by Bob Spitz
She’d be ready for him when he finally returned!
Still, the entire matter was ugly and suspicious. “I have just been wondering today if someone is out to ‘get him,’ ” she mused. Two reasons sprung immediately to mind. A few months back they had made a contribution of twenty-five dollars to something called the I Believe Fund, as in: I believe Senator McCarthy is a despicable insect, and here is twenty-five dollars for the express purpose of investigating him. Perhaps that had put Paul’s name on a list. But could the Republicans be that petty—for a measly twenty-five dollars? Julia already knew the answer to that. What she didn’t know was whether she had caused the difficulty.
A letter—it might have stemmed from a letter Julia had written. In October 1954, a woman named Aloise B. Heath, who happened to be William F. Buckley’s sister, accused five Smith College faculty members of being “traitors” and the college of “knowingly harboring Communists.” There was no evidence to support the claim, just her say-so. But it was enough to draw a fierce reaction from Julia. She immediately dashed off a letter to Mrs. Heath, announcing that she was “doubling my annual contribution to Smith” and that this type of character assassination sent a chill up her spine. “In Russia today, as a method for getting rid of opposition,” Julia wrote, “an unsubstantiated implication of treason, such as yours, is often used.” There was every reason to suspect the letter found its way into Paul’s Washington dossier.
Of course, other peccadilloes might have also drawn attention. For instance, Paul’s endearing nickname, “P’ski,” which Julia always called him. He signed his personal letters that way, sometimes “Paulski” or “Comrade Paulski.” Hadn’t it ever occurred to him that Comrade Paulski looked the slightest shade of pink? How about his frequent tirades blasting government indiscretion? Lapses in judgment like that were reported to the proper authorities.
You never knew who was looking at you cross-eyed, Avis admonished Julia. “I even wondered if your father had talked in the wrong places.” Would Pop try to discredit his own son-in-law? Was he that ideologically rabid? Maybe it was simpler than that: “being so pally with the DeVotos.” Benny had been subpoenaed by the House Committee in 1953 and refused to answer their questions. Guilt by association was a popular accusation.
Rather than stew on it, Julia put “the great investigation,” as she called it, behind her. There was still too much duck and turkey work to be done on her poultry chapter, and by October “Paul’s stock [had] risen considerably” as a result of several bravura exhibits that were credited to his stewardship. To Julia’s delight, he began feeling as though he deserved more from his work—certainly more recognition, and even more respect, which was not in his makeup. “I have a feeling he may well, and at last, get a promotion this year, as he is making noises about it.”
By September 1956, their lives seemed to be back on track—as far as their itinerant lives were ever really on track. They had grown reasonably comfortable in Germany, despite Julia’s quibble that “Plittersdorf is a strange half life.” “We both seem to be continually and hopelessly busy,” she offered. Around this time she wrote her family a letter filled with enthusiasm for the German language and the rigors of her work. She had begun reading newspapers in the native tongue and hoped to wade into Goethe before too long. “I have been madly fussing around in the duck and goose section, along with running continuous experiments on making stock in the pressure cooker; how much water per rice is the right amount for risotto; and have also started a light round of entertaining again.”
That same month Julia accompanied Paul to Berlin, where he was supervising three exhibits in the American sector. The trip coincided with their tenth wedding anniversary, and they celebrated in style, hitting a number of fine-dining restaurants that had resurfaced since the war. It was a lovely few days away together. Ten years later, Paul still found his wife “as astonishingly beautiful as ever.” He considered her “a veritable goddess” and exulted in her company. “You’ve made quite a sacrifice for my career,” he told her over coupes de champagne before dinner at the Dreesen. He had a surprise, a special anniversary gift for her, too: “I’m being transferred back to the States,” he announced.
Julia could hardly believe her ears. The States! And after eight years in Europe. “Must feel a bit like an earthquake,” Avis commiserated. How could it be otherwise? America would probably seem as foreign as, well, Germany, she suspected. Living in a house again. Their house, in Washington, D.C. “Shall get a dishwashing machine first thing,” Julia fantasized, “and I shall certainly get a new stove, a black one, gas. And it will be so heavenly to have some friends again!”
And family! It seemed like ages since Julia had felt that kind of intimate connection. Now Charlie and Freddie would be within a short train ride—and her brother, John, who was in Massachusetts, working for the family paper business. And Avis, in Cambridge; she was practically family. Her husband, Benny, had had a heart attack and died suddenly in November 1955. After all she’d done for Julia, it would be wonderful to provide some comfort and support.
The States!
After the initial “tingle of excited apprehension,” Julia was left with a numbing fact: the move would delay the book. Again. The wonderful momentum she’d enjoyed would suddenly grind to a halt, as would her proximity to Simca and all things French. She’d finished the duck section in August and had started in on geese, but now everything—the boxes upon boxes of research, the towering stacks of notes, the dog-eared manuscript—had to be crated and shipped overseas, along with all her utensils and cooking doo-dads. And a new kitchen—another new kitchen—would have to be installed.
Nevertheless, it would give her a chance to apply all she had done, the cooking and the writing, to an American standard. “In fact,” she realized, “this is just about the right time, from the point of view of the book, to be coming home.” Her research may have been exclusive to France, but her audience was entirely back in the States. As was her publisher. Perhaps it was all for the best to finish the book at home, “where everything such as ingredients can be accurately checked.”
A few weeks later, the preparations were complete. On the week of November 12, 1956, just as the leaves had fallen from the trees along the Rhine, Julia and Paul walked out of their Plittersdorf flat, into the midday darkness, and set out for Le Havre. The air was unusually frigid; a harsh winter wind had swept off the North Sea and, at the last minute, Julia, whose clothes had already been shipped overseas, had to borrow an extra coat for the trip. Their car would carry them across Germany into France. Then, home at last.
They never looked back.
ACCORDING TO JULIA, it took more than several months before her life returned to normal. Their 150-year-old house on Olive Street desperately cried out for a face-lift; the place needed repainting from top to bottom, the ceilings a replastering, the walls an up-to-date rewiring; the kitchen was enlarged, two bathrooms renovated, an attic studio remodeled to serve as Julia’s office.
Her approach to cooking, American-style, needed a similar makeover. Everything had changed since 1947, when she had left for Europe, and it was essential to understand the shifting winds in the atmosphere. The post-war food industry stood poised to revolutionize home cooking, converting kitchens everywhere to a kind of instant, ready-mix fare. If Big Business had its way, traditional cooking from scratch would become passé by 1960. Housewives, they determined, sought culinary shortcuts, anything to help reduce the time it took them to prepare a meal. Convenience became the operational catchword, and with it came convenience foods: frozen fish sticks, milk in cartons, packaged cake mixes, canned vegetables—TV dinners! Could it get any more wretched? Julia was no stranger to the vagaries of convenience. She had made Paul a dinner that featured instant mashed potatoes, another with a helping of Uncle Ben’s converted rice. As an experiment. Just to see if he would notice. (He didn’t.) The phenomenon didn’t intrigue her one bit, and yet it seemed to be sweeping the country.
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sp; Supermarkets were full of the stuff. “When the American housewife shops her supermarket,” claimed an article in McCall’s, “she has a choice of 4,693 short-cut foods—the most dazzling array of prepared, pre-cooked, and ready-to-eat foods the world has ever seen.” The sensation wasn’t lost on Julia. She swooned at the enormous selection of food available in an enormous M Street supermarket, around the corner from her enormous house. There was so much to choose from. So utterly … convenient. It was nothing like in France, where a few essentials were showcased on shelves behind a counter and the grocer always selected and bagged one’s purchases. The supermarket experience was liberating to Julia. “You pick up a wire pushcart as you come in and just trundle about looking and fingering everything there is,” she wrote Simca. How wonderful to pick out each asparagus spear or mushroom yourself.
As Julia knew, the rise of the supermarket was in no way analogous with an advance in American cooking. As early as 1953, Esquire had voiced the modern housewife’s plaint: “Cooking, to her, is no longer an adventure. It’s a chore, and she’s sick of it.” Women kept cooking, nonetheless, but with far less enthusiasm, less pizzazz. A post-war go-go lifestyle demanded a go-go kitchen routine. It seemed ridiculous to spend precious time making a roast when the family wolfed down portions of frozen prepared Swiss steak and Tater Tots. “It’s just 1-2-3, and dinner’s on the table,” advised a magazine article designed for the modern homemaker. Opening a couple of cans and mixing the contents together, then popping the whole thing in the oven sure beat all the fuss that went into prepping a classic recipe. Why bother? Julia saw this reflected in “the most disheartening article” in Woman’s Day, contrasting the output of a traditional cook who made things from scratch with that of “a smart young thing who did everything the ‘New Modern Way’ … using cans and boxes, and frozen stuff.” It baffled her that this new-age gal would serve frozen asparagus—yes, frozen asparagus—with a blob of Hellman’s mayonnaise atop instead of “silly old-fashioned Hollandaise sauce.” It seemed counterproductive, if not silly old-fashioned dumb. The New Modern Way appeared to have factored out flavor. What is the country coming to, I’d like to know? she wondered.
In the end, Julia couldn’t abide the supermarket ethos. The chickens on offer looked plump and beautiful—but had no chicken taste whatsoever. The butter had no creaminess, no body. The bread was unnaturally white, fluffy, and came pre-sliced, in cellophane wrappers. The fruits and vegetables were industrialized versions of garden-grown specimens. The lettuce was iceberg, full of water, all texture, no tooth. There were no cèpes, morels, or chanterelles, no shallots or crème fraîche. It was next to impossible to buy a calf’s foot for making stock, or even decent veal. How did she expect to instruct modern cooks who used margarine and thrived on canned-soup casseroles?
More troubling, perhaps, was the absence of good wine. It wasn’t a part of the American dining tradition. There was some cheap California jug wine—“hearty burgundy” or “fruity Chablis”—but it was rarely, if ever, drunk with meals. That meant there’d be nothing delicious on hand to cook with—nothing to deglaze a pan with or to flavor a sauce. “People just do not have bottles of white wine all the time to use in cooking,” she reported to Simca. “If they bought one for a bit of cooking, they wouldn’t know what to do with the rest of it.” That raised a whole slew of problems. How could one prepare coq au vin with Italian Swiss Colony “chianti” or a sauce à la livournaise with Almaden “grenache”? You might as well forget about making fricassées or moules marinière.
Julia wasn’t home very long before coming to the conclusion “that most Americans don’t know anything at all, NOTHING, about the techniques of good cooking.” There was none of the care or craftsmanship she learned at Le Cordon Bleu; the quality of ingredients was practically a nonexistent factor. Or the taste: it never occurred to the modern American cook that processed foods had little or no flavor. Wherever she went, Julia kept bumping into shortcuts and convenience food: frozen piecrusts and packaged fillings, dehydrated onion soup, instant coffee, pancake mixes, instant meringue, canned fruit cocktail, Cheez Whiz, Reddi-wip—the monstrous magnitude of it depressed and discouraged her. And the drivel she read in women’s magazines! In one case, an editor’s suggestion for a “Harvest Luncheon” included a recipe for Twenty Minute Roast, which featured slabs of Spam slathered with orange marmalade and a layer of Vienna sausages broiled with canned peaches. At the time, Julia was experimenting with duck à l’orange. She had typed an instruction for intensifying the flavor:
Remember the sauce must be thick enough to withstand the dilution of the orange juice to come. Boil down to thicken more if necessary.
Taste very carefully for seasoning and strength. It will receive some more flavor from the wine and roasting juices later, but should, even so, be almost perfect at this stage.
Normally, she would have just said: “Reduce to thicken if necessary and correct flavor,” but would that be enough for a cook who slathers marmalade on Spam? Everything—every function and procedure, every baby step—had to be thoroughly explained. “So I am deeply depressed, gnawed by doubts, and feel that all our work may just lay a big rotten egg,” she wrote to Avis DeVoto.
Even more vexing, she feared her collaboration with Simca would also come to naught. Initially nervous that no American would undertake one of Simca’s rigorous, labor-intensive recipes, Julia had pleaded with her partner to simplify the process without losing any of the authentic French spirit. During their time apart, Simca obliged with her work on the vegetable chapter, a collection of recipes that would stand all the existing writing on its head. Now, every few weeks, another package arrived from France with a new sheaf of recipes that were as well conceived, logical, and streamlined as they were utterly delicious. Simca had managed to take all her old family specialties and reimagine them for an enthusiastic cook. Braised endive and leeks, glazed carrots, ratatouille, cauliflower au gratin, stuffed tomatoes, potatoes a dozen different ways—the output was extraordinary for its variety and inspiration. Julia was awed by her partner’s contribution. No one worked harder preparing splendid recipes than Simca.
Despite their prodigious effort, however, Julia continued to be troubled. On the one hand she considered all the work they’d done to be something of a watershed in the history of American cookbookery. Nothing in print resembled anything they had achieved for its all-out research and thorough detail, as well as its exhaustively instructive style. It was revolutionary in the way it presented French cuisine, not with reverence or pomposity, but joie de vivre. And, yet, the apathy of the American homemaker seemed especially disturbing. All those cooking conveniences and processed foods! The magazines and newspapers were full of such blather. “There are loads and loads and loads of books and articles on how to do things quickly,” Julia brooded, “and very very very few on how to make things taste good.” Why, the sorry plague had even spread its tentacles to France. A new cookbook by Henriette Chandet called Cuisine d’urgence—or “Hurry-Up Cooking”—startled Julia for its insidious premise that classic French recipes could be accomplished by using … shortcuts! She found its techniques and cooking methods “horrifying” and “disturbing.” It reduced culinary competence to shake and bake. “It will be the death of La Cuisine F(rançaise),” she predicted. The more Julia read and observed, the more discouraged she became. It seemed pointless to push ahead if the contrivances of modern cuisine pointed the whole practice on a downhill course. “HELL AND DAMNATION, is all I can say,” she vented in a letter to Simca. “WHY DID WE EVER DECIDE TO DO THIS ANYWAY?”
Because it was undeniable, of course. Because there was no other alternative. “I can’t think of doing anything else, can you?” she asked Simca.
Besides, the book they were writing defied convention. It was unique, she felt, in every way. There were plenty of so-called French cookbooks available on American shelves, but nothing so exhaustive, nothing so authentic, nothing “for people … who want to be able to produce the
most delicious things it is possible to do.”
Julia had spent considerable time studying the competition. So far, there was nothing that seemed to resemble their book. Overall, she wasn’t very impressed with the quality of American cookbooks. They were mostly condensed, slapdash affairs, with little instructional substance for the novice cook, not like the technically proficient models by Madame Saint-Ange or Ali-Bab. There was The Cordon Bleu Cookbook by Dione Lucas, the first female graduate of Le Cordon Bleu, who had made a name for herself as a New York instructor. Julia didn’t know what to make of it. “Her technique is certainly not classical French,” she grumbled. For example, the recipe for duck à l’orange was a single paragraph long. There was no direction to season the duck with salt and pepper, no orange liqueur, no vinegar for acidity. It called for stock, without saying what kind of stock. No reminder to cut and discard the trussing strings. No orange segments as an accompaniment to the meat, no butter added to enrich the sauce. The new Lucas cookbook, Meat and Poultry, fared no better in Julia’s wary eye; she found it “sloppy” and “very poor in many respects.” Elizabeth David’s French Country Cooking wasn’t bad, as far as recipes went, but the author was reluctant to provide specific measurements. “Her books were charmingly written,” says Judith Jones, an editor who would eventually play a major role in Julia’s career. “But she despised American cooks and their need for exact proportions, so you were often in the dark as far as ingredients were concerned.”