Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  Julia’s peculiar responsibility was to translate the book into the American language—a challenge because in the United States there was no culinary vocabulary as there was in France. The name of recipes were in French, but the directions had to be in English. Julia would explain to Simca that “stale” meant leftover; “broken eggs” meant something other than to break an egg; “into” meant closed up inside. Yet when it came to recipe decisions, she insisted (October 25, 1953) that the book “is most definitely a joint book” on which “we all three must absolutely agree on all points…. It is rather like Existentialism, I suppose, in that we alone are responsible for how this book turns out.” She also suggested, and DeVoto agreed, that the ingredients be printed on the left, the method on the right.

  “Julia is woodpeckering the Royal Portable right next to me, jiggling the table like a tumbrel on cobbles,” Paul complained to his brother. When she was not shopping and laboring over the stove, she was typing single-spaced letters of several pages (she was their official typist) and five or six carbon copies of each recipe. “The most difficult part of the cookbook was writing all those letters,” she said later. “Then correcting those six copies. It was terrible, just awful.” (Yet their transfer to Marseilles, which necessitated voluminous correspondence, provides the culinary historian a unique opportunity to study the development of a classic cookbook collaboration.) She used up boxes of onionskin and carbon paper, for she often (but not always) sent copies of letters to Louisette as well. The recipes called for multiple copies because she was having Avis DeVoto in Cambridge, Katy Gates in Pasadena, Freddie (and niece Rachel) in Lumberville—her “guinea pigs”—cook the recipes and report every detail of success and failure. The typewriter and the stove were her daily instruments. But neither were built to her height, perhaps contributing to her stooped back in years to come.

  In all things, Julia was a consummate professional. She informed her partners that they must not put their names on any recipe (these were French classics). She consulted them on every matter of business (“We are a team!”). She was the go-between with DeVoto (their unpaid agent) and the Houghton Mifflin editor, Mrs. Dorothy de Santillana, who was happily “overcome” (according to Avis) when she first saw their manuscript. Julia distributed to Simca and Louisette the contracts and composed biographies for their approval. (Houghton Mifflin insisted on dealing only with Julia.) It was Paul’s nephew, Paul Sheeline, who would iron out the contract with Houghton Mifflin. Julia arranged with Waring Blender to get a discount and free cookbooks for their blenders. Because she had a small income of her own, she became the cooking trio’s banker and paid for expenses that seemed necessary (they were to reimburse her from future royalties), including their membership in the order of Tastevins, a famous old wine-tasting society in Burgundy (they traveled to Dijon for the annual Tastevin dinner in November). She called the bank account the “Child French Cookbook Banking Fund.”

  She insisted that they be as accomplished as possible, using Gourmet, certain self-proclaimed “experts,” and some of the French chefs’ cookbooks (“La Fumisterie” [fakery]) as contrasts: “In other words, we must be Descartesian, and never accept anything unless it comes from an extremely professional [French] source, and even then, to see how we personally like how it is done,” she wrote Simca on November 5, 1953. To be absolutely accurate on ingredients, she persuaded Paul to give her Larousse Agricole for her birthday. “If we depart from the French tradition to cater to American tastes, or to our personal tastes,” she told Simca, “we must always so indicate.”

  Julia had the classic French cookbooks, such as Escoffier, on hand for constant reference. But from a simple regional recipe book such as La Bonne Cuisine du Périgord to the works of Escoffier, recipes were too brief and general for her (“place casserole on a moderate fire” or “add a soupspoon of shallots”). She quickly noted that they “all copy from one another.” She kept up with current reading, noting in her letters that a new review, Gastronomie le Neuvième Art, quoted “those two boys,” Brillat-Savarin and Grimod de La Reynière, on every other page. She half agreed with Baudelaire that Brillat-Savarin was “a kind of old brioche whose sole use is to furnish windbags with stupid quotations [tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you what you are].”

  Because they were virtual newcomers to Marseilles, visits from dear friends were important. The Nigel Bicknells, now living in Istanbul, came by with their two children. The Childs visited Dick and Alice Lee Myers several times in nearby Cassis, once just a day after Ernest Hemingway had stopped by on his way to Africa. On a trip to Monte Carlo with the Peter Bicknells, they watched Colette being wheeled to her table near them at the Hôtel de Paris. France’s famous novelist, who would be dead within months, had “an imperial look in her eye,” remembered Julia, and her “gray-white hair [was] moplike and flying in its unmistakable way.” Julia does not remember what Colette ate, but she herself began with consommé because she was working on that recipe at the time.

  In early summer (before strikes stopped telephones, mail, newspapers, and garbage pickup), George and Betty Kubler came from their Portugal sabbatical to Marseilles to visit their old friends. Julia and Paul then joined them on a two-week trip to Spain and Portugal. Paul’s photographs later accompanied Kubler’s “A Yale Professor Goes to Spain and Portugal,” published in the Yale alumni magazine. Paul was also taking photographs of Julia cutting up chicken and preparing vegetables. It was her idea, he told Charlie, that they be taken over her shoulder, a whole new way of documenting food preparation.

  When Paul’s fellow OSS photographer John Moore visited from Zurich with his wife, Hedi, Julia talked to him about illustrating their cookbook (a friend named Pierre Comte earlier tried some drawings, which did not please Julia or Paul). The line drawings were to be made from the photographs Paul had so painstakingly taken. John agreed and began working from Paul’s photographs, even after they returned to Washington later that year. Less frequently than the visits of their beloved friends were the routine arrival of U.S. destroyers and aircraft carriers with their thousands of sailors and what Paul called the “protocol, stripes, basketball games, religious services,” and hosting of officers—all part of Paul’s duties. Less frequently came the relentless mistral winds that rattled their windows and outdoors could turn Paul’s hair white with salt and trip the hem of Julia’s skirt.

  When Julia announced the completion of the first draft of the soups chapter, Paul noted sardonically, “That really means every part of it has been gone over twenty times.” Though she did all the shopping and housework and entertained business associates, French dignitaries, and friends, she reserved part of six days a week for her work: “The Wifelet sticks to her 5-hours-a-day schedule of Cook-Book-Work,” Paul frequently reported.

  During a spring weekend in Paris for the semiannual Public Affairs Officers (PAO) conference, the grand banquet with Ambassador Dillon (“a highly charged ulcer-type,” Paul thought) coincided with general strikes that crippled the city’s transportation system. Julia walked (with her shoes in her hand) to the American National Ballet performance at the Palais de Chaillot and then all the way to the Dillons’ ambassadorial residence. We are no longer Parisians, Julia informed Simca upon their return to Marseilles. Clearly she missed cooking in the kitchen with Simca, a regret that echoes in her letters.

  When the original owner of the Childs’ Old Port apartment returned that winter, Julia and Paul had to find another home. They moved up the hill above their first apartment to a broad, tree-lined street. Number 113, Boulevard de la Corderie offered them north and south balconies and a spectacular seventh-floor view of the harbor and Fort St.-Nicolas. They could see, a few miles off the coast, the infamous Château d’If, where Alexandre Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo was falsely imprisoned on spy charges. The extra rooms and space allowed them to get the other half of their possessions out of storage. Julia used the dining room as her workroom. The kitchen workroom, as usual, was not made to accommodate
Julia’s height. As was her custom, she “hung everything in sight.” “If we ever get into the money,” she told Avis, “I am going to have a kitchen where everything is my height, and none of this pigmy stuff, and maybe 4 ovens, and 12 burners all in a line, and 3 broilers …” Though the building was poorly built with noise echoing from neighboring apartments, she informed friends that it was “a nifty little apartment with balconies and a view of the sea;” repairs went on for months.

  Their first winter in Marseilles, Hill the Pill left the consulate, and morale changed overnight. Clifton Wharton, who was to become the first American Negro career ambassador, was accessible and enthusiastic about his work and interested in other people. Paul thought he was a “wonderful guy.” Julia and Paul immediately became friends with Clifford and Leonie Wharton, who frequently dined at their apartment and lived not far away at 335 Promenade de la Corniche. (“Hope Big John doesn’t ever meet him!” she confided in Dorothy, referring to their father.) Later, Julia and Simca, who was visiting for the week, prepared boeuf bourguignon for a beautiful birthday party for twelve in honor of Cliff Wharton.

  Inspired in part by Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi, as well as by the opportunity to travel with Peter and Mari Bicknell, Julia and Paul spent Christmas and New Year’s in Greece. They stopped in Venice on the way and Paul took photographs for a painting of canals he would create.

  For another year Julia typed the results of her recipe experiments and the cross-testing of Simca’s recipes on pounds of onionskin paper. She finished her egg chapter early in 1954. When Avis DeVoto received a copy of the egg chapter, she was “absolutely overwhelmed” by the amount of work, found that it read “like a novel,” and claimed “famous professionals like Dione Lucas would be green with envy.”

  While Simca tested meat recipes, Julia began testing Simca’s chicken recipes and researching the raising and cooking of chickens (consulting, among others, Madame Saint-Ange’s method for poulet en cocotte—cooking the potatoes before putting them in the hot fat). “There is a fine old girl,” Julia said to Simca two years later about her growing appreciation of Madame Saint-Ange. With the research and typing and housekeeping (she missed Jeanne, her Paris femme de ménage), Julia had little time for reading the remaining Balzac volumes. Certainly Proust would have to “wait for some long prison term” or illness (“I have never gotten beyond the church steeple and the cup of tea in Swann’s Way,” she confessed). When she read a biography of Florence Nightingale, she thought her speed and stamina for work paralleled Simca’s. Julia did keep up with Gourmet, for her research; finding errors there reassured her of the need for accuracy in their own recipes and testing.

  When each chapter was ready to be shown to Dorothy de Santillana, Julia mailed it and awaited the response. Their editor wanted less cross-referencing and more discussion of the use of frozen and canned produce—disheartening news, but they tried to comply. Simca experimented with canned consommé and clams. Julia cautioned against using a lot of truffles and foie gras because “Americans are not used to spending as much money on food as the French are, as food is not as important.”

  Julia’s contribution to what was now being called French Cooking in the American Kitchen is clearly revealed in the massive correspondence with Simca. One sees the endless testing, arguing over techniques, hammering out of language, and thousands of hours of typing that went into this masterpiece. Julia’s observations and opinions vacillated between two occasionally contradictory goals: making the recipes practical for the American cook and representing the true and historic recipes and techniques of classic French cooking.

  On the practical side, Julia informed Simca that a recipe was “too rich for Americans,” that certain food products or utensils were not available in the United States (no conical chinois (sieve); the lack of mortar and pestle necessitated a blender for quenelles). She had Avis send her shallots to compare with the French onion and bottled herbs to test in recipes. When Time magazine talked about a new tenderizer, she sent for some. She insisted that the readers be able to “adapt the recipe” to their available produce, “or they will find our recipes useless.” Occasionally she reminded the three of them not to become too encyclopedic: this is “a cookbook for the average cook.” Yet it was she who always asked the detailed questions: why indeed should one hang birds by the head and animals by the feet? Why clean some and not others? They did not want to frighten the reading cooks with lengthy recipes, yet they wanted their recipes to be foolproof. She omitted the oeufs filés (an egg drop consommé), complicated and not pretty, concluding, “Just because Escoffier and the other boys include it, is no reason why we have to!”

  On the side of idealism and the integrity of French cooking, Julia insisted, “We must be French!” (July 6, 1953). “But that is not French, is it!” she exclaimed the following October. “This must always be Frenchy French, though practical for US.” After insisting that they incorporate a candy thermometer “because it is standard equipment in the USA,” she adds that the “Thillmont method must also be included.” She told Simca, “Thank heaven we both agree on the effort to reach perfection, by the road of ‘scientific method.’”

  When the Pasadena testers complained about the pedantic tone of her typewritten instructions, Julia insisted on keeping to the “classical tradition” of French cooking, suggesting that the United States might be the final preserve. She did admit, “I find it is very difficult to shorten up an explanation, yet give every step that is necessary for its successful making.” The effect on Paul of all this experimenting was what he called “Julie’s Law,” which meant “my critical faculties concerned with food are becoming elevated to the point where other people’s meals often seem banal.”

  One theme in Julia’s letters to Simca that is interesting in light of her future fame on television was her insistence that they perfect their knife filleting skills so they could demonstrate their savoir faire. “Always pretend we are cooking in front of an audience,” she wrote Simca on May 7, 1954, “that will help us to discipline ourselves. I don’t expect we will ever appear on television, but possibly we will give demonstrations if we are successful.”

  IN SEARCH OF

  THE PERFECT BOUILLABAISSE

  From her first week in Marseilles, Julia was interested in experimenting on the great fish soup called bouillabaisse and with the Provençal sauces based on oil, tomatoes, onions, garlic, and herbs, so unlike Paris’s butter, flour, and cream. “To choose bouillabaisse as a theme,” said Raymond Oliver in his great history of gastronomy, in which he gives it an entire chapter, “is to select the most vibrant and passionate … dish which in itself represents a whole region and its deepest motivations and symbols.”

  Specifically, Julia was interested in bouillabaisse à la Marseillaise, made with mullet, gurnard, sea eel, rascasse, and bream, all laced with olive oil and garlic-heavy rouille. She began research (which she delighted in doing) to find similar American fish (“California Rock Cod or Rockfish looks just like Rascasse,” she insisted confidentially to Simca). She sent her bisque recipes to her niece Rachel Child, who was cooking in Maine, and Rachel sent them back with comments. At the fish market Julia frequently inquired about “la vraie bouillabaisse,” receiving dogmatic but conflicting advice as to the true ingredients: one said absolutely no tomatoes, one said saffron, another no saffron. Julia, who had read every French food history and classic recipe book, became “irked” at their dogmatism and occasional ignorance. “Balls,” she replied in private. But she confided in Avis: “I don’t say anything, as, being a foreigner, I don’t know anything anyway.”

  She began her own “bouillaing” in July 1953 by making bouillabaisse borgno (with saffron flowers, fennel, bay, and thyme) for lunch and decided not to strain it because she liked to see the vegetables (onion, leek, potatoes) floating; another time she put it through the food mill to thicken it; tried it with and without potatoes; insisted that though it was a main dish, it should be placed in their book
with the soups; in September 1953 she cut lobsters and crabs into pieces before cooking them so they would take up less room and make final serving easier. Each variation was reported to Simca and, occasionally, Louisette.

  Julia’s relationship to Louisette was always cordial and loyal, but Louisette did not share the intense professional commitment Julia had with Simca (“We have both worked like dogs”). Louisette contributed the extra touches (adding fresh peas or strips of fresh tomato pulp to a soup), novelties in “l’esprit américain.” “You and I,” Julia informed Simca, “are more straight chef-type cooks, I think.” Louisette’s letters are always loving, concerned about Paul’s happiness. The correspondence among the three women reveals that Louisette’s contribution was comparatively negligible and that they did not believe she knew as much about cooking as they. Julia suggested to Simca that they write a contract among the three of them because “you and I do not want to be allied always to L, I don’t think.”

  Paul confided to Charlie that “for the sake of good working relations everyone must maintain the fiction that there are three authors, sharing equally in the work, the knowledge and the drudgery.” By the next year, Julia wrote to Simca, “I have a strong feeling that this book we are doing is not at all the kind of book that is her [Louisette’s] meat. I think she is temperamentally suited to a gay little book, like What’s Cooking, with chic little recipes and tours de main, and a bit of poesy, and romanticism. The kind of recipes in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and the smart magazines.” However, she believed that Louisette would be “wonderful, the cute, darling little Frenchwoman” who looks like “everyone’s dream of the perfect Frenchwoman” and sees her on the American cooking circuit, “even going on television.” When Simca agreed with her about “our dear Louisette,” Julia shrewdly pointed out that “she has all those women’s club connections,” which “will be very useful” to their book. The women’s clubs do indeed “represent the mass market.”