'd never met in person. Sometimes she would sit under the hair dryer at the beauty parlor with paper and pen, scribbling away until, as she said, she was “baked to a turn.” Avis couldn't stop talking either: the two of them scrambled from food to cookbook matters to reports on daily life to complaints and wishes and self-scrutiny, all the while pressing each other for opinions on everything from shallots to sex. Both their husbands, they discovered, liked “barbarian” food—roasts, steaks, lots of spices, lots of garlic. “I think that is very American male,” Julia decided. Avis thought the Kinsey reports were a big bore; Julia was riveted by them. (“Heaven knows, I am no authority on sex, but I think it is a fine institution which should be enjoyed by all to the fullest extent.”) Avis loved England, Julia much preferred France; Avis liked martinis, Julia begged her to try a good red wine. Early on, the two friends exchanged photographs. “That is a wonderfully worldly expression you have on,” Julia remarked admiringly. “It is the face I always try to wear when I am in New York, with no success.” She also added relevant physical details:

And she sent interior snapshots as well. Paul, she said, was an intellectual, always ready to probe new ideas, always working on training his mind. “Me, I am not an intellectual,” she admitted. “Except for La Cuisine, I find I have to push myself to build up a thirst for how the atomic bomb works, or a study of Buddhism.” She attributed this problem to her childhood in a “useless and wasteful class of society.” Not until she joined the OSS and was thrown in with “intellectuals and academicians” did she find the sort of people she liked. “You, however, have had years of it,” she reflected. Across the ocean, in a house near Harvard Square, Avis was living one of Julia's imagined lives, just as Simca in her French kitchen was living another.

But for the first seven years of their friendship, Julia and Avis talked more than anything else about the book. As soon as the sauces chapter was fully revised, Julia sent it to Avis asking for an honest opinion as well as any advice about publishing. Avis turned every page with mounting admiration. This was a revelatory approach to French cooking: the infrastructure of culinary methods was as pertinent as the recipes, and the recipes were the most precise and logical she had ever seen. A good American cook would be able to follow them, not necessarily with ease, but at least with a sense of confidence that the authors were never going to leave her in the lurch. And, as she found in the kitchen, the recipes worked. The ingredients came together just as the instructions said they would, and the sauces tasted French. She quickly wrote back to Julia: she must keep right on working; she must not sign with Ives Washburn; Avis was going to send the chapter to a friend at Houghton Mifflin, which was a major publishing company based in Boston, and the book would be handled the way it deserved.

Julia was overjoyed—“I would say
excited,
which is my real reaction, but am learning not to use that word because of its more carnal implications in French!” The chapter went to Dorothy de Santillana, managing editor at Houghton Mifflin, who was, Avis reported, “tickled pink” with the depth and expertise of what she saw. A contract followed, along with an impressive advance of $750. “HOORAY,” typed Julia. “The book will be dedicated to you, my dear, and to La Belle France.” Avis refused the dedication but agreed to be the chief editorial go-between. It had all happened in less than six weeks. Julia tried to be realistic about what lay ahead: she thought it would be a year, at least, before she and her two coauthors completed the manuscript. Her prediction was off by six years, but in every other respect she understood just where she stood in her life. As she said to Avis, the midwife who would see her through a long labor, “I realize with awesome seriousness that the real work is about to begin.”