Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  LAUNCHING THE BOOK

  Julia was sitting at her desk in Cambridge at the end of September, the furniture and boxes from Washington and Oslo unpacked but the noise of construction in the kitchen disrupting the peace and quiet. She held in her lap her first creation, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, after a ten-year gestation, fraught with hard work and future hopes. “It weighs a ton!” she said of the three-pound, 734-page book. After months of physical labor on the book and the move from Oslo, her joy was tempered by personal crisis. She consulted with several doctors, who informed her that she needed a hysterectomy. There was no time now. She would wait until January, after the promotion of the book. After making the decision, she wrote the letters to arrange a tour for the last months of the year. In her letters to family and friends asking for help in setting up private demonstration classes, Julia emphasized, “I do not care at all for the public end of this … but I love to teach.”

  Simca arrived in New York City for the launching of the book. They won the two biggest prizes just days before: a rave review in the New York Times and a coming spot on the Today show with John Chancellor. Craig Claiborne, the food editor of the Times, had called their recipes “glorious” in the first review, on October 18:

  [T]he most comprehensive, laudable and monumental work on [French cuisine] was published this week … and it will probably remain as the definitive work for nonprofessionals…. This [book] is … for those who take fundamental delight in the pleasures of cuisine…. It is written in the simplest terms possible and without compromise or condescension. The recipes are glorious….

  Claiborne, one of the premier food critics in America, singled out their cassoulet recipe, noting that it covered nearly six pages, “but there is probably not a wasted syllable.” His only criticism was their use of a garlic press and the absence of recipes for puff pastry and croissants.

  In the middle years of her life and in the tradition of late bloomers, Julia McWilliams Child embarked on her public career. Her eight years in Europe, where she studied cooking techniques, her organizational skills developed in the OSS Registry and writing advertising copy for Sloane’s, even her drama productions for the Junior League—every life experience was used to bring her to this moment.

  Carrying omelet pan, whips, bowls, and three dozen eggs, Julia and Simca appeared at NBC at dawn to practice on a hot plate. With their usual thoroughness, they worked out a routine together the night before at the home of Rachel and Anthony Prud’homme, cracking dozens of eggs. Julia, out of the country for years and without a television, was unaware of the Today show’s audience of four million. Until show time they practiced on this miserably inadequate hot plate, which was finally hot enough for the successful omelet demonstration. “We liked [John] Chancellor, who was so nice,” Julia said thirty-five years later.

  The next day they gave a cooking demonstration at Bloomingdale’s, and Julia reported to her sister, “The old book seems, for some happy reason, to have caught on here in New York, and our publishers are beginning to think they have a modest best seller on their hands…. They have ordered a second printing of 10,000 copies, and are planning a third of the same amount.” They visited Dione Lucas, the most visible figure on the 1950s food scene, at her combination of restaurant and cooking school called the Egg Basket, where they got some pointers on doing public cooking demonstrations. They also visited James Beard (“the living being performing in his lair,” as Julia described his cooking school on Tenth Street). He responded to their book by saying, “I only wish that I had written it myself.” According to his first biographer, “he made it his role to see that the fledgling American food establishment did what was necessary to put Mastering the Art of French Cooking on the map.”

  Lunch sponsored by Vogue at the Cosmopolitan Club was an elegant affair (“I’m no Voguey type, heaven knows,” she told Dort) arranged by their longtime friend Helen Kirkpatrick (now Milbank). The following day, after appearing on Martha Dean’s radio program, they met food editor José (pronounced Josie) Wilson to discuss articles they would write for House & Garden magazine (“All the fancy types like J. Beard and D. Lucas write for them,” she told her sister).

  After the launch in New York City, Julia, Paul, and Simca traveled by train to Detroit, where Simca had done cooking demonstrations years before. By the time they got to Detroit, Knopf had published a second edition with twenty corrections (Knopf had mistakenly said in the note about the authors that Beck and Bertholle also graduated from the Cordon Bleu). From Chicago, they went to San Francisco, where Julia visited her sister and the Katharine Branson School and dined with the French consul (a cousin of Simca’s husband, Jean Fischbacher). They were traveling with pots, pans, whips, knives, and bowls, for Julia drummed up several private demonstration classes. In Los Angeles she met Beard’s collaborator, Helen Evans Brown of Pasadena, and she and Simca gave benefit demonstrations for charity. In Washington, DC, on the way home, Rosie Manell had a big dinner party for them.

  It was a trip planned by Julia, not Knopf, whose publicity director, Harding LeMay, wrote to Julia’s sister, Dorothy Cousins, that his “wife” tells him the contents of the book “are every bit as extraordinary as the format.” Julia paid for her own tour, taking advantage of her network of friends and family to contact the press and set up demonstration classes. Avis also helped by sending books to the leading social figures in Georgetown (wives of McGeorge Bundy, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., George Ball, and Kenneth Galbraith, the latter in New Delhi). On this first book tour, Julia began to establish a network of food contacts.

  In Chicago, they made the cake that would remain the favorite with readers for decades: Reine de Saba, the Queen of Sheba chocolate and almond cake. It was based on a more complicated and slightly different cake of the same name by Madame Saint-Ange. Julia and Simca carried their eight-inch pan, a blender to whip the egg whites separately, and pulverized almonds to blend with the butter, sugar, and melted chocolate. They assembled the following ingredients:

  Reine de Saba

  4 ounces or squares semi-sweet chocolate melted with 2 Tb rum or coffee

  ¼ lb or 1 stick softened butter

  ⅔ cup granulated sugar

  3 egg yolks

  3 egg whites (1 Tb granulated sugar at end

  of whipping process)

  pinch of salt

  ⅓ cup pulverized almonds

  ¼ tsp almond extract

  ½ cup cake flour

  While the audience watched, Julia and Simca creamed together the butter and sugar first. Then, as they blended in the egg yolks, they explained that the batter would become very stiff. Next they stirred in the melted chocolate and coffee, then the salt, almonds, extract, and half the stiffly whipped egg whites. Finally, they alternately folded in the remaining egg whites and the sifted flour before turning the mixture into a buttered and floured cake pan. While the cake baked 25 minutes at 350 degrees, they answered questions about the recipe and their book. Because the cake needed more time to cool before frosting, they served it warm without a butter chocolate frosting or almond decoration. The audience fell in love with the warm cake with its creamy center, and with Julia.

  The last stop was culinary fireworks in New York City, where they had dinner at the Four Seasons with James Beard, chef Albert Stöckli, and Joseph Baum, president of Restaurant Associates. “I adore both women, and Paul came to life [for me],” Beard informed Helen Evans Brown, after he listed the menu: cheddar cheese soup, barbecued loin of pork, and coffee cup soufflés. In what Judith Jones calls “an extraordinarily generous gesture”—for neither she nor the Knopf staff then knew the food world—Beard planned a party at Dione Lucas’s restaurant, including its guest list.

  Dione Lucas’s party for Child and Beck followed on December 15 at the Egg Basket, which was closed for the occasion. Julia and Simca soon realized they would have to do most of the food preparations for the thirty people, and, true to form, they pulled it off at the last minute. (Julia had sen
t out the invitations from Pasadena.) Lucas, who once owned the London Cordon Bleu with Patience Grey, made sole with white wine sauce, Julia and Simca a braised shoulder of lamb, with Lucas preparing the final courses (salade verte and bavaroise aux fraises). The thirty people included those most important to the success of the book (though Claiborne and the Knopfs were absent): Judith and Evan Jones, James Beard, Bill Koshland, Avis DeVoto, and several of the press, including editor Poppy Cannon, the queen of molded Jell-O, frozen food, and canned soup (The Can Opener Cookbook) of House Beautiful and CBS’s Home show fame. Avis declared it the “snazziest dinner” she had attended, but Beard pronounced Lucas’s Bavarian cream “the worst.” Simca flew home to Paris the next day, and Julia returned to Cambridge to face surgery and bed rest after the holidays.

  Julia made certain that “my husband, Paul, our manager” was included in every event. Not only were they partners, he was indispensable in the planning of trips, managing the heavy bags of equipment and the mechanics of the presentations. Some people found him “off-putting” and cool until “you earned your way with him.” According to Bill Koshland: “Paul was one of those people who knew his own worth, and he certainly knew what he regarded as Julia’s worth, and I think he saw it his mission in life to see that everything worked for her.”

  “Paul was such a perfectionist,” Jones told a journalist. “Julia struck me as more a big Smith College girl.” Judith was a petite five-foot-five-inch New Englander with reserved old-school manners, and an intuitive businesswoman. She immediately formed a bond with Julia based upon their love of French cuisine and a mutual determination to make Mastering the Art the major success that would launch both their careers. Indeed, with the success of Mastering, she would become a powerful editor of cookery books, as well as fiction. In her opinion, “Julia has a highly analytical mind,” and the book would not have happened without her. “It was completely Julia’s contribution to analyze, to teach, to translate, to hold you by the hand because she had been that ignorant cook. [Simca] had not.”

  Judith introduced Julia to Alfred and Blanche Knopf, the “Jupiter and Juno” of the publishing world, according to one of their authors. But according to Avis, “it was years before Alfred would admit that he had a great book on his hands. And Blanche was quoted as saying, ‘Oh, I don’t give a damn about Julia Child.’ Blanche was a very ill-tempered lady.”

  The reviews of the book over the first few months were not numerous, but the reviewers that mattered took a strong and enthusiastic stand. In December, the House & Garden editor José Wilson declared she “flipped when she saw the first copies”: it was a “commonsense approach to French cuisine that dispenses with … the heady prose of so many recent books intent on building up a snob mystique of gourmet cooking. Wow!!” That same month the Foreign Service Journal, read by their OSS and USIA friends all over the world, ran a photograph of Julia and Paul and said the book was “sure to become a classic.” The following March, Naomi Barry in the International Herald Tribune called it “one of the most satisfactory cookbooks … in years.” And a year after publication, in The Saturday Evening Post, Claiborne, who privately told friends she was not born with a wooden spoon in her mouth, declared it “the most lucid volume on French cuisine since Gutenberg invented movable type…. This work is brilliant.” According to Avis DeVoto, “the only person who was less than enthusiastic was Charlie Morton, then on The Atlantic Monthly,” but Avis worked on him until he came around privately.

  By contrast, Sheila Hibben in The New Yorker criticized them for underestimating the American cook by allowing canned bouillon and canned salmon and for “lack[ing] a certain intuitive connection” with their food. Some reviewers more gently criticized the detail, but others praised that very attention to detail. Raymond Sokolov later wrote, “Child, Beck, and Bertholle [possess the same] certitude about the fundamentally immutable structure and principles of French cooking [as] … Auguste Escoffier, had.” Evan Jones declared, “No previous U.S. culinary manual had been so detailed and yet so encouraging to those hesitant to try complicated procedures.”

  Few critics, except for the Hesses in 1977, criticized the adaptations to American tastes, such as their firmer soufflé. The French soufflé is “fast and runny,” said André Soltner of Lutèce in 1996. “Julia adapted it to the American taste, yet even Escoffier said ‘a real chef has to adapt to his time.’” Culinary historian Barbara Wheaton adds: “But of course they were adapting the techniques to her American generation.” Using the language of 1996, Camille Paglia told a reporter, “What Julia Child did is deconstruct this French, classical, rule-based cooking tradition and make it accessible … as a source of pleasure.”

  Mastering the Art of French Cooking set a standard in three ways. The physical beauty and quality of the published book is superb. With large margins and print, it lies flat when opened. Thirty years later people stood in lines to have their food-stained copies autographed, only a few with the pages loosened from the cover. The presentation of the recipes set a standard for clarity and precision that changed cookbook writing and editing, heretofore chatty and sometimes sketchy in explanation. According to Beard’s latest biographer, soon after the publication of the book Beard did what he called “a Julia Child job” on all the recipes of his cooking school, retyping them clearly and precisely. The pedagogical style of Beck and Child became widely imitated. According to cookbook editor Narcisse Chamberlain (daughter of Narcissa and Samuel), who at that time was editing her first book by Michael Field, “Mastering put good authors on notice that cookbooks had to be honest. As an editor I greatly admire that volume.” Paula Wolfert, respected for her excellent books on Mediterranean cuisine, said in 1997, “Just as it’s been said that all Russian literature has been taken from Gogol’s overcoat, so all American food writing has been derived from Julia’s apron.”

  Most important, Mastering became a landmark in food history. M. F. K. Fisher praised the volume, though on one occasion said its explanations were “so complicated.” Food people as diverse as Gregory Usher, who until his death in 1994 headed the Ritz Escoffier Cooking School in Paris, Barbara Wheaton, and Mimi Sheraton, author and longtime ruling restaurant critic (after Claiborne retired) of the New York Times, say that this volume is among their favorite books and the best of Julia Child’s work. Wheaton is on her second copy. Sheraton’s book falls open to food-stained pages of boeuf à la catalane (page 321), pouding alsacien (page 626), and pêches cardinal (page 630).

  Several other important food books were published the same year as Mastering, including Crown’s English translation of Larousse Gastronomique, edited by Julia’s Smith pal, Charlotte Snyder Turgeon. Craig Claiborne’s The New York Times Cook Book appeared the same year he generously reviewed Julia and Simca’s efforts. Unlike the effusive responses of Beard and Claiborne, Field’s first words to his editor were: “Oh my, is this going to ruin the sales of my book?”

  TELEVISION PILOT

  On January 3, Paul drove Julia to Beth Israel Hospital for her operation, and laboratory tests determined that her tumor was benign. During her convalescence in Cambridge, Julia began testing recipes from Lady Bird Johnson, Jacqueline Kennedy, Mrs. Stewart Alsop, and others for José Wilson’s series on Washington hostesses, which would run all year in House & Garden. At the end of February, Julia had an offer to be interviewed on educational television in Boston and, because there was little promotion for the book in the Boston area, she accepted. The opportunity began when they invited Beatrice Braude for dinner, a friend fired in 1953 from the USIA Paris office who had also been caught up in the McCarthy witch hunt. Bibi came to Boston to work as a writer and researcher for Henry Morgenthau, who was producing Eleanor Roosevelt’s Prospects of Mankind for WGBH. She urged Julia to publicize her book by appearing on Professor Albert Duhamel’s interview program entitled I’ve Been Reading. Though Duhamel had never interviewed the author of a book so “trivial,” or practical, before, he yielded.

  When Julia called
the station to talk to Duhamel, Russell (Russ) Morash, a young producer in his twenties, answered the telephone. “I heard this strange voice which sounded like a smoker’s pack-a-day-combined-with-asthma voice who asked if the station had a hot plate. I said I doubt it.” He thought she was “very eccentric.”

  Julia and Paul appeared with copper bowl, whip, apron, and a dozen eggs for her interview. “It was my idea to bring on the whisk and bowl and hot plate. Educational television was just talking heads, and I did not know what we could talk about for that long, so I brought the eggs,” said Julia. The interview and demonstration were not taped, as usual, because of the expense of tape ($220 to $300) and the difficulty of storing it. The response to the February interview was positive, and she received many requests for classes, briefly entertaining the idea of opening a cooking school in Boston. The station had other plans. Though several people have suggested that the station telephones “rang off the hook” and the station received “hundreds” of letters, they received twenty-seven letters, which they considered overwhelming support, says Morash. “A remarkable response,” adds WGBH’s president, Henry Becton, in 1996, “given that station management occasionally wondered if 27 viewers were tuned in to the modest program.” Julia later told a Smith College interviewer, “Most of the letters didn’t mention the book. They said, ‘Get that woman back. We want to see some more cooking.’ That gave them the idea.” The station manager, Bob Larson, and program director, David Davis, decided that young Morash would put together three pilot programs of Mrs. Child cooking.