My Life in France Page 22

  “It is entirely thanks to Mme. Beck and her life-long interest in cooking that we have not only the usual classical collection of recipes, but many personal and out-of-the-ordinary ones which are deeply French,” I wrote. “As far as we know, most are hitherto unpublished.”

  ON NOVEMBER 6, 1959, I received a letter from Paul Brooks, the editor-in-chief of Houghton Mifflin, in the diplomatic pouch. I picked up the long white envelope and stared at it for a moment. It represented so much to me that I hardly dared to open it. Finally, I did.

  The company’s executives had met several times about French Recipes for American Cooks, he wrote, and after much discussion had reached a decision:

  You and your colleagues have achieved a reconstruction of process so tested and detailed that there can be no doubt as to the successful outcome of the instructions. Your manuscript is a work of culinary science as much as of culinary art.

  However, although all of us respect the work as an achievement, it is obvious that . . . this will be a very expensive book to produce and the publisher’s investment will be heavy. This means that he should be able to define in advance the market for the book, to envisage a large buying public for a cookbook which will have to be high priced because of its manufacturing costs. It is at this point that my colleagues feel dubious.

  After the first project grew to encyclopedic size you agreed with us that the book . . . was to be a much smaller, simpler book. . . . You . . . spoke of the revised project as a “short simple book directed to the housewife chauffeur.” The present book could never be called this. It is a big, expensive cookbook of elaborate information and might well prove formidable to the American housewife. She might easily clip one of these recipes out of a magazine but be frightened by the book as a whole.

  I am aware that this reaction will be a disappointment and . . . I suggest that you try the book immediately on some other publisher. . . . We will always be interested in seeing a smaller, simpler version. Believe me, I know how much work has gone into this manuscript. I send you my best wishes for its success elsewhere.

  I sighed. It just might be that The Book was unpublishable.

  I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself. I had gotten the job done, I was proud of it, and now I had a whole batch of foolproof recipes to use. Besides, I had found myself through the arduous writing process. Even if we were never able to publish our book, I had discovered my raison d’être in life, and would continue my self-training and teaching. French cuisine was nearly infinite: I still had loads to learn about pâtisserie, and there were many hundreds of recipes I was eager to try.

  But I felt sorry for poor Simca. She and Louisette had started this project ten years earlier, and still had nothing to show for it. “You just picked the wrong American to collaborate with,” I wrote her.

  ALMOST IMMEDIATELY I got a morale-boosting letter from Avis, our tireless champion, saying: “We have only begun to fight.”

  She forwarded a lovely consoling letter from Dorothy de Santillana, who wrote: “I hate to think of [Julia and Simca’s] disappointment. . . . I feel very badly to see the perfect flower of culinary love, and the solidly achieved work of so many years, go begging. They’re such nice authors.”

  She went on to flesh out the actual reasons behind Houghton Mifflin’s decision. It was based on a very cut-and-dried business equation: the cost of production (very high) versus the possible sales of the book (unknown, but probably low). Our competitors were producing gimmicky cookbooks—like Houghton Mifflin’s own Texas-themed cookbook—and our more serious approach was considered too much of a risk. Even though our recipes were foolproof, the editors had convinced themselves that our dishes were too elaborate.

  “All the men felt the book would seem formidable except to the professional cook, and that the average housewife would choose a competitor for the very reason that it was not so perfect,” Dorothy wrote. “They feel she wants ‘shortcuts to something equivalent’ instead of the perfect process to the absolute, which this book is. . . . This manuscript is a superb cookbook. It is better than any I know of. But I could not argue with the men as to its suitability for a housewife-chauffeur.”

  Was our book ten years too late? Did the American public really want nothing but speed and magic in the kitchen?

  Apparently so. The entire recipe for coq au vin in one popular cookbook, now in its third printing, read: “Cut up two broilers. Brown them in butter with bacon, sliced onions, and sliced mushrooms. Cover with red wine and bake for two hours.” Hm.

  Well, maybe the editors were right. After all, there probably weren’t many people like me who liked to fuss about in the kitchen. Besides, few Americans knew what French food was supposed to taste like, so why should they want to go to all that silly trouble just to make something to eat?

  As for myself, I was not at all interested in anything but French cooking. If we couldn’t find a buyer for our opus, then I would just forget about it until we returned to the States.

  Charlie Child wrote consolingly: “I think Julie is a natural for TV, with or without [book] publication. But this is only one man’s opinion.” I laughed. Me on television? What an idea! We had hardly seen a single program and didn’t even own a television set.

  THE EDITORS AT Houghton Mifflin had suggested we show French Recipes for American Cooks to Doubleday, a big publishing house with its own book clubs. But Avis had another idea. Without consulting me or Simca (but with our full retroactive approval), she had sent our 750 pages to an old friend, Bill Koshland, whose title was secretary at the Alfred A. Knopf publishing house, in New York.

  Koshland was an accomplished amateur cook who had seen part of our manuscript at Avis’s, and had asked about it. Knopf was a prestigious house that did not have any new cookbooks on its schedule.

  Losing Houghton Mifflin was a “Godsend in disguise,” Avis wrote, and publishers like Knopf had far more imagination. “This may take time but you will get published yet—I know it, I know it.”

  Sleeping on it

  CHAPTER 6

  Mastering the Art

  I. A LUCKY COINCIDENCE

  IN MAY 1948, a twenty-four-year-old editor at Doubleday named Judith Bailey embarked on a three-week vacation to Europe. She and a Bennington friend sailed steerage-class from New York to Naples, and eventually made their way to Paris. It was Judith’s first visit to Europe, and she spoke only schoolgirl French, but was thrilled to be there. Her friend went home, but Judith settled into a small hotel, the Lenox, on the Left Bank, not far from where we’d eventually live on la Rue de l’Université. The days flew by, and the longer she was there the more Judith fell in love with Paris. “I have been waiting for this my whole life,” she said to herself. “I just love everything about it.”

  Two days before she was scheduled to return to her job in America, Judith sat in the Tuileries Gardens reading. She had her return ticket in her purse. The sunset was so beautiful that she began to weep. “Why am I leaving?” she wondered. With a sigh, she stood up, gathered her book, and wandered off. It was only when she turned the corner that Judith realized she’d left her purse, with all of her francs, travelers’ checks, passport, and return ticket, in the garden. She rushed back, but it was gone.

  She reported the robbery to the police and walked back to the Lenox without a sou to her name. “This is so strange,” she mused. “I wonder if somebody is telling me I should stay here?”

  Back at the hotel, an old friend from Vermont (Judith’s native state) happened to be staying at the same hotel and noticed Judith sitting in her room with the door open. “Judith Bailey!” he exclaimed. “What are you doing here?” He and his pals took her out for dinner. Was this another sign that she should stay? She had also met a young Frenchman, who squired her about to restaurants and was a wonderful cook himself. That clinched it.

  Once she had decided that she wasn’t returning to New York at all, Judith managed to find work as an assistant to Evan Jones—an American nine years her senior, who was e
ditor of Weekend, an American general-interest picture magazine that had grown out of Stars and Stripes. Weekend did well for a time, but collapsed once the behemoths Life and Look hit the Paris newsstands. Meanwhile, Judith Bailey and Evan Jones had fallen in love.

  While he wrote freelance articles and attempted a novel, Judith worked for a shady American who bought and sold cars for Hollywood stars and other wealthy expats traveling through France. She and Evan rented a little apartment and learned to cook together. Although she didn’t have any cookbooks, or the wherewithal to go to a school like the Cordon Bleu, Judith was naturally inquisitive and had a talent for the stove. Like me, she learned by tasting things—the wonderful entrecôte in restaurants, the tiny cockles in Brittany. She learned culinary trucs by asking questions of all sorts of people, such as the butcher’s wife, who showed her the perfect fat to fry pommes frites in.

  During this time, Paul and I had settled into our apartment at 81 Rue de l’Université. It’s quite possible that we passed Judith and Evan on the street, or that we stood next to each other at a cocktail party, for we were leading parallel lives. But we never met in Paris.

  Tired of the demanding car-dealer, Judith found new work as an editorial assistant to a Doubleday editor in Paris who was acquiring European books for the U.S. market. One day, she happened to pick up a stray book that her boss was planning to reject. Intrigued by the cover photo of a young girl, she opened the book and read the first few lines. Within pages, Judith found herself so absorbed by the story that she couldn’t put it down until she had finished it all. Feeling passionate about the book, she implored her editor to reconsider, which he did. Doubleday bought the book, and it was published it in the U.S. as Ann Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.

  By November 1951, Judith and Evan had gotten married and returned to New York. When Anne Frank became a worldwide sensation, Knopf, which had rejected the book, offered Judith a job as an editor. Her primary duty was to work with translators of French books acquired by Knopf.

  In late 1959, when Bill Koshland showed our manuscript to the editors at Knopf, it was Judith Jones who immediately understood what we were up to. She and Evan tried out a few of our recipes at home, subjecting our work to the operational proof. They made a boeuf bourguignon for a dinner party. They used our top-secret methods for making sauces. They learned to make and flip an omelette the way Bugnard had taught me (they practiced the omelette flip using dried beans in a frying pan, as we had suggested, on their little deck; the following spring, they discovered beanstalks sprouting from their roof). They avidly read our suggestions on cookware and wine.

  “French Recipes for American Cooks is a terrible title,” Judith said to her husband. “But the book itself is revolutionary. It could become a classic.”

  Back at the office, Judith declared to her somewhat skeptical superiors: “We’ve got to publish this book!”

  Angus Cameron, a Knopf colleague who had helped to launch the Joy of Cooking at Bobbs-Merrill years earlier, agreed, and together they hatched up all kinds of promotional schemes.

  In mid-May 1960, I received a letter from Mrs. Jones in Oslo. Once again I found myself holding an envelope from a publisher that I hardly dared to open. After all these years of soaring hopes and dashed expectations, I was prepared for the worst but was hoping, really hoping, for the best. I breathed deeply, pulled out Mrs. Jones’s letter, and read:

  We have spent months over [your] superb French cookbook . . . studying it, cooking from it, estimating, and so on, and we have come to the conclusion that it is a unique book that we would be very proud to have on the Knopf list. . . . I have been authorized to make you an offer. . . . We are very concerned about the matter of a title because we feel it is of utmost importance that the title say exactly what this book is which distinguishes it from all the other French cookbooks on the market. We consider it the best and only working French cookbook to date which will do for French cooking here in America what Rombauer’s THE JOY OF COOKING once did for standard cooking, and we will sell it that way. . . . It is certainly a beautifully organized, clearly written, wonderfully instructive manuscript. You have already revolutionized my own efforts in the cuisine and everyone I have let sample a recipe or talked to about the book is already pledged not to buy another cookbook.

  I blinked and reread the letter. The words on the page were more generous and encouraging than I ever dared dream of. I was a bit stunned.

  When Avis called us transatlantic, she gave a big “Whoop!” and assured us that Knopf would do a nifty printing job and would know how to really publish the book the right way.

  As for the business side of things, Knopf offered us a fifteen-hundred-dollar advance against royalties of 17 percent on the wholesale price of the book (if we sold more than twenty thousand copies, we’d get a royalty of 23 percent). The book would be priced at about ten dollars, and would be launched in the fall of 1961. For simplicity’s sake, the contract would be with me, and I’d work out the financial arrangements with Simca and Louisette. Mrs. Jones didn’t care for the line drawings we had submitted (done by a friend), and would arrange to hire the best artist she could find to do our illustrations. All of these details were acceptable to us authors, and to our lawyer, and I signed the contract before anyone could have second thoughts.

  There, it was done. Hooray!

  Our sweet success was largely thanks to that nice Avis De Voto. She pushed and hammered and enthused for us for so long. Heaven knows what would have happened to our book if it were not for her—probably nothing at all.

  It turned out that Mrs. Jones had never edited a cookbook before. Yet she seemed to know exactly what she liked in our manuscript and where she found us wanting. She enjoyed our informal but informative writing style, and our deep research on esoterica, like how to avoid mistakes in a hollandaise sauce; she congratulated us on some of our innovations, such as our notes on how much of a recipe one could prepare ahead of time, and our listing of ingredients down a column on the left of the page, with the text calling for their use on the right.

  But she felt that we had badly underestimated the American appetite. “With boeuf bourguignon,” she noted, “two and a half pounds of meat is not enough for 6–8 people. I made the recipe the other night and it was superb, so much so that five hungry people cleaned the platter.” Of course, our servings had assumed that one was making at least a three-course meal à la française. But that wasn’t the American style of eating, so we had to compromise.

  She also felt that we ought to add a few more beef dishes—as red meat was so popular in America—and “hearty peasant dishes.” I felt that we had quite a few peasant dishes already—potée normande (boiled beef, chicken, sausage, and pork), boeuf à la mode, braised lamb with beans, etc.—and that she was being overly romantic about this point. But after a bit of back-and-forth, we included a recipe for cassoulet, that lovely baked-bean-and-meat recipe from southwestern France.

  To the untrained American ear, “cassoulet” sounded like some kind of unattainable ambrosia; but in truth it is no more than a nourishing country meal. As with bouillabaisse, there were an infinite number of cassoulet recipes, all based on local traditions.

  In my usual way, I researched the different types of beans and meats one could use, and eventually produced a sheaf of papers on the subject at least two inches thick.

  “Non!” Simca barked at my efforts. “We French—we never make cassoulet like this!”

  She dug her heels in over the question of confit d’oie (preserved goose) in our list of ingredients. She insisted we must include it, but I pointed out that 99 percent of Americans had never heard of confit d’oie, and certainly couldn’t buy it. We wanted our directions to be correct, as always, but also to be accessible. “The important item is flavor, which comes largely from the liquid the beans and meats are cooked in,” I wrote. “And truth to tell, despite all the to-do about preserved goose, once it is cooked with the beans you may find difficulty in distinguishing goose
from pork.”

  Simca shook her finger at me and insisted: “There is only one way to make this dish properly—avec confit d’oie!”

  This irked. “What earthly good is it for me to do all this research if my own colleague is going to just completely, blithely disregard it?” I retorted.

  After much drama, we agreed on a basic master recipe for cassoulet using pork or lamb and homemade sausage, followed by four variations, including one using confit d’oie. In the book we explained the dish, gave menu suggestions, discussed the type of beans to use, and provided “a note on the order of battle.” This took nearly six pages to accomplish, but we tried to make each word count.

  The title of our book caused the biggest headaches. Judith felt that French Recipes for American Cooks was “not nearly provocative nor explicit enough.” I agreed completely, which set in motion a hunt for a nifty new name. As bounty, I offered friends and family a great big foie gras en bloc truffé, straight from France. Who could resist such mouth-watering temptation? All someone had to do to claim the prize, I wrote, was to “invent a short, irresistible, informative, unforgettable, catchy book title implying that ours is the book on French cooking for Americans, the only book, the book to supersede all books, the basic French cookbook.”

  My own suggestion was La Bonne Cuisine Française.

  Judith felt this wouldn’t do, as a French title would be “too forbidding” for the American reader.

  Some of the other early contenders included French Cooking from the American Supermarket, The Noble Art of French Cooking, Do It Yourself French Cooking, French Magicians in the Kitchen, Method in Cuisine Madness, The Witchcraft of French Cooking, and The Passionate French Cook.