by Bob Spitz
The first class was given on January 23, 1952, amid a haze of improvisation and fluster. Almost immediately, all sorts of hurdles arose. Since there had been no time for rehearsal or an actual run-through, it was difficult for the teachers to coordinate who spoke when. Recipes hadn’t been adapted for American-style measurements, when exact measurements were made at all; whereas Julia and Simca were specific when it came to quantities, Louisette was an instinctive cook, using pinches and splashes instead of exact amounts. And the French instructors found it incomprehensible that American housewives didn’t cook with a staff of servants. Shopping? Cleaning up? Why, just leave it for the housekeeper, bien sûr.
These flaws were only hiccups, however. Within a few classes, they had ironed out the kinks and the women performed as an effortless ensemble. Sessions ran for two hours, twice a week, capped by a formal sit-down lunch at 1:00 p.m. Paul showed up in time to join the meal, pouring generously from a sampling of Bordeaux aging in his cellar and “giving a little discussion on wines” to students whose “taste in reds,” he presumed, “seems to have been founded in large part on Italian Swiss Colony gallon-jug juices.” Paul turned out to be a star attraction. “He poured with a flourish and talked with eloquence, as if the wine were nectar,” Simca recalled. The lunches were so successful, in fact, that the cooking school began taking on extra guests just for the meals as a way of showcasing and promoting their classes.
For the rest of the spring, Julia worked in her kitchen with Simca and Louisette, testing recipes in between teaching and shopping. Those cooking sessions were especially rewarding. Simca’s baking was inspired, nothing short of divine, Julia discovered, and she was “full of ideas on cakes and pastries.” Chef Pellaprat had unlocked for her the mysteries of puff pastry, which she shared while making piecrust with Julia. But the women stumbled on an obstacle of sorts that would alter the course of their cooking exploits.
For some stubborn reason, Simca’s recipe refused to proof—“all her proportions were off” and her piecrusts crumbled like gypsum. Why? The recipe had been in her family for years and she’d made hundreds of pies that had turned out perfectly. It must be Julia’s oven, that hulking monster from the bogs of Hell. But regulating its temperature failed to solve the problem. What, then, or perhaps who was the culprit? At the time, no one suspected the flour, which they’d been buying at the PX—Gold Medal flour, to be precise, imported in bulk from the United States. After a few experiments, however, the proof was in the piecrust. French flour, they realized, was “much fatter and full of body and seems to need as much as one-third less fat to make a nice short crust.” Apparently, American flour was chemically re-jiggered to extend its life on a supermarket shelf. That meant processing out the natural fats to keep it from getting maggoty, as it tended to be in France. So all the pastry recipes had to be recalculated, retested, and rewritten for the American kitchen, as would every recipe for their prospective audience. Not to mention the necessity of a rethinking of all ingredients. So many staples of French markets were not available in the States. Crème fraîche, for one, was unknown, as were shallots and leeks and chanterelles, to name a few. Butter, too, was a whole different animal. And try finding Gruyère on an A&P shelf. There was so much to explain.
It was a lot of work—but worth it. Julia focused her attention on the differences between cooking in France and America. “From that time on I never lost sight of the fact that my sole purpose was to teach cooking to Americans, not the French,” she recalled. “I had to find a way to translate everything into a pleasurable experience that a typical housewife could execute without fuss.” So things like margarine had to be taken into account. And Crisco. And ketchup.
Meat presented another dilemma. The French cuts of beef were entirely different from those found in an American supermarket. How were they supposed to explain recipes that featured tournedos, chateaubriand, and entrecôtes, to say nothing of sweetbreads, tête de veau, kidneys, and tripe? Buying lardons, for barding veal, was next to impossible, even in New York, with its large faction of French ex-pats. The last thing Julia wanted was for their students to return home to America only to discover they were unable to cook any of the recipes from her class. She expressed these concerns in a letter to her sister-in-law, Freddie, and in no time, a packet of photos arrived in France resembling an undercover surveillance of butcher-shop cases. Every cut of meat was shown in explicit detail so that the women could make a suitable comparison.
Meanwhile, the next session of the cooking school began on March 1, 1952, with a slightly higher price—7,000 francs (about $20) for three classes—and a new name: L’École des Trois Gourmandes, whose official logo, a red “3” in a circle, was worn on a badge by the instructors. The class filled up fast with five students, “plus a small waiting list.” Julia, Simca, and Louisette had launched the operation so that it would be self-perpetuating, an ongoing concern—a business, as opposed to a hobby—and legitimate competition for Le Cordon Bleu. As somewhat of a coup, Julia brought in Max Bugnard as a guest instructor, and they plotted to lure away other chefly studs from Madame Brassart’s stable.
Throughout the spring and summer of 1952, when not cooking or teaching a class, Julia explored the new culinary landscape that Simca and Louisette had mapped out for her. Her days were filled with functions that involved food and eating—many of them revolving around luncheons sponsored by Le Cercle des Gourmettes. The club remained one of her go-to haunts. She adored the “gossipy cooking sessions and the dazzling food,” the delight of rubbing elbows with so many women obsessed as she was. It didn’t faze her that the members were mostly ancient relics, well into their seventies and eighties. She, Simca, and Louisette were among the club’s young Turks—rising stars, but hardly arrivistes. Food savvy was currency in Paris, where Louisette, more than others, seemed to know everyone on the scene.
It was Louisette who brought Julia into the capricious orbit of one of Paris’s most eccentric gastronomes: Maurice Edmond Sailland, otherwise known as the great Prince Curnonsky. Part poseur, part virtuoso, part gustatory mooch, Curnonsky, as he called himself to juice up his otherwise plain-vanilla byline, had an all-consuming passion for fine French food and an intellect that showcased a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of the subject. Curnonsky had been a reporter, an influential food critic, a prolific author, and a philosopher whose ideas and critical monologues are imbued with tradition as well as controversy. His thirteen-volume manifesto, La France gastronomique, advanced the interpretation of three hundred years of French cooking. He was instrumental in founding Guide Michelin and, in 1928, established the Académie des gastronomes, the preeminent body on matters pertaining to French cooking. He famously observed that “good cooking is when things taste of what they are,” which was typically Curnonskian: simple, authoritative, pretentious, unassailable.
At seventy-nine, when Julia met him, Curnonsky was still the enfant terrible of the French food scene, a voluptuous epicurean known to receive visitors in his bathrobe and to swoop into a three-star restaurant unannounced and expect dinner waiting for him, free of charge. He was no longer strong and sinewy, but the victim of indulgence, a “short, fat, eagle-beaked, triple-chinned, pale-blue-eyed, witty, spoiled and knowledgeable” man, whose “stories about food, wine, and people” were the assets he traded on. Julia reminisced how she “immediately fell for him.” He seemed larger than life, “a spirited and charming old man,” who amused her with untold numbers of sketches of cooking lore that grew increasingly more convoluted and contradictory the more he rambled on, until she began to regard him as “a dogmatic meatball,” and “a big bag of wind.”
Later, in July, Louisette invited “the girls” to lunch with Irma Rombauer, the doyenne of American cookbookery, whose Joy of Cooking was the undisputed reigning heavyweight champion. Julia thought Joy was “a wonderful book.” It was chatty and social and much more readable than its crowd-pleasing predecessor, The Fannie Farmer Cookbook. The recipes were clearly better, more in t
une with what people were eating—much more modern, more twentieth century. Rombauer, herself, had surprised Julia. On the one hand, “old Mrs. Joy was terribly nice, just a good, simple Midwestern housewife.” And, yet, there was a steely undercore to her, a no-nonsense astuteness that Julia found refreshing. Mrs. Joy, as she discovered, was also Mrs. Irate—irate for having been ripped off by her publisher. Heatedly, she explained how “she’d been in some way weazeled [sic] out of something like royalties for 50,000 copies of her book, and she was furious,” Julia recalled. Publishing, it seemed, was a cutthroat business, a tidbit Julia stored away for the future, just in case.
In any case, Rombauer set the bar high for Simca and Louisette, who were in the midst of polishing their “big jumble of recipes” for their upcoming anthology, French Home Cooking. The publisher, Ives Washburn, had hired a freelance editor named Helmut Ripperger to assist in the process, which seemed to reinforce the good intentions all around. But Ripperger turned out to be a goldbrick. He dawdled when it came to revising the manuscript and preyed on Louisette’s moony good nature, borrowing money from her and cadging “delicious little meals.” It made Julia’s blood boil when she thought of “poor Louisette” being “pushed around by this egocentric pansy.” This only soured her on Ives Washburn and the publishing game. Still, her colleagues pressed on, engrossed in their work. The book was massive, ambitious, revealing practically every recipe from their families’ vaults, in addition to a complete overhaul of classical methods and technique. Nothing like it had ever been attempted.
Finally, on August 28, 1952, a letter arrived from Ives Washburn, in New York, that starkly altered the course of the project. It contained the news that Helmut Ripperger had either quit or was sacked, leaving the book without its American voice. The consequence spelled disaster. As much as Julia loved her two colleagues, as much as her respect for their work was deep and profound, she knew they were lost, lost, if left to their own devices. Her opinion was no reflection on their know-how as cooks, but rather on their ability to express themselves to an American audience. They discussed all this decisively one afternoon in Louisette’s upside-down kitchen, acknowledging that it now seemed hopeless to proceed as planned. Of course, if someone were to come to their rescue, someone they knew and trusted, someone much like them, fiercely dedicated to the cause, who understood and appreciated French cooking … All eyes turned to gauge Julia’s reaction.
“I’d be delighted to,” she said without hesitation.
The decision needed no great reflection, but it would be some time before she learned what she’d gotten herself into.
Twelve
A Memorable Feast
The manuscript was a mess. Julia knew it almost from the moment she started to read. The “big jumble of recipes” that Simca and Louisette put together was incomprehensible: too long, too complicated, too French, too too. As a cookbook, it seemed “infuriatingly vague,” so clumsy in its execution; she doubted Americans would find it very useful. Above all, the writing was “not very professional.” Julia felt a sinking disappointment throughout September 1952, as she attempted to parse the various chapters she’d been given: sauces, soups, eggs, entrées, poultry and game, meats, and vegetables. The book sure didn’t grab her the way she had hoped. “In fact,” she said, “I did not like it at all.”
But … oh, there was something so enchanting about the idea: a French cookbook for American housewives, “fully explained for the novice.” Others had tried—and failed—to pull it off, ignoring what Julia called “the ‘whys,’ the pitfalls, the remedies, the keeping, the serving,” all the nuances that made French home cooking so special. And the cuisine! “I wasn’t aware of any book that explained la cuisine bourgeoise the way this one did.” It is almost impossible to overstate the effect its dishes had on Julia. Simca and Louisette were such damned good cooks. She loved their food, loved their whole approach. They—all three of them—had forged a close, interactive bond. It seemed a shame to let such a project implode.
Julia thought long and hard about whether to get involved with this book. It would need an overhaul, a major rewrite, from top to bottom, and she doubted that any of the recipes would make sense to an amateur cook. They needed to be deconstructed, rethought, to make them clear and more informative. And accurate: Julia would have to test all the recipes herself, test them from scratch, to ensure that they worked, that the measurements were precise. How many times would she have to cook them to determine that? How long would it take to work her way through six hundred recipes? “It needs an immense amount of work,” Paul warned. “It’ll be a colossal job.”
Les Trois Gourmandes: Louisette, Simca, and Julia, Paris, April 8, 1953 (Photo credit 12.1)
Could she make that kind of a commitment at this point in her life? Only a month earlier, Julia had turned forty. It seemed fairly late to launch yet another new career. She’d already laid the groundwork for a French-based cooking school that, still in its infancy, was loaded with potential. And there was Paul to consider. His four-year stint with the USIS terminated automatically on September 15 and therefore his “future was anyone’s guess.” It seemed unlikely that he’d be renewed for Paris. That seemed almost too good to be true. There was some talk about a transfer to Bordeaux or Marseille, but Paul knew the score: diplomatic service was “a matter of slots and bodies”; he could wind up anywhere they needed a French-speaking desk jockey with a background in espionage and art. Madrid and Rome weren’t out of the running, or they could “slam us off to Zamboan,” he mused. He had just turned fifty, an age when most diplomats were either at the top of their departments or taking early retirement. Since 1948, Paul had been stuck in a mid-level post with “an anomalous rank: Foreign Service Staff Officer.” The best he could hope for was a lateral transfer. In any case, he said, “I don’t particularly relish changing my life-pattern again.”
Julia wasn’t so sure. “Meself,” she wrote to Freddie, “I’d rather like to stay here just one more year.” There was still much she wanted to learn about French cooking, but she was also feeling some nostalgia for the States. “Two or three years in Washington” sounded nice. It had been ages since she’d slept in her own bed, or cooked in her own kitchen in the Olive Street house. She was also curious about a newfangled sensation she’d been reading about: television. The magazines were full of its attractions. A box in your home that broadcast entertainment shows and the news! “How much do you really use it?” she asked her sister-in-law. “How do you like the programs?” Television. “My heavens, I am beginning to feel very out-of-date indeed.”
No, she wouldn’t mind moving back for a while. Besides, there were rumblings of another sort that had begun to give her pause. The State Department had become a target for right-wing witch-hunters who claimed there was widespread Communist infiltration inside its offices. Anyone connected with culture or the arts was a prime suspect. Paul’s friend Budd Schulberg had already been fingered, as had buddies of his and Julia’s from the OSS. Who was next? Julia understood how anyone engaged in an intellectual life in the thirties and forties might have flirted with the same ideals as communism: collective bargaining, ending classism and economic inequality. “I’ll bet I would have been a communist at that period, too,” she speculated, “if I had been an intellectual instead of a well-to-do butterfly.”
Not even the USIS had been spared the Red-baiting pogrom. In December, Representative Fred Busbey, a Republican from Illinois, had seen one of Paul’s art exhibits when he passed through Paris that he later determined was “communist art.” Never mind that the work had been done by fifty-six contemporary American artists and was on loan to the embassy from the Museum of Modern Art. Or that half the prints were abstract, a form banned in Soviet Russia. Or that the exhibit was underwritten by Nelson Rockefeller. Busbey, art critic and patriot, demanded an investigation.
All of this made Julia uncomfortable. But the book—that book—took her mind off the distractions. She kept returning to Simca and Louise
tte’s manuscript with real alacrity. “The more I thought about it,” she said, “the more this project fired my imagination.”
She would do it, she explained to her two colleagues; she would join forces with them in making this cookbook the most important work of its kind. But there were conditions. They’d have to be equal partners. To ensure that the tone was right for Americans, Julia would do most of the writing. And the manuscript—well, it was out, for now; they’d be writing an entirely new book.
The recipes, she quickly determined, were its tent pole. Everything depended on their accuracy to begin with, and afterward, on the way, they were explained simply and logically. Julia wasted no time getting down to business. By mid-September, she started cooking through the wad of recipes, beginning with soups, which seemed fundamental and were started with all-purpose bases that could be used as building blocks to create variations when enriched with other ingredients. This wasn’t done willy-nilly, plunge-right-in. Julia had a plan: she’d make one soup per day, consulting Simca and Louisette’s recipe for, say, watercress soup, along with similar recipes from five classic cookbooks on her shelf: Carême, Larousse gastronomique, Flammarion, Curnonsky, and Ali-Bab. After reading through each, she would make the soup three different ways to determine the best possible recipe.
It was a long, tedious process. Julia’s days were filled with experimentation: cooking and making notes, more cooking and more extensive notes. She went about everything scientifically, subjecting each recipe to what she called the “operational proof”—that is, not relying on the published recipes or family traditions so much as concrete results from her very own stove. Recipes found in the American cookbooks presented the greatest challenge. They were so loosely written, so casual in their approach; measurements were listed in terms of “a spoonful,” “a cupful,” or “a medium-sized onion.” That wouldn’t do—no, that wouldn’t do at all. It became even more apparent when Julia made béchamel, one of the most basic French white sauces. Even Joy of Cooking’s recipe for it was way off the mark. For authenticity’s sake, she weighed American tablespoons of butter and flour on the metric scale until the perfect balance was achieved. This took time and several misfires before she was able to rewrite the recipe to reflect the results. To most observers, this process may have seemed trivial or “arcane”; nevertheless, to Julia each outcome was “an exciting discovery.”