by Bob Spitz
The work consumed her. The cooking itself was a source of endless discovery, each new recipe an unfolding mystery, each new combination of ingredients its set of unifying clues. She sifted through the data like Nero Wolfe: methodically, open-minded, inquisitive, analytical. Nothing escaped her critical eye. Everything needed proper balance. The first time Julia made onion soup, for instance, the broth seemed pallid, lackluster. It had none of the sweet, buttery richness that onions demand. Subsequent tests produced a burned, almost tarry aftertaste. None of the elements seemed to harmonize. After several more false starts, she discovered her problem: it wasn’t the ingredients, but time. The onions needed to be fully caramelized, to take on that sugary, almost sticky quality, which could only be done by “a long, slow cooking in butter and oil.” There was no cutting corners. The only way to deepen the flavor, to make it perfectly, was time, nearly forty-five minutes of constant cooking, constant stirring, constant attention as the onions melted in the nut-brown fat. Oh, the smells that competed in her little kitchen! Piles of strong, astringent sliced onions, sizzling butter laced with salt and sugar, the toothsome fellowship of bouillon and vermouth. In the end, she produced a rich mahogany soup that seethed with intensity and deep flavor.
The cooking was invigorating, joyous. For Julia, the cooking fulfilled the promises that Le Cordon Bleu had made but never kept. Where Le Cordon Bleu always remained rooted in the dogma of French cuisine, Julia strove to infuse its rigors with new possibilities and pleasures. It must have felt liberating for her to deconstruct Carême and Escoffier, respecting the traditions and technique while correcting the oversight. “To her,” as a noted food writer indicated, “French culinary tradition was a frontier, not a religion.” If a legendary recipe could be improved upon, then let the gods beware. Julia lost herself in the process, often working ten-, twelve-, fourteen-hour days. There were nights she “sat up till two a.m. working on that cookbook,” unable to put it aside in mid-stride.
Simca Fischbacher joined her on many mornings. Almost immediately they established a professional, if distant, rapport, cooking side-by-side though continents apart: Simca upholding her French heritage, Julia giving it an American voice. There was a practical balance to their collaboration. Simca was “equally hardworking and professional in her attitude,” Paul observed. It seemed to him “they make a good combination.” He was right, of course; they were suitably well matched—but he was also wrong. Simca was “a perfectionist,” a vigorous, charming woman who impressed Julia with her knowledge of regional cooking. It was in her blood, it came second nature to her. But Simca was also hidebound, obstinate, determined to preserve the family recipes she inherited, adhering to them like scripture. It didn’t suit her to see them emended by an American upstart, not even Julia Child, whom she liked and respected. As a result, there was a constant undercurrent of tension as they tested each recipe: Julia questioning its soundness, Simca defending the faith.
They pushed and pulled at those recipes, challenged long-standing methods, challenged each other. Give and take. Simca, highly excitable, often put her foot down. Ahm-pah-ceeb! Non! She couldn’t cook in a way that made a mockery of French tradition. It was wrong. Wrong! It wasn’t right, wasn’t … French. When she did this, Julia would draw back into the hard-shelled Pasadenan who was just as obstinate, albeit without the blood and thunder. Like her husband, Julia practiced diplomacy. She knew better than to tackle Simca head-on. Nothing was more likely to make this feisty femme dig into her position than an outright refusal to see things her way. Instead, Julia would suggest they test a certain recipe two or three different ways, knowing the results would vindicate her and eventually defuse Simca’s indignation.
It wasn’t easy, but it allowed them to stay on track, pushing through the chapter on soups and then deep into sauces. Throughout the day, skillets sizzled, kettles burbled, blenders whirred, mallets pounded, and the low rumble off rue de l’Université rolled in through the open window. Louisette occasionally stopped by to pitch in, but her kitchen appearances had grown more infrequent, less productive. Louisette was grappling with a regrettable marriage—another regrettable marriage, as things would have it. Her current husband, Paul Bertholle, was a big, boisterous character with “a rhinoceros’s thickness of skin and a cockatoo’s preening egocentricity,” who was “into horses and gambling and business deals that bridged the two.” His slippery behavior was propelling Louisette toward another rancorous breakup. Whatever the reasons, clearly Louisette was distracted by the domestic fireworks. She agonized over the prospect of ending her relationship with Bertholle. Her first divorce—the result of an arranged marriage to a Vietnamese painter, Harry Chan—had led to her excommunication from the church. It was a punishment from which Louisette, a devout Catholic, had never fully recovered. As such, she drifted deeper and deeper into despair and away from the cooking.
Julia and Simca had great empathy for Louisette’s struggle to resolve her situation. They knew she was timid to begin with, “a lost little flower,” not especially as confident or as gutsy as her cooking colleagues. While Paul pegged her as being “shy,” “sweet,” and dizzily “romantic,” he also considered her “a charming little nincompoop.” But, oh, that woman could cook—she knocked ’em dead in the kitchen, with her dazzling takes on Burgundian and southwestern cuisine. She knew her way around most of the provinces, yet she wasn’t always available to work as a productive teammate. Instead, from the beginning of August through the fall of 1952, Louisette withdrew into a shell of inertia and seclusion.
In the meantime, Julia and Simca picked up the slack. By the end of September 1952 they had demonstrated their prowess for reworking creaky recipes and making them hum with precision. Their work had already transcended the esoteric world of cookbookery. Each evening, after cleaning up the dinnerware, Julia withdrew to the bedroom and typed up that day’s recipe, along with handwritten tasting notes buried in the margins. Within no time, Julia recalled, “a pile of wrinkled and stained pages grew steadily on the counter next to my stove.”
By November, the pile began to feel like a cookbook. It had heft, as Julia had noted, but also real focus and direction. The sauces chapter especially seemed accomplished, exhaustive. There were brown sauces with untold variations: mustard, tarragon, capers, duxelles, and curry; tomato sauces; butter sauces; hollandaise; and vinaigrettes. And, of course, white sauces galore, including béchamel and velouté.
One white sauce, in particular, continued to elude her—beurre blanc nantais, “a wonder sauce used on fish” that originated in Nantes. It seemed like a simple preparation: an emulsion of warm butter flavored with shallots, wine, vinegar, salt, and pepper. But no matter how many times Julia made it, her sauce turned oily. It needed to be creamy and just warm enough to keep the butter from congealing, while ensuring the acids were well concentrated. But—how? It was an incredibly tricky process, and “the cookbooks were all vague on the subject.” Julia remembered a bistro that prepared it to perfection, a small Right Bank boîte called Chez la Mère Michel that she’d eaten in once, three years earlier. On a crisp night in October, she and Paul returned there—to have dinner, certainly, but also for reconnaissance. During aperitifs, Julia came face-to-face with La Mère Michel herself, a stoop-shouldered crone with a penetrating stare, who ruled the place like a despot. The former OSS operative leaped into action. Paul watched in awe as his wife, “with her special system of hypnotizing people so they open up like flowers in the sun, talked her way into Mère Michel’s kitchen, and inside of two minutes was watching them make beurre blanc.” Julia wrote the recipe on a napkin and stuffed it into her purse. Yes, the sauces chapter was coming together beautifully. Julia envisioned it as a model for the entire project.
As if on cue, a letter arrived from Ives Washburn, the New York publisher. Under separate cover, it said, they were returning Simca and Louisette’s original manuscript, along with the revisions that Helmut Ripperger had made. No one was happy with the outcome, so far. “Afte
r a year of frustration for everyone concerned,” the publisher wrote, “we are still a long way from a completed book.” Louisette had obviously informed them that Julia agreed to come onboard, and a sigh of relief was reflected in that news. “The big job now rests on your shoulders, and you must be the absolute boss of what goes into the book and what stays out. Now that you, Mrs. Child, have taken over the helm, I am more confident than ever that a fine book can be made of this.”
Julia was pleased—and puzzled. The tone and style of the manuscript had been deeded to her care: the absolute boss. That was excellent news. And Ives Washburn seemed intent on publishing the book, but—ye gods!—not a word about business. A lot of time and effort had gone into the research, to say nothing of the costs the three women had incurred. From what Julia knew of these things, some sort of advance seemed appropriate. At the very least, she expected to hear about recouping their substantial expenses. Or be promised a contract. What to do? What to do? She was in uncharted territory.
To stall for time, she answered the publisher—a long, rambling letter detailing a revolutionary approach to the book. She promised a sample chapter “in about ten days,” as well as an outline “explaining the conception and plan” for the entire book. But in any case, it would “build off the Bugnard/Cordon Bleu system of teaching theme and variation,” she promised. All in all “a new type of cookbook.” If everything went according to plan they could expect delivery on or about June 1953.
Meanwhile, she sought advice elsewhere, from anyone who could help her. Initially, Julia contacted Paul Sheeline. The son of Paul’s sister, Meeda, he was an associate at the Wall Street law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. Sheeline admitted he “had no experience with publishing contracts” but agreed to review the correspondence related to the book and give her an idea of their obligation to Ives Washburn.
She also outlined the situation in a letter to Avis DeVoto.
ON A CLEAR spring evening in April 1951, after the Cordon Bleu exam debacle, after the inaugural lunch with the Gourmettes, Julia curled up on the couch with the latest issue of Fortune and combed over a persnickety essay by Bernard DeVoto. It contained a litany of complaints about big business shortchanging consumers, particularly as it applied to the manufacture of general household goods, and specifically to cutlery. Julia had to keep herself from leaping up to cheer. Knives were a special pet peeve of hers. She’d been known to “let off a blast of cuss-words in the kitchen” during wrestling matches with extremely dull blades. Once, while sitting in a garden, Paul heard her scream through an open window: “God damn it!—I’ve never yet gone into a private French kitchen where the knives are sharp! How the hell do these people think they’re going to cook when they can’t even slice a tomato?” DeVoto’s article had struck a chord.
That might have sufficed, the last word on such a narrow topic, but DeVoto was a notoriously cranky guy; no less than Wallace Stegner referred to him as an “angry watchdog.” So a few months later, this time in a column in Harper’s, he resumed his splenetic crusade. Knives: “They look wonderful, but they won’t cut anything,” he chuffed. “The chromium that makes them shiny … makes them incapable of holding an edge.” On and on he went, burning through more words than anyone ever dreamed possible, certainly more than the subject warranted, including an aside that knife manufacturers should be referred to the House Un-American Activities Committee.
That did it! The article “smacked Julie right in her Achilles’ (cooking) heel.” She could no longer restrain herself. She dashed off a fan letter to Brother DeVoto praising his “diatribe,” along with a “nice little French model as a token of my appreciation.” Inside the envelope, against a piece of cardboard, she had taped a stainless-steel knife she’d picked up at Dehillerin for seventy cents.
A month later, Julia opened a letter from DeVoto, although not Bernard, as she’d anticipated, but his wife, Avis. And what a letter!—several single-spaced typewritten pages of beautifully wrought prose, not only thanking her for the knife but rhapsodizing about meals she’d eaten in Parisian bistros and asking for advice on several related issues. “She pours out words the way the waters come down at Ladore,” Paul cracked. There was real warmth in her writing; it was personable and engaging, the type of letter that begged a response. Julia couldn’t let it go unanswered.
Back-and-forth letters flew during the next few months, an exchange between the women of their dynamic lives. They shared family information, recipes, self-scrutiny, and political views, both consumed by the looming presidential election. Nothing was an unsuitable topic for consideration. “Before marriage I was wildly interested in sex,” Julia disclosed, “but since joining up with my old goat, it has taken its proper position in my life.” There was so much to say, so much to ponder and chew on. Avis DeVoto, it turns out, was the perfect pen pal for Julia, so confident, expressive, an outspoken free spirit who refused to stand by while events unfolded around her. “She had a very particular view of what was right and what was wrong,” said her son, Mark, “and she put herself on the line for things that mattered, no matter how unpopular or against the tide.” She was “a take-charge gal,” a Renaissance woman—wife, mother, writer, editor, critic, volunteer for charities, political activist, and savvy cook, with more than a hand or two in the publishing business. She seemed to know her way around the various houses, dropping names of legendary editors and raising Julia’s eyebrows.
By November 1952, Julia could no longer resist. She sent Avis a chapter of French Home Cooking, with correspondence covering her arrangement with—and misgivings about—Ives Washburn. Any critique, as well as advice, was welcomed. “And please,” Julia implored, “be frank and brutal.”
Avis wasn’t one to mince words. She was “wildly excited” about what she eventually read. In fact, she was so keen about the book that she couldn’t believe it was as good as it was. “There isn’t any cookbook like it,” she said, adding she was “absolutely convinced that you really have got something here that could be a classic and make your fortune and go on selling forever.” As for Ives Washburn, it was as Julia suspected—they were “small, poor, and not well known.” Avis thought the women should jump ship for Houghton Mifflin, the Boston house that published her husband. She asked Julia’s permission to show the manuscript to Dorothy de Santillana, one of Houghton’s leading editors and a former cooking student of Dione Lucas, the first female graduate of Le Cordon Bleu. “I’m quite sure she’d give her eye-teeth to get this particular book.” Julia needn’t worry about her fear that they “seem to be sewed up morally (not legally) with Ives Washburn.” According to her husband, Avis said, “there is no such thing as a moral obligation to a publisher.”
That was all Julia needed to hear. Houghton Mifflin was big-time, it was legit, a huge step up from the basement operation that was Ives Washburn. She had what she thought was “a major work” on her hands, and had “no intention of wasting it on a no-account firm.” Houghton Mifflin would take her book seriously, they had a track record with cookbooks, would publish it with dignity, promote it, pay royalties—everything she wanted. But how would she convince Louisette to agree? Louisette had a relationship with Ives Washburn. Its publisher, Sumner Putnam, had “absolutely charmed” her during a visit to New York, and they’d become friends in the interim. She felt “they had an obligation to keep working with him,” though Julia “was not convinced.”
Besides, Putnam had never responded to Julia’s letter. Two months had gone by and not a word from his office. Did it take more than a few days to read a chapter on sauces? Had he lost interest? Was he neglecting her on purpose? This was exactly the type of poor stewardship Julia had feared.
She continued to lobby Simca to take her side against Ives Washburn, decrying their mistreatment any chance she got. She brooded over the affair like a spurned lover. They had to protect themselves, she insisted, do what was right for the book. It wasn’t enough to trust in the publisher’s good faith. After all, Ives Washburn had hung them
out to dry once before. Simca held out as long as she could, but she was no match for Julia’s agitprop. In the end, she agreed they should test the waters. Louisette had no choice but to make the decision unanimous.
By January 1953, it was all but confirmed: Dorothy de Santillana was “tickled pink” about French Home Cooking, which she read and considered “an essential book.” There was no doubt that Houghton Mifflin would acquire it. In fact, paperwork was already in the pipeline for a contract, as well as an advance of $750.
Avis, it seemed, had pulled off the impossible. “HOORAY,” Julia scrawled as part of her reply. She was beside herself—thrilled to have a deal at last, delighted to be with a big-time publisher. It validated everything she’d been doing these last few years, everything she’d been working toward since graduating from Smith. At last, a career she could call her own, with a payoff, she figured, no more than two or three years off. A writer. It’s what she had wanted for herself all along, ever since New York, when she had made the rounds of magazines and journals, begging for an editorial job. In New York, she had desired to become “a great woman novelist.” This wasn’t so far off the mark. It had taken her longer than she thought to achieve her goal, on a route that had taken her halfway around the globe, but none of that mattered anymore. She was a writer, with a contract. A cookbook writer, no less. Could life be any better than that? HOORAY, indeed.