Provence, 1970

by Luke Barr

  Beard had resisted while writing American Cookery, but now that it was done he agreed to take on the bread book. The narrow focus and modest ambition of the project was a relief after the monumentalism of the American book.

  Jones enlisted junior staffers at Knopf to test the bread recipes, and Beard would stop by the office to examine and judge the results. It was remarkable how different the loaves turned out, even though they were all following the same recipes, and starting with the same ingredients. Breadmaking was not about the recipe; it was about technique. Beard was a brilliant teacher, but when it came to sitting down to work, Jones discovered, he found it hard to focus. If the phone rang while they were working together, he would inevitably take the call and end up talking at great length to some woman in Iowa about her macaroons. Beard kept his phone number listed, and loved hearing from his fans and readers.

  In Cambridge, meanwhile, in 1971 and 1972, Child was immersed in her television show. It was stressful, but she loved it. The French Chef was filmed twice a week at a dedicated studio on Western Avenue in Boston. Each shooting day was preceded by a rehearsal day, and the days were long. There was now a thirty-five-person crew at work on the show, assembling ingredients, filming close-ups, washing dishes. The program had been in reruns in the late 1960s, while Child was working on Mastering II, but it had remained popular. Now in color, Child was seen on 134 public television stations nationwide. She was bigger than ever.

  People stopped her on the street to tell her they loved her—Paul called them “JWs,” short for “Julia Watchers.” Newspapers and magazines profiled her and the show, lauding her unflappable, entertaining way around the kitchen and her belief that anyone could cook, and cook well, if they were willing to learn. This was the democratization that she believed in, and that Beck had disdained. It was part of her American-ness, just as Beck’s attitude had been part of her French-ness.

  In early 1971, Child wrote to M.F.:

  We are engulfed in our TV and just finished taping our second show of French bread Thursday—a horrendous experience, with bowls of dough rising and falling all over the set, hot irons on the stove, the oven panting, and the whole story to be done in 28 minutes or bust …

  In fact Child found the chaos of the show energizing, and she defused all tension with her laughter. She also counted on Paul, who was with her every step of the way, working on scripts, managing logistics, and shooting publicity stills on set. They continued to be full partners, as they had always been.

  Later that year, Julia and Paul embarked on a national tour to promote the paperback boxed-set edition of Mastering. Julia did cooking demonstrations and answered questions from St. Louis to Denver to Seattle and everywhere in between. It was important to get out there, she realized—her large audiences in these cities “could care less about the East Coast and the New York Times,” she wrote to Beard. “They have their own good lives and own good papers, and we’re not reaching them atallatall if we stay put.” Beck stayed at home in France; she had disengaged from the Mastering books, which were seen as Child’s, in any case, and was hard at work on her own Simca’s Cuisine.

  Child made omelets in department stores (frequent stops on her paperback book tour) and staged more elaborate demonstrations at larger venues. She traveled with two assistant cooks in addition to Paul, and signed books for hours wherever she went, an evangelist of cooking.

  And thanks in considerable part to her, American food in the early 1970s was indeed changing. But it was a slow process. Yes, there were fashionable dinner parties where pâté en croûte and asparagus soup were being served; and yes, there were also community gardens and hippie bakers and natural food co-ops, and large and enthusiastic audiences for books such as The Whole Earth Cookbook, The Commune Cookbook, and The Vegetarian Epicure, all of which were published in the early 1970s. But there were still many places where it was hard to find good fresh produce, much less the more rarified ingredients in some of Child’s recipes—many places where the culinary 1950s seemed to live on.

  Beard described one of those places in a letter to M.F., when he went on a trip to Plainfield, Indiana, for a cooking demonstration in the spring of 1972. The church group that invited him had served lunch:

  The lunch was prepared by the good ladies of the church who do this sort of thing semi-demi and it was true Indiana food via ladies magazines. It turned out to be a piece of iceberg lettuce on each plate with a sad little mound of a mixture of chicken, mandarins, pineapple, chopped pecans, celery and what seemed to me like Aunt Laura’s boiled dressing. This was garnished by a cinnamon apple ring and centered with a pimento stuffed olive. The rest of the plate was occupied by an enormous cinnamon bun. This bounty was followed by a large dessert which turned out to be chunks of torn angel food topped with lemon pie filling (from a package, of course) and garnished with something I haven’t seen for years—marshmallow cream!

  Beck was hard at work on her new cookbook in 1971, and had finished writing it by early 1972. Before she began, she and Jones continued their discussion about possible collaborators—that was the first order of business. Jones took charge; she knew that Beck’s strength was her creativity and intensity, and that she needed to work with someone who could corral and streamline her ideas. They needed more than simply a translator, in other words.

  Jones asked around. One candidate was apparently not very systematic or careful about writing down recipes. That wouldn’t work. Another did not want to play second fiddle to the imperious Beck. And then she found Patricia Simon, a well-regarded freelance food writer based in Pennsylvania.

  Simca’s Cuisine would be truly French. Although the recipes would not be strictly classical, they would be deeply rooted in Normandy, Alsace, and Provence, and would include recipes from her own family as well as traditional regional preparations. Many were quite elaborate—they were for times, she said, when “one wants to be a little bit special, a little festive.”

  The first recipe in the book would be Porc Braisé au Whiskey—the very dish that she and Child had fought over when completing the pork chapter the previous year for Mastering II. It was a slowly simmered dish (with mustard and brown sugar, in addition to the whiskey) that Beck liked because it was excellent hot or cold. It would be served with timbales of lettuce pureed with shallots and cream, and followed by a green salad and a frozen chocolate mousse. The dessert was a favorite of Jean’s—he loved chocolate.

  As M.F. worked on various magazine assignments and wrote a few book reviews, she was thinking about France. She had come to new terms with the place during her time in Provence, and she wanted to put her thoughts in writing. The natural starting point was the diary she had kept in Arles and Avignon. She showed it to Norah, who encouraged her to send it to Rachel MacKenzie, M.F.’s editor at The New Yorker. MacKenzie, one of the few women editors at the magazine, was brilliant, dry, and affectionate, all at the same time. Her advice was that it might work as part of a book, and to send it to Judith Jones at Knopf. And thus began a conversation about a new Provence book. It would have darker shadings than Map of Another Town, M.F.’s early sixties book on Aix. It would take the measure of how France had changed, and how M.F. had changed, too. Maybe it would center on Marseille, a port town, a place of comings and goings, a place where she had come and gone countless times.

  The book would be called A Considerable Town and, though she didn’t know it then, would take many years to write.

  In Solliès-Toucas, Richard Olney was working on his next cookbook, Simple French Food. This would be his reaction to the changing times, a fuller expression of the purist food philosophy he’d begun to articulate in the French Menu Cookbook, with a greater emphasis on rustic and regional dishes. It would be a cookbook of la cuisine de bonne femme, with a strong Provençal influence: stuffed braised cabbages, daubes à la provençale, rabbit civets, and terrines.

  If Child was finding her voice as a newly liberated American cook, making curries and chowders, Olney was setting the stage
for a new view of French cooking, no longer beholden to the litany of four-star restaurant classics. His next book would be based on something more elemental than training or tradition (neither of which he could really claim, being a self-taught American); it would be an expression of his lifestyle. He shopped at the local open-air markets, he cooked whatever was fresh, he improvised freely. Olney lived in rustic seclusion, and this book would represent his brand of “simple” country cooking. Unlike his previous book, which included very elaborate, formal menus and preparations, the new book would emphasize roasts, braises, stews, ragouts, terrines, and grilled dishes; there would be much discussion of tripe, kidneys, livers, and hearts. There would be lots of lamb and rabbit.

  For Olney, simple cooking was not necessarily simple. In fact, it was quite difficult. The idea was to create dishes that were what he called “pure in effect”: presented without artifice or unnecessary decoration; possessing pure, uncomplicated flavors; celebrating traditional techniques. The recipes would all be for just the sort of effortless-seeming yet transcendent dishes he prepared for guests in his house in Solliès-Toucas. (Needless to say, it took enormous effort to achieve this “pure” effect.)

  Olney compared cooking to art—to painting. He would attempt to teach improvisation by laying out basic preparations and then pointing to possible variations. Blindly following step-by-step instructions, a paint-by-numbers approach, was not the way to learn to cook, he felt. He wrote:

  You, the cook, must also be the artist, bringing understanding to mechanical formulas, transforming each into an uncomplicated statement that will surprise or soothe a gifted palate, or from your knowledge drawing elements from many to formulate a new harmony—for such is creativity, be it in the kitchen or in the studio: the application of personal expression to an intimate understanding of the rules.

  He planned to include an entire chapter in Simple French Food on improvisation, but it proved difficult to set out in any convincing way: “Improvisation is at war with the printed word. It either defies analysis or, in accepting it, finds its wings clipped. The classroom facilitates things; with one’s hands deep in the mixing bowl, eliminating a chosen ingredient, deciding to add another, tasting, altering, discussing, the spontaneity is alive and contagious and the result is there to be tasted.”

  Olney began teaching summer cooking classes in Avignon, mostly to Americans, during which he demonstrated his improvisatory technique. He was busy, though he had never really done much to promote The French Menu Cookbook. “He won’t do anything to make himself known,” Child wrote to M.F. Olney maintained a standoffish distance from the so-called food establishment.

  Over the coming months and upcoming publishing seasons, their latest books were released, each in its way signaling what was a new direction in American cooking. It was as if the subterranean currents of the fall and winter of 1970 in Provence had sprung forth, shifting the culinary landscape, making way for a fresh and energetic confidence. It was a moment of liberation and experimentation, of discovery and growth. There were ever more cookbooks being published, including some of the first rigorous surveys of international gastronomy, such as Diana Kennedy’s The Cuisines of Mexico and Claudia Roden’s A Book of Middle Eastern Food. At Knopf, Jones was instrumental in launching many of these books.

  Some of the books sold well, some did not. Beard’s American Cookery received mixed reviews and modest sales. Nika Hazelton declared it “a marvelous book,” but Raymond Sokolov was skeptical of Beard’s attempt at a grand theory of American food. He wrote:

  The real problem with Mr. Beard’s approach is that it is synthetic, it homogenizes an apparently orderly food heritage for Americans out of the most heterogeneous possible pool of recipes … It feels, somehow, too “invented,” too much born of a desire to delineate a national cuisine in one volume, to show that America has a cooking style of its own.

  The trouble is, America is not a homogenous nation-state like France. And American cooking, when it is good, is a federation of recipes that has grown up with local roots.

  Beard took the criticism personally. “What can he have against me?” he asked soon after the review was published in the New York Times. “It still hurts and humiliates me very much.” He wrote to Sokolov to protest what he considered an unfair attack. Sokolov stood his ground, explaining that he had only the greatest respect for Beard, and had written “in the spirit of a zealous acolyte.”

  Simca’s Cuisine, likewise, did not resonate. “It was a very French book,” Child later wrote, “with ambitious menus that demanded a lot from the American cook.” There were far fewer detailed, step-by-step instructions, like the ones in the Mastering books, and the American audience probably found it intimidating. Child found it charming but wasn’t surprised when it didn’t sell so well. In the Times, Hazelton revered the book as an artifact of the old, disappearing, douce France. “They don’t make them (or rather, her, Simca) anymore,” she wrote, “and her kind of life, the essence of civilized French life, is being swept away by superhighways and supermarkets and the new skyscrapers that have ruined the Paris skyline.”

  It was From Julia Child’s Kitchen, Beard on Bread, and Olney’s Simple French Food that best reflected the shape of things to come, setting the terms and the tone of a new American cooking.

  Child’s book was an immediate success, powered by her celebrity and her approachable, commonsense instruction. Unlike the Mastering books, this one listed all ingredients at the beginning of each recipe, and recounted many amusing anecdotes of her cooking experiences, including near-disasters and close calls on the set of The French Chef. She also addressed her readers personally, offering money-saving advice and shopping tips—how to tell the butcher exactly what you need, for example. As she’d planned, she had moved beyond purely French recipes, and her confidence and verve anticipated that of her increasingly sophisticated audience. “The great lesson embedded in the book,” she said, “is that no one is born a great cook, one learns by doing … try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless, and above all have fun!”

  In his review, Sokolov remarked on the book’s personal tone and broader scope:

  It is a pleasure to read Julia Child’s reminiscences about great meals: glimpsing Colette in Monaco’s Hôtel de Paris dining room in the 1950s over a bowl of consommé George Sand (a clear fish soup with crayfish quenelles and morels as garnish) and sensing that an era was creeping to a close, but grandly creeping. Julia (great stars are properly known by their first names) discourses with easy learning on the lore of peeling hard-cooked eggs, on turkeys, on all manner of edible subjects large and small, French and non-French.

  For Child, the book represented what she called her “great liberation”—from France, from Beck. Perhaps for that very reason, Beck hated it, and so did Olney. They scorned both its detailed explanations of the obvious (seven pages alone on how to boil an egg) and its sometimes playful, intimate tone. “What a problem for cookery bookery writers,” Child wrote. “How are we to know the extent of our reader’s experience? I, for one, have solved that riddle by deciding to tell all.” Experienced cooks could skip ahead, she figured. She also made a point of emphasizing the idea that cooking well did not mean cooking fancy.

  “Now tell me, Richard, very frankly, what do you think of Julia’s book?” Simca asked Olney when From Julia Child’s Kitchen came out.

  “Very frankly,” he said, “it is without interest.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “I think so too—and those cartoons—such bad taste!” (The book contained reproductions of a couple of cooking-related New Yorker cartoons by George Price.)

  The term cookery bookery was also in questionable taste, Olney replied—too “quackery-wackery.” He was referring to Child’s casual, joking style. Not quite knowing what he meant, Beck agreed wholeheartedly: The book was unsophisticated. It was American.

  Beard’s bread book was also a huge success, and hugely gratifying for him after the dismal American Cookery expe
rience. The book was just the sort of definitive, accessible guide that home bakers wanted. Beard on Bread brought to America the techniques, textures, and flavors of European baking, translating them for use with American flours and yeast. The book jacket, too, spoke to the cultural moment: a hand-drawn and painted sketch of Beard in his kitchen, with an enormous loaf of bread in the foreground. The cover was printed on light brown paper and wasn’t flashy in the least; it looked almost homemade, the aesthetic more Berkeley than New York, resonating with the same audience that was buying titles such as The Whole Earth Cookbook. In the Times, John Hess reported on the new interest in home-baked bread:

  A kitchen revolt is underway, against what the venerable James Beard in Beard on Bread calls “spongy, plasticized, tasteless breads, pre-sliced, doctored with nutrients and preservatives, and with about as much gastronomic importance as cotton wool.”

  Olney’s book, Simple French Food, was decidedly French, but he, too, had managed to find an informal, personable style that worked for an American audience, presenting authentic dishes in great detail, infusing the recipes with an almost palpable sense of place. Beard had written a brief foreword: “The dishes are not those found in posh restaurants but those one enjoys in comfortable little country restaurants, less prevalent since the Second World War, and in well-run homes where the traditions of good eating have been maintained.” Olney’s authority and depth of knowledge were rooted in his passionate connection to the land, the markets, flavors, and fragrances of southern France. He made this world accessible, connecting it in spirit to the growing American interest in natural, seasonal ingredients. He had also made consistent efforts to address the American availability of all the ingredients he used, specialty products, herbs and spices. He gave mail-order information for his favorite olive oil. He gave advice and instruction on growing herbs, brining olives, and making vinegar.