Laura Shapiro Page 6

  Julia quickly became the de facto head of the project. The whole idea thrilled her: she would be a professional writer and culinary authority, Prof. Julia on a larger stage. The more she identified with this new public persona, the more eager she was to get a lawyer involved with the project in order to put it on a businesslike basis and help them deal with Ives Washburn. She had heard a lot of horror stories about writers’ experiences with their publishers. “I’ve gathered it’s a cut-throat game and that if you don’t get a lawyer or agent on your side who knows all the ropes, you can get your face peeled and all your efforts bring in the mazuma only for the publisher,” she explained to Paul Sheeline, a lawyer she trusted because he was a nephew of Paul’s.

  Julia didn’t write this book or any other primarily for the money, but she hated to feel she was being cheated or exploited, and from the beginning of her career, she made a point of being involved in the finances. She was already dubious about Ives Washburn because of the way it had botched “What’s Cooking in France,” and since Simca and Louisette had no formal contract with the company, she decided they should jump ship and look for a better publisher. Their book was going to be a definitive contribution to French cookery, and she was adamant that the stature and dignity of the enterprise be taken seriously. For Julia, it was the same as being taken seriously herself. “Now I’ve started in writing, I intend to keep at it for years and years,” she told Sheeline. “So I think it wise to start out on a very firm footing.” Sheeline was no specialist in cook-books, but he did know how hard it was for first-time authors to get published, and he tried to get Julia to put the situation in perspective. “Almost any deal that can be made by a budding writer with a publisher is a good one,” he counseled, and said Julia should consider herself lucky to have any publisher at all interested in her work, even Ives Washburn. This sort of thinking infuriated her. “I quite appreciate the fact that unknown authors are unknown authors,” she retorted. “However, we have a good product to sell, which I think will sell itself, and I see no reason to crawl about on our stomach. This is no amateur affair written by some little women who just love to cook, but a professional job written by professionals; and, I would say without modesty, even a ‘major work’ on the principles of French Cooking. I therefore have no intention of wasting it on a no-account firm.”

  At the time Julia was taking this magisterial stand, the three authors had little in hand except the revised chapter on sauces and some early work on poultry. Even a “no-account” firm wouldn’t have signed up a trio of unknown women on the basis of their hollandaise recipe. What they needed was somebody knowledgeable about cookbook publishing who would fall in love with the project and steer this cumbersome, audacious dream toward the real world; and in the spring of 1952, that very person came into Julia’s life. Avis DeVoto was a writer, editor, and literary agent who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband, Bernard DeVoto, a political journalist and historian with a regular column in Harper’s called “The Easy Chair.” One of his columns caught Julia’s attention because he was complaining about American knives. Why were they so inadequate? he demanded. Stainless steel knives were beautiful but useless; they wouldn’t hold an edge. Julia agreed wholeheartedly and went out and bought a good French knife, which she mailed to him. Avis, a sophisticated cook who had suggested the column in the first place, was delighted. She wrote a thank-you letter, Julia wrote back, and the two of them fell into an absorbing correspondence.

  Since moving to Paris and discovering the passion that would shape her future, Julia had been growing into herself, experiencing more and more of the sense of rightness that had started to emerge back in the OSS. It was in the course of this evolution that Avis became her chief confidante, a wonderfully witty and perceptive recipient for all Julia’s musings, rants, and bouts of philosophy. Julia would type on and on, astonishing herself by how much she had to say to this faraway friend whom she’d never met in person. Sometimes she would sit under the hair dryer at the beauty parlor with paper and pen, scribbling away until, as she said, she was “baked to a turn.” Avis couldn’t stop talking either: the two of them scrambled from food to cookbook matters to reports on daily life to complaints and wishes and self-scrutiny, all the while pressing each other for opinions on everything from shallots to sex. Both their husbands, they discovered, liked “barbarian” food—roasts, steaks, lots of spices, lots of garlic. “I think that is very American male,” Julia decided. Avis thought the Kinsey reports were a big bore; Julia was riveted by them. (“Heaven knows, I am no authority on sex, but I think it is a fine institution which should be enjoyed by all to the fullest extent.”) Avis loved England, Julia much preferred France; Avis liked martinis, Julia begged her to try a good red wine. Early on, the two friends exchanged photographs. “That is a wonderfully worldly expression you have on,” Julia remarked admiringly. “It is the face I always try to wear when I am in New York, with no success.” She also added relevant physical details:

  Paul, 5‘11”, weight 175, very muscley. He has done lots of woodchopping, etc., and is a 3rd-degree black-belt Judo man (which is a remarkable thing).

  Julia, 6 ft. plus, weight 150 to 160. Bosom not as copious as she would wish, but has noticed that Botticelli bosoms are not big either. Legs OK, according to husband. Freckles.

  And she sent interior snapshots as well. Paul, she said, was an intellectual, always ready to probe new ideas, always working on training his mind. “Me, I am not an intellectual,” she admitted. “Except for La Cuisine, I find I have to push myself to build up a thirst for how the atomic bomb works, or a study of Buddhism.” She attributed this problem to her childhood in a “useless and wasteful class of society.” Not until she joined the OSS and was thrown in with “intellectuals and academicians” did she find the sort of people she liked. “You, however, have had years of it,” she reflected. Across the ocean, in a house near Harvard Square, Avis was living one of Julia’s imagined lives, just as Simca in her French kitchen was living another.

  But for the first seven years of their friendship, Julia and Avis talked more than anything else about the book. As soon as the sauces chapter was fully revised, Julia sent it to Avis asking for an honest opinion as well as any advice about publishing. Avis turned every page with mounting admiration. This was a revelatory approach to French cooking: the infrastructure of culinary methods was as pertinent as the recipes, and the recipes were the most precise and logical she had ever seen. A good American cook would be able to follow them, not necessarily with ease, but at least with a sense of confidence that the authors were never going to leave her in the lurch. And, as she found in the kitchen, the recipes worked. The ingredients came together just as the instructions said they would, and the sauces tasted French. She quickly wrote back to Julia: she must keep right on working; she must not sign with Ives Washburn; Avis was going to send the chapter to a friend at Houghton Mifflin, which was a major publishing company based in Boston, and the book would be handled the way it deserved.

  Julia was overjoyed—“I would say excited, which is my real reaction, but am learning not to use that word because of its more carnal implications in French!” The chapter went to Dorothy de Santillana, managing editor at Houghton Mifflin, who was, Avis reported, “tickled pink” with the depth and expertise of what she saw. A contract followed, along with an impressive advance of $750. “HOORAY,” typed Julia. “The book will be dedicated to you, my dear, and to La Belle France.” Avis refused the dedication but agreed to be the chief editorial go-between. It had all happened in less than six weeks. Julia tried to be realistic about what lay ahead: she thought it would be a year, at least, before she and her two coauthors completed the manuscript. Her prediction was off by six years, but in every other respect she understood just where she stood in her life. As she said to Avis, the midwife who would see her through a long labor, “I realize with awesome seriousness that the real work is about to begin.”

  Chapter 3

  How to Make
Things Taste the Way They Should

  FRENCH COOKING for American cooks? It had to be an oxymoron. How could these two incompatible beasts ever be yoked together? But Julia knew it was possible, because it had happened to her. Now she envisioned a culinary America where it happened to everyone: where ordinary home cooks made perfect creamy omelets, kept a useful supply of mirepoix on hand, boned the duck themselves, and always served a welcoming little first course when friends came to dinner. Alas, most Americans would never encounter the Cordon Bleu. The homemaker who wanted to cook something French had nothing to help her but recipes; and how miserably they could fail a hopeful cook, Julia knew well. She had spent years floundering in the awkward gap between the cookbook and the cook, until good teaching set her free. The book she would deliver to Houghton Mifflin must be just that teacher. There was no precedent for such a thing: a guide to authentic French cooking that sat on the kitchen counter calmly issuing instructions and advice in English on what to do, and what problems to expect, and how to fix them. Over the next seven years, as she worked on the manuscript, she circled round and round the core message she wanted to convey, phrasing it this way and that in an effort to pin down a heretical idea that kept prodding at her. What she wanted to tell everyone was this: French food is uniquely French, but a sure and precise route to it can be mapped in any language.

  Julia’s approach to the cookbook project was simple and vast: she would look at every dish in the traditional home repertoire from every perspective she could think of, testing and revising until she came up with a recipe that was absolutely foolproof and irreproachably true to its origins. When Avis asked her once why the book was taking so long, Julia described a typical day’s work, in this instance a day devoted to cabbage soups. She had climbed upstairs to the kitchen with an armful of recipes: Simca’s cabbage soup, numerous other cabbage soups that Julia had gathered from authoritative French cookbooks, and several regional variations. After studying all of them, she decided to try three, following two of them exactly as written and adapting the third for a pressure cooker. Obviously pressure cookers were not traditional, and Julia disliked them on aesthetic grounds (“Stinking, nasty bloody pressure cookers, I hate them!”), but if they could be made to produce good soups, she wanted to know about it. This particular experiment was a flop; the soup had an overprocessed flavor she had come to associate with pressure cookers. Nonetheless, she would keep trying: “Maybe I don’t use it right, but I will persist with an open if distasteful mind.” The conventionally made soups were better, but she was still a long way from having a usable recipe. “I feel 1) there has got to be a good stock of veg. and ham before the cabbage is put in, and that that is one of the ‘secrets’ 2) that the cabbage must not be cooked too long.” Maybe the cabbage would behave better if it were blanched first. Or maybe a different variety of cabbage would be an improvement. “So, all these questions of how and why and what’s the point of it, have to be ironed out,” she concluded. “Otherwise, you get just an ordinary recipe, and that’s not the point of the book.”

  One of the reference books she kept close at hand was La Bonne Cuisine de Madame E. Saint-Ange, first published in 1927 and a bible in millions of French households. Julia often said it was her favorite French cookbook, and she would have been very pleased to see the English translation that finally appeared in 2005. Little is known about Madame Saint-Ange, except that her remarkable expertise ranged from restaurant haute cuisine to economical family cookery; but whenever Julia opened this volume, she found a mission and a sensibility exactly like her own. The recipes didn’t just parade through the book: Madame Saint-Ange was teaching fundamental techniques as well as some thirteen hundred specific dishes, and she made constant reference to the history of French culinary practice and style as she moved from soups to meats to vegetables to desserts with the wisdom of a professional. Yet she could look at any given recipe as if she were an everyday home cook with a penchant for disaster. Her discussion of scrambled eggs started with a detailed scrutiny of the proper pan, then considered several methods of beating the eggs and compared the merits of a whisk versus a wooden spoon, then specified the exact shape of the wooden spoon if that was the utensil chosen, and finally proceeded carefully through the cooking, with instructions on how to avoid crises and how to undertake rescues as necessary. She did all this in a voice so calm and cheerful that whatever she was describing sounded perfectly within the reach of any attentive cook. Julia’s precise debt to Madame Saint-Ange is hard to quantify—the Frenchwoman’s recipes stand behind Julia’s along with many other sources of inspiration—but if Madame Saint-Ange had lived long enough to translate, modernize, and fully Americanize her great work, she might well have come up with Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

  As soon as Julia started to focus on the manuscript in her sharply analytical fashion, she ran into a problem that would keep her in a simmering rage for years. In culinary France, women like Julia—ambitious, intellectual, and irreverent—were not supposed to exist. Madame Saint-Ange was a rare exception to the rule. Women’s place in French cuisine was an honored but quite specific one: it was back home in the provinces, where untutored mamans of legendary talent turned out the magnificent meals their sons remembered forever. This was not Julia’s view of her role. To make matters worse, she was an American; and everyone in France knew for a fact that Americans were pathetic dullards who subsisted on canned food and floppy bread and had never heard of garlic. Dearly though she loved the French, this curtain of smugness, condescension, and superiority that dropped into place whenever the conversation turned to food drove her wild. “There is just an enormous amount of dogmatism to be gotten through in this country,” she complained to Avis. “Cooking being a major art, there are all sorts of men’s gastronomical societies, and books, and great names, and ‘The real ways’ of doing things, many of which have become sacred cows.” Julia was painfully aware of how much she still had to learn, and she wasn’t about to put one word into print that hadn’t been backed up with research and testing. Yet this profound respect for accuracy seemed to count for nothing, compared with the airy certainties of Frenchmen whose culinary wisdom was based in sentiment, not science. “At the party was a dogmatic meatball who considers himself a gourmet but is just a big bag of wind,” she reported indignantly to Avis. “They were talking about Beurre Blanc, and how it was a mystery, and only a few people could do it, and how it could only be made with white shallots from Lorraine over a wood fire. Phoo. But that is so damned typical, making a damned mystery out of perfectly simple things just to puff themselves up. I didn’t say anything as, being a foreigner, I don’t know anything anyway.”

  Practical down to her toes, Julia did not believe that mysteries were in any way related to good cooking. The idea that wondrous and ineffable traditions were granted pride of place among French gastronomes, while her own rigorous testing was seen as the pleasant little pastime of an embassy wife, infuriated her. “Discuss—Dogmatism,” she scribbled on the Trois Gourmandes class schedule one day. She wanted the pupils to be aware that whenever they heard a French food lover talking about the “real” bouillabaisse, or the “real” cassoulet, they should be wary: different households made different bouillabaisses, and they were all “real.” To Julia, traditional French cooking was resilient, a living thing that flowed this way and that across time and through one kitchen after another. But if that was the case, if authenticity wandered from this household to that, what held the tradition together? What made French cooking French?

  When it became apparent that this was how Julia was thinking about the project, and that work on the cookbook was going to be finicky, tedious, and research-driven, Louisette drifted away. Years later, she would produce cookbooks of her own, but she just didn’t think about the kitchen the way Simca and Julia did. From time to time she sent along a few ideas, but her participation was minimal. Julia wasn’t surprised. “I think the book is out of her depth,” she told Avis. “She is the charming
‘little woman’ with a talent and a taste for cooking, but a most disorganized and ultra feminine mind.” Still, the book had been Louisette’s idea in the first place; she was a good friend, and her home life was falling apart. Simca and Julia didn’t have the heart to turn their backs on her. Louisette’s name remained as coauthor, but she was allotted a smaller percentage of the royalties.

  So the working team became Simca and Julia, two loving colleagues who fought their way through every recipe in the book. Fundamentally, they were incompatible—Simca wielded her intuition, Julia her intellect—which made for an exhausting collaboration but did produce a manuscript true to both of them. Avis, who watched them cooking together in Julia’s kitchen in Provence one winter, said afterward that Simca was too excitable to win most of their arguments: she was constantly waving knives in the air, clashing pans around, and speaking floods of high-speed French. Julia used similar tactics but kept her wits about her and wore down her opponent by sheer tenacity. Paul thought that the reason they never actually tore each other’s hair out was that for all their differences, “both have their eyes on the target rather than on themselves.”