Laura Shapiro

by Julia Child

  Clearly, there could be nothing rigid or pristine about the concept of ingredients in this book. That didn’t bother Julia at all. On the contrary, she thought it was in the very nature of ingredients to be pliable, to serve the cook no matter where the cook was heading. She had always hated that brand of wisdom about bouillabaisse that insisted the only proper versions came from grizzled French fishermen in certain coastal towns. She had had a terrible bouillabaisse in the coastal town of Le Lavandou—“very rough, and flavored with nothing but saffron”—and decided she was probably a better cook than most grizzled fishermen. She proceeded to make bouillabaisse everywhere she lived, from Maine to Norway, using the likeliest fresh fish available, and found the results not only delicious but impeccably French. A slew of freshly caught pollack was the basis for her Maine bouillabaisse: with potatoes, fennel, and saffron, she reported to Simca, “It was very good, and had the correct taste…the necessary flavor was there.” What made a dish French wasn’t the raw materials, it was what happened to them in the hands of the cook.

  Strawberries were dreamberries—she ate them with rapture every summer she found herself in France—but the key that unlocked French cooking for Julia was technique. Her lessons with Chef Bugnard had turned her toward a radiant future. In the logic and transparency of culinary method, each step a meaningful contribution to the complex beauty of the result, Julia had found her lifelong faith. She was a believer, not in the dogma set down by the sages, but in the notion of French cooking as a great master plan—fundamental procedures that could be applied to all the cuisines of the world. Learning to cook, moreover, had unleashed her imagination, her powers of analysis, her scholarly skills, and her addiction to hard work. Simple dishes, well prepared, would always win her respect; but Julia liked cooking best when it was akin to mountain climbing, not a stroll in the park. She went into the kitchen because that was the place where her mind was engaged most happily and energetically. Years later, when her friend Anne Willan was planning the curriculum for La Varenne, the Paris cooking school, Julia urged her to establish a place early in the schedule for “difficult or advanced items, like puff pastry.” The size and scope of the demand constituted, to Julia, the very essence of her chosen work. As she put it to Willan, “The sooner one gets to pastry, the more of a cook one begins to feel.” By contrast, the whole question of ingredients was negotiable. Canned and frozen foods, vermouth instead of wine—these couldn’t erode or undermine the Frenchness of the cooking. But when a French cookbook devoted to shortcut recipes appeared—Cuisine d’Urgence, or “Hurry-up Cooking”—Julia read doom on every page. If technique was lost, if careful methods gave way to speed for its own sake, the end was nigh. “I find the sauce-making methods horrifying, and also disturbing, and hope that too many people will not take to it,” she wrote to Simca. “It will be the death of La Cuisine Fcse.”

  Yet even on the subject of technique, she was willing to consider modern innovations if they achieved the right results. At the Cordon Bleu she had learned to whip egg whites with a balloon whisk, to beat butter by hand, to keep constant watch over the egg yolks while making hollandaise to be sure they were thickening properly and absorbing the right amount of butter, and to employ hours of pounding and sieving and beating to make quenelles. Now she bought a blender and an electric mixer and started to experiment. “This whole field is wide open, that of using the electric aids for a lot of fancy French stuff, and we’ll be presenting something entirely new,” she told Avis. “No sacred cows for us.” She was delighted to outdo the old masters by using a mixer to beat cream into the quenelle paste, or using a blender instead of a mortar and pestle to make shellfish butter. But even when the electric aids did a good job, she was careful about how she expressed her approval. If a machine saved the cook from a truly laborious chore, she recommended it outright. But when machines became a substitute for the cook’s skill, for her practiced hand and her powers of observation—when they made it possible for someone to cook as if she, too, were a machine—Julia hedged. Yes, you can make hollandaise and mayonnaise in the blender, she assured readers, and included recipes for both the traditional and machine versions. But she begged readers to become adept at making these sauces by hand so they could examine close-up what was happening to the egg yolks. Even an eight-year-old could make blender hollandaise, she added—a remark that wasn’t necessarily an endorsement. Julia never believed good cooking was child’s play. As she scribbled in her notes while writing the introduction to the book, “Life is hard & earnest. Most pains—most results. If know what doing—half battle is won.”

  Long hours in the kitchen, hard labor, page after page of instructions, unfamiliar food—Julia did wonder occasionally whether American homemakers were going to be as enthusiastic as she was about these recipes. American newspapers and magazines were constantly running stories about how modern women didn’t know how to cook and refused to learn, preferring to make dinner by opening boxes and cans. Even a gourmet meal, the magazines crowed, could now be put on the table in a half hour. “The advertisers have made people feel like fools if they even wanted to take time over things,” Julia wrote to Simca. “There are loads and loads and loads of books and articles on how to do things quickly, and very very very few on how to make things taste good.” Americans just didn’t think about cooking the way the French did. Homemakers looked at recipes and worried about how many pots and pans were going to get dirty; they liked to economize by using margarine and never dreamed it could affect the flavor of the dish; they put three or four ill-matched ingredients together and served it up as a casserole. “Casseroles,” Julia groaned to Avis. “I even hate the name, as it always implies to me some god awful mess.” Nor could she abide the way Americans made a fetish of nutrition. “I think one should get one’s vitamins in salads, and raw fruits, and what is cooked should be absolutely delicious and to hell with the vitamins.” At a luncheon meeting of the American Embassy Wives Club in Oslo, Julia was served what she described to Simca as “the most horrible meal I have ever had”—a particularly lurid example of what was going on back home. “As we sat down each guest was served a big plate on which there was a tower of pink stuff posed on a piece of lettuce. This tower turned out to be about ½ litre of frozen whipped cream mixed with mayonnaise, frozen strawberries, bananas, peaches, and grapes…everything as hard as a rock. And the lettuce leaf was so small one couldn’t hide anything under it. The next and final course was a banana and nut cake–mix cake, an enormous piece for each guest. Cake was surrounded with a very thick tan-colored frosting, also a mix I suppose, because I can’t imagine anyone making it. Ugh.”

  But she refused to believe that frozen fruit salad had permanently numbed the American palate. Surely, if she and Simca could make their recipes clear and foolproof, American homemakers would convert. How could they resist the food, once they had tasted the first perfectly prepared chicken breasts of their lives? The first true omelets? The first cakes made light by their own billowing egg whites, not baking powder? The greater challenge would be to persuade homemakers to undertake such lengthy recipes, given their lackadaisical approach to cooking and the tremendous bugaboo of time. One solution was to do as much as possible ahead of zero hour, and Julia had long made a specialty of this strategy. The clock ticking inexorably toward dinnertime, the sense of panic, the bevy of details frantic for her attention—all this was deeply familiar to her. Throughout her work on the book, the needs of what she called “the chef-hostess” were at the forefront of her thinking. Every recipe, she told Avis, would include directions on how to prepare as much as possible of the dish ahead of time, and how to store and reheat it without sacrificing flavor or texture. “There are so many many things which can be done that way—green veg, fish in sauce, roasts, braises, sautés in sauce—etc.,” she explained. “There is no reason why one has to serve those bloody casseroles all the time.”

  Toward the end of 1957, while Julia was living in Washington, she decided it would be a good
idea to publish a few articles in American magazines. She and Simca were in the final stages of their work, readying the manuscript for delivery to Houghton Mifflin, and a little advance publicity would certainly benefit the book. After much thought about what might appeal to Americans, she prepared an article featuring the Belgian specialty waterzoï de poulet. It would be timely, since the 1958 World’s Fair was about to open in Brussels, and she felt the recipe would pose no special difficulties to the home cook. Because her editor, Dorothy de Santillana, was based in Boston, Julia sent the article to John Leggett, who was Houghton Mifflin’s New York editor, to “peddle around.” She urged him to explain to magazine food editors that although the recipe was long, it was not at all complicated—merely detailed. To her amazement, there were no takers, even though the recipe required nothing more than sweating the chicken, poaching it in wine, julienning and cooking the aromatic vegetables, and making a rather tricky sauce with egg yolks, cream, and broth. Helen McCully of McCall’s food section took one look and said that if she showed this recipe to her editor, “she would probably faint dead away.” McCully added that she herself could tell what a well-constructed recipe it was, but “to the non-cook it certainly looks like quite a chore.” Julia was not discouraged. She trimmed the recipe and sent it back to Leggett along with another possibility—boned stuffed duck in a pastry crust. “This is a marvelous dish, can be served hot or cold, and makes a splendid effect,” she wrote hopefully. “Most people think this is the kind of impossible thing only a chef could do, but it is quite within the range of even the modest cook if supplied with good directions such as ours.” She envisioned a spread in Life: “Life Bones a Duck.”

  Leggett had no success with the articles. McCully said even the shortened version of waterzoï was too complicated for American housewives, and the other food editors had the same reaction. For the first time, Julia started to worry that she might be horribly out of step with the rest of the country. “I am deeply depressed, gnawed by doubts, and feel that all our work may just lay a big rotten egg,” she admitted to Avis. But she hated the thought of turning the recipes into baby talk just because a lot of magazine editors didn’t understand French cooking. “The completed volume will, I believe, speak for itself,” she told Leggett with dignity. Simca came to Washington, and the two women scrambled to finish by deadline day, February 24, 1958.

  They made the deadline, but the manuscript they delivered did not speak for itself, at least in any language Houghton Mifflin could understand. The thing was a monster: eight hundred pages, and they covered only poultry and sauces. Julia’s idea was that the book would be published as a series of volumes, one every two years. The next would be eggs and vegetables, then perhaps meat, then soup and fish, and so on into the future—“up to the grave, as the subject is vast,” she predicted happily. She had tried to explain this plan a few months earlier to Dorothy de Santillana, who protested that Houghton Mifflin wanted a cookbook, not an infinite series of cookbooks. The misunderstanding had never been cleared up, and now De Santillana was gazing white-faced at recipes with a quantity of detail that bordered on manic. If you want to make pressed duck, Julia informed American homemakers, you’ll find it hard to locate the right sort of duck—one that was killed by suffocation in order to retain the blood that enriched the sauce—so go ahead and do as so many French restaurants now do, and add fresh pig’s blood mixed with wine to the duck press. “This is not the book we contracted for,” De Santillana said faintly. Julia objected, but when she was able to step back and gain a little perspective on the manuscript, she could see exactly what they had delivered to Houghton Mifflin: a huge, densely overgrown thicket of brambles, impossible to handle.

  De Santillana rejected the manuscript outright, but she was still impressed by Julia and Simca, and she invited them to come up with a plan for a more salable book. She even picked up on Julia’s idea of a series, but said the books would have to be very different from the volume in hand. Each one must be very simple and very compact, written to fit the time and attention constraints of the typical American cook, “who is so apt to be mother, nurse, chauffeur, and cleaner as well.” Julia knew this was sensible advice, but it didn’t appeal to her. She was still longing to write a big, fat treatise covering every single essential point about French cooking. Nonetheless, after conferring with Simca, she decided to give in and accept the American way of life in culinary matters, or at least to go along with the prevailing pessimistic view of it. Americans seemed intent on “speed and the elimination of work,” she conceded to De Santillana. “We have therefore decided to shelve our own dream for the time being and propose to prepare you a short and snappy book directed to the somewhat sophisticated housewife-chauffeur.” The book would run about three hundred pages and feature authentic French recipes as well as hints on the “pepping up” of frozen and canned products. “Everything would be of the simpler sort, but nothing humdrum,” she promised. “The recipes would look short. We might even manage to insert a note of gaiety and a certain quiet chic, which would be a pleasant change.”

  She was proposing exactly the sort of book she despised. Yes, she would try to lift it above the inanity of most magazine treatments of French cooking—“quiet chic” might help, assuming the format could support such an innovation—but she would be addressing her least favorite people in the world, the ones who firmly resisted cooking. Housewives. Julia had never thought one way or another about the word, but she was growing to hate it. Editors, publishers, everyone who talked about recipes in America bowed and scraped to housewives, those ubiquitous females forever depicted as running frantically from laundry to car pool to scout troop, with no time to cook excellent meals and, it was universally assumed, no desire to learn. The task facing her now would be to win the allegience of this unappealing creature. Other cookbook authors had succeeded; maybe she and Simca could at least raise the standard. She asked Avis to send her a copy of one of Houghton Mifflin’s bestselling cookbooks, Helen Corbitt’s Cookbook, by a popular Texas food expert in charge of the restaurant at Neiman Marcus. Corbitt’s recipe for coq au vin was exactly twenty-five words long, not counting the list of ingredients. “It is such a wonderful example of easy-looking recipes,” Julia wrote; and her admiration was sincere, though not for the food.

  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.