My Life in France Read online

  As the apple trees blossomed in Oslo, and Paul and I started to grill outdoors, we debated the merits of poetic titles versus descriptive titles. Who could have predicted that the Joy of Cooking would become just the right title for that particular book? What combination of words and associations would work for our tome? We made lists and lists—The French Chef’s Companion; The Modern American’s Guide to French Cooking; How, Why, What to Cook in the French Way; Food-France-Fun—but none seemed to be le mot juste.

  In New York, meanwhile, Judith was playing with a set of words like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, trying to get them to fit together. She wanted to convey our idea that cooking was an art, and fun, not drudgery; also that learning how to cook was an ongoing process. The right title would imply scope, fundamentality, cooking, and France. Judith focused on two themes: “French cooking” and “master.” She began with The Master French Cookbook, then tried variations, like The French Cooking Master. For a long time, the leading contender was The Mastery of French Cooking. (Judith’s tongue-in-cheek subtitle was: An Incomparable Book on the Fundamental Techniques and Traditional Dishes of the French Cuisine Translated into Terms of Use in American Kitchens with American Foods and American Utensils by American Cooks.) Reactions were generally enthusiastic to the title, but the Knopf sales manager worried that mastery is an accomplished thing, and that the title did not tell you how to go about mastering it. Well, then, how about How to Master French Cooking? Judith suggested.

  Finally, on November 18, 1960, she wrote me to say that she’d settled on exactly the right title: Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

  I loved the active verb “mastering,” immodest as it was, and instantly replied: “You’ve got it.”

  At the eleventh hour, Simca declared that she did not care for the title.

  “It’s too late to change it,” I said, adding that only an American ear could catch the subtle nuances of American English. Plus, I said, Knopf knew a lot more about books than we did, and they were the ones who had to sell it. So, in effect, tant pis!

  Unbeknownst to us, Alfred Knopf, the imperious head of the publishing house, who fancied himself a gourmand, was skeptical that a big woman from Smith College and her friends could write a meaningful work on la cuisine française. But he was willing to give it a chance. Then, when Judith announced that we’d decided to call the book Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Alfred shook his head and scoffed: “I’ll eat my hat if anyone buys a book with that title!”

  But then he acquiesced. “All right, let’s let Mrs. Jones have a chance.”

  SEPTEMBER 1, 1960, marked our fourteenth wedding anniversary, but Paul and I had no time to celebrate. After eighteen years in the Foreign Service, he had decided he’d had enough and would retire. Paul could have stayed on to reach the twenty-year mark and earn three thousand dollars a month, if he wanted to. But he didn’t. It was a wrenching decision. However, once he’d made it, I noticed an immediate surge in Paul’s energy and enthusiasm.

  The Knopf contract had been the impetus, but the real reason he quit was that, after twelve years of staunch effort, Paul had been rewarded with exactly one measly promotion and one disgraceful investigation. He was fifty-eight years old and sick of battling narrow-minded bureaucrats in Washington while doing yeoman’s work abroad without so much as a “thank you.” Furthermore, we both felt it was time to put down roots in our native soil and get to know our family and friends again.

  We left government service on May 19, 1961—two years and two days after we had arrived in Oslo. Now we were just plain old U.S. civilians.

  IN THE WEEKS leading up to our departure, I had been chewing my way through the fifteen pounds of galleys for Mastering the Art of French Cooking practically twenty-four hours a day. Proofreading was a perfectly horrible job. I was shocked to discover I’d written things like “1⁄4 cup of almond extract,” when I’d meant to say “1⁄4 teaspoon”; or had forgotten to say, “Cover the pot when the stew goes into the oven.” How could this ever have happened? Seeing one’s inadequate English frozen into type was a lesson in humility.

  I worked slowly and methodically. But with an upcoming NATO conference keeping Paul fully occupied until the last moment, our imminent departure for the States, and our looming Knopf deadline, my nerves began to fray. So did Simca’s.

  She was a dear friend, but horribly disorganized and rather full of herself. She didn’t bother to check the copy with care, which led to several difficult moments between us. Our deadline for proofreading was June 10, 1961. As that date drew closer and closer, a flurry of emotional letters winged between Paris and Oslo.

  We debated things like a cake recipe Simca had proposed in 1959, but now, in May 1961, had second thoughts about. Noticing the recipe in the galleys, Simca declared: “Ce gâteau—ce n’est pas français! C’est un goût américain! On peut pas l’avoir dans notre livre!” (“This cake—it’s not French. It’s an American taste. We can’t have it in the book.”)

  She didn’t think the cake was French, but of course it was. I spent hours checking my datebooks and notes, and reported the facts to her: “On June 3, 1959, you sent me this recipe. I tried it out, it worked well, and we agreed to incorporate it into the manuscript. On October 9, 1960, we met and discussed every recipe together, including this one. On February 20, 1961, I wrote you to confirm this.” It was too late to take an entire recipe out of the book. “What you now read in print is what you previously read and approved,” I reminded her. “I am afraid that surprise, shock, and regret is the fate of authors when they finally see themselves on the page.”

  We had worked so hard, and were so close to the finish line, that our disagreements were a real strain. Yet they could not be simply brushed aside. We did our best to muddle through the give-and-take. But the clock ticked ever louder.

  When Simca objected to our section on wine, I wrote back: “It cannot be as incorrect as you now think, or you wouldn’t have OK’d it before!”

  I was beside myself with frustration over her dithering. To me, Mastering the Art of French Cooking was something akin to my firstborn child, and, like any parent, I wanted it to be perfect.

  Wise Avis wrote: “Leave us face it. No relationship is flawless. And a relationship like yours with Simca is in many respects like a marriage. Very good ups and very bad downs. But it’s been a working relationship, and on the whole, good and productive. And the child you have produced is going to have flaws too, but will also be, on the whole, good. We must settle for what we can get.”

  II. PRAWNS IN THE MAELSTROM

  ONE AFTERNOON in late September 1961, I sat with a printed and bound copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Beck, Bertholle, and Child in my lap. It was 732 pages long, weighed a ton, and was wonderfully illustrated by Sidonie Coryn. I could hardly believe the old monster was really in print. Was it a mirage? Well, that weight on my knees must mean something! The book was perfectly beautiful in every respect.

  Our official publication date was October 16. Simca would fly to New York for the big day, and Paul and I would leave Cambridge to meet her. We planned to stay in New York for about ten days, to try to meet people in the food-and-wine game and drum up a bit of trade.

  Knopf had agreed to take out a few advertisements, but most of the promotion job fell to us. I had no idea how to arrange for publicity, so I wrote friends in business and asked for advice. Frankly, I didn’t expect much. Our book was unlike any other out there, and Simca and I were absolutely unknown authors. I doubted whether any newspapers would want to write about us. Besides, I hated the whole idea of selling ourselves. We’d just grit our teeth and try our best.

  And as long as we had a real live French woman in the States, we thought we ought to do a quick book tour. But how did one go about that? Simca and I decided to travel to places where we knew people who could put us up for the night and help arrange book signings, lectures, and cooking demonstrations. From New York we’d travel to Detroit, then out to San Francisco,
and finally we’d descend to Los Angeles, where we’d stay with Big John and Phila.

  Pop was eighty-two years old now. He hardly ever got sick, but lately had been struck by a virus and laid up in bed for two weeks. Otherwise, he had been keeping himself busy fund-raising for Nixon and fulminating against John F. Kennedy. “What this country needs is to get some real businessmen down to Washington to fix things up!” he wrote me. But I didn’t think the GOPers were the nation’s answer. Poor old Ike wasn’t very informed, and after we watched movies of the presidential debates while in Oslo, I couldn’t fathom how anyone could vote for that loathsome Nixon. “I will be voting for Kennedy,” I informed my father.

  LO AND BEHOLD, in its first few weeks in print our little old book caught on in New York. Knopf was hopeful that they had a modest best-seller on their hands. They ordered a second printing of ten thousand copies, and if business continued on as it was, they were prepared to order a third printing.

  Simca and I felt very proud and lucky indeed. It must have been that Mastering was published at the right psychological moment.

  Writing in the New York Times on October 18, Craig Claiborne declared:

  What is probably the most comprehensive, laudable and monumental work on [French cooking] was published this week. . . . It will probably remain as the definitive work for nonprofessionals.

  This is not a book for those with a superficial interest in food. But for those who take fundamental delight in the pleasures of cuisine, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” may well become a vade mecum in the kitchen. It is written in the simplest terms possible and without compromise or condescension.

  The recipes are glorious, whether they are for a simple egg in aspic or for a fish soufflé. At a glance it is conservatively estimated that there are a thousand or more recipes in the book. All are painstakingly edited and written as if each were a masterpiece, and most of them are.

  Ouf! We couldn’t have written a better review ourselves.

  Claiborne sniffed at our use of a garlic press, “a gadget considered in some circles to be only one cut above garlic salt or garlic powder,” and thought that our lack of recipes for puff pastry and croissants was “a curious omission.” I happened to like garlic presses, but his comment about puff pastry stung a bit. Simca and I had tried and tried, but failed to come up with a workable recipe for pâte feuilletée in time for publication. But Claiborne did make special mention of our pages on cassoulet: “Anyone who attempts this recipe will most assuredly turn out a dish of a high and memorable character.” I nearly purred at that.

  A few days after the Times review, Simca and I were interviewed on the radio by Martha Deane, who had a morning news-and-comment broadcast which was much listened to up and down the East Coast. It was the first time we had done anything like this, but Ms. Deane had a natural facility for putting us at ease. We had an informal chat with her for about twenty minutes, with test questions and answers, and then the tape went on and everything we said was for keeps. We didn’t worry that our words were being broadcast to the public, and just had a wonderfully good time talking about food and cooking.

  Two days later, we went to the NBC studio to do a morning TV program called Today. As Paul and I didn’t have a television yet, we knew nothing about it, but the Knopf people said the show aired from 7:00 to 9:00 a.m. and was listened to by some four million people. That was a lot of potential readers.

  Today wanted us to do a cooking demonstration, and we decided the most dramatic thing we could do in the five minutes allotted to us was to make omelettes. At five o’clock on the assigned morning, Simca and I arrived at the NBC studios in the dark with our black French shopping bag filled with knives, whips, bowls, pans, and provisions. It was then that we discovered that the “stove” they had promised was nothing more than a weak electric hot plate. The damned thing just wouldn’t heat up properly for an omelette. Luckily, we had brought three dozen eggs, and had an hour to experiment before the decisive moment. We tried everything we could think of, but it didn’t do much good. Finally, we decided we’d just have to fake it and hope for the best.

  About five minutes before we were to go on, we put our omelette pan on the hot plate and left it there until it was just about red-hot. At seven-twelve, we were ushered onto the set. The interviewer, John Chancellor, had that same nice quality as Martha Deane—with a deft verbal touch, he put us at ease and bolstered our confidence so that Simca and I had such a good time we didn’t care what happened. Well, by heaven, if that one last omelette didn’t work out perfectly! The Today show went better than we could have hoped for, and it was over before we knew it. We were impressed with the informal and friendly atmosphere of the NBC chaps, not to mention their perfectly timed professionalism. TV was certainly an impressive new medium.

  The old publicity express was rumbling along at a good clip now. Somehow, Life magazine learned of our book and mentioned it in their pages. Then Helen Millbank, an old Foreign Service friend, arranged to have Simca and me photographed for Vogue, where she worked—ooh-la-la! And the best news of all was that House & Garden, which had an excellent cooking supplement, asked us to write an article. This was a great boon, as that magazine is where all the fancy food types, like James Beard and Dione Lucas—the English chef and teacher, who had a TV cooking show—appeared.

  One night while in New York, we met James Beard, the actual, large, living being, at his cooking school/house at 167 West Twelfth Street. Simca and I felt immediately fond of Jim, as he insisted we call him, and he kindly offered to do what he could to put Mastering on the culinary map. He was a man of his word, and introduced us around town to culinary movers-and-shakers, like Helen McCulley, a tiny gray-haired fireball who was the editor of House Beautiful. She, in turn, introduced us to a number of chefs, like a young Frenchman named Jacques Pépin, a former chef for de Gaulle who was cooking at Le Pavillon restaurant. And we also met Dione Lucas at the Egg Basket, her little restaurant that had a cooking school in the back. Simca and I sat at the omelette bar, where Lucas put on a wonderful performance while giving us lunch and pointers on doing cooking demonstrations for an audience.

  In early November, we flew from Boston, where it was eighty-two degrees, to Detroit, where it was snowing. We stayed in Grosse Pointe with socially prominent friends of Simca’s, who invited a big crowd to our demonstration. Although most of the people there knew nothing about la cuisine française, they liked our book enough (or followed the herd enough) so that it sold out in local bookstores. We had no idea if these sales had any wider significance, but it was a pleasant surprise in Detroit. It would have been awful to be on a promotion trip for a dead, or dying, duck!

  Simca and I being interviewed by Rhea Case at the Cavalcade of Books in Los Angeles

  Then on to California, where San Francisco was brilliantly sunny, diamond-clear, cool, and green. On a typical day, we were picked up at nine-forty-five at Dort’s house in Sausalito by the local Knopf representative, a Mr. Russell. He drove us to an interview at the Oakland Times. Then to the Palace Hotel in San Francisco by noon, where we were interviewed on KCBS Radio. By this point, we were getting much better at answering interviewers’ questions, talking more slowly and clearly, and not feeling self-conscious. It was fascinating to see how the radio and newspaper people went about their work. After a quick lunch, Russell drove us back to Sausalito, where we barely had time to wash our hands before Paul and I climbed aboard Dort’s Morris Minor and drove to Berkeley. There we had a sort of “diplomatic” tea with a Mrs. Jackson, a children’s-book author and wife of a famed book editor. Then back to Dort’s, where we picked up Simca, and drove into San Francisco for a cocktail party with a mob of university types. Then dinner with a woman who would host a book party for us in Washington, D.C., and who would try to persuade the Washington Post to write something about Mastering the Art of French Cooking. After dinner we called on an older woman friend, as vigorous as a pirate, and we finally made it home by eleven-thirty. Whew!
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br />   On another day, Simca and I set up a stove on the fifth floor of a big department store called the City of Paris, and spent from 10:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m. making omelettes, quiches, and madeleines, again and again. Screaming at the top of our lungs in order to be heard, we worked practically non-stop and subsisted on whatever we made. It was fun, although we felt like pawns, or prawns, in the maelstrom.

  This sort of life was fine for six weeks, but I would not like to be stuck in it continuously. It left no time for work.

  When we quit the Foreign Service, Paul and I had said, “Ah, freedom at last—no more of this hurly-burly, thank you very much!” But here we were, shuttling from place to place and hitting deadlines with just seconds to spare. Paul, with his years of experience in exhibits and presentations, helped us immeasurably. Not that Simca and I couldn’t take care of ourselves, but to have someone along who didn’t have to think about cooking and talking, and who could devote himself entirely to wrangling microphones, stage lights, tables, ovens, etc., allowed us to concentrate on the job at hand.

  Just to keep things interesting, we were all ailing—Simca had a leg swell up, Paul suffered a major toothache, and I had a touch of cystitis. “One thing that separates us Senior Citizens from the Juniors is learning how to suffer,” Paul noted. “It’s a skill, just like learning to write.”

  By the time we arrived in Los Angeles, Pop had recovered from his flu enough to toss off a few verbal stinkbombs. He needled us as usual about “those people” (i.e., the French), about “the socialist labor unions” (he hated all unions), and about “the Fabian Society in Cambridge” (he disdained the politics of his elder daughter and son-in-law). His views, and general ignorance, were not uncommon in Pasadena. “I’ve never heard of the Common Market; what is it?” asked a nice and well-educated friend of my parents, a statement that shocked me. Maybe we had lived outside of the U.S.A. for too long, but many of our fellow citizens seemed blissfully unaware of world politics or culture, and seemed exclusively interested in business and their own comfort.