Laura Shapiro Read online

  While Julia was cooking, Avis was plotting. For the last several years, she had been talking about the book with her friend William Koshland, who recently had been made an executive at Alfred A. Knopf, one of the most distinguished publishing houses in the country. Koshland was a food lover and had been following the travails of the manuscript with interest. As a New Yorker with many friends in the culinary world, he was sure that Houghton Mifflin was being shortsighted and that this was exactly the right time for a good, definitive work on French cooking. Housewives might not have the time for long, unfamiliar recipes; but there were, he believed, “real cooks and hobby cooks” everywhere who would be fascinated. People were traveling, they were taking cooking lessons, they were subscribing to Gourmet, and they were buying the huge tomes on high-class cooking published by the magazine—“Never before has this country been so gourmet-minded,” he told Avis. Most of the soothsayers in publishing saw this trend as negligible, at least compared with all the high-speed cooking that was being promoted so adamantly in the media. But something told Koshland that this book, a genuine teaching tool, had the potential to create a market of its own. As the fortunes of the manuscript rose and fell at Houghton Mifflin, Koshland kept reminding Avis he wanted Knopf to be next in line. The moment Julia heard the bad news from Houghton Mifflin, Avis had the manuscript sent directly to Alfred Knopf himself, who—like everyone else in publishing—was a friend of hers. “Do not despair,” she wrote to Julia. “We have only begun to fight.”

  Neither Alfred Knopf nor his wife, Blanche, who ran the company with him, had any interest in bringing out a new French cookbook. They had just published Classic French Cooking by Joseph Donon, a protégé of Escoffier. Surely that was enough of a nod to the emerging gourmet market. Alfred didn’t even glance at the manuscript, but as a courtesy to Avis he passed it along to Koshland, who was regarded as the in-house food expert. Koshland promptly handed it to a young editor named Judith Jones, who had lived in France and was a talented cook. The two of them, along with Angus Cameron—the editor who had helped launch Joy of Cooking years earlier at Bobbs-Merrill—worked their way through one recipe after another and grew more excited with every dish they turned out. Jones found the manuscript to be an extraordinary achievement, the first book she had ever seen that made it possible to reproduce the flavors she had loved in France. In Julia’s text, Jones could recognize not only an expert cook but a personable writer and brilliant teacher. Americans would respond to this book. But they wouldn’t even see it unless the Knopfs agreed, and Koshland knew what an obstacle that was. The book would be expensive to put out, he admitted to Avis, but he told her he was ready to “ram it through the board,” no matter how reluctant Alfred and Blanche might be. Julia had refused to let herself feel optimistic about Knopf, especially because of the Donon book, but when she heard this—and when she learned that several editors had actually gone to their stoves and used the recipes and loved them—she allowed the tiniest “coal of hope” to begin to glow.

  Koshland won, and the book was formally accepted in May 1960 with Judith Jones at the head of the immense project. For the rest of Julia’s career, Jones would be the editor who counseled, inspired, steadied, and rescued her in countless ways, not only while they worked on books together but in the course of Julia’s work in television, magazines, and public life. It was Jones who came up with the title Mastering the Art of French Cooking—nixing “French Food at Last!,” “French Kitchen Pleasure,” and “Love and French Cooking,” among other contestants—and it was Jones who knew that even Americans might venture on board for a long, tumultuous voyage to cassoulet or French bread if Julia was piloting the ship.

  Mastering the Art of French Cooking came out with a gratifying splash in October 1961. Craig Claiborne of the New York Times called it “glorious,” “comprehensive,” “laudable,” and “monumental,” and New York’s culinary elite swarmed to a publication party hosted by Dione Lucas, who had reigned since the 1940s as the nation’s leading expert in French cooking. But there was significant competition that fall, even in the small category of definitive French cookbooks. Gourmet brought out a fat volume called Gourmet’s Basic French Cookbook by Louis Diat, the chef at New York’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, whose columns in the magazine Julia had admired for years. The first American edition of the famous culinary encyclopedia Larousse Gastronomique also turned up, with one of Julia’s classmates from Smith, Charlotte Turgeon, as coeditor. And while Claiborne’s own book, The New York Times Cookbook, wasn’t specifically French, it was certainly sophisticated enough to appeal to many of the passionate home cooks Julia had counted on to buy Mastering. Earlier French cookbooks, including Samuel Chamberlain’s beloved Clementine in the Kitchen and his 619-page Bouquet de France, were still on people’s shelves, along with Dione Lucas’s two books and the first Gourmet cookbook, which had come out in 1950 and continued to sell nicely. There did seem to be talented, ambitious home cooks in America, but perhaps they were happy with the books they already owned. Despite rapturous reviews and an exhilarating cross-country publicity tour—which Julia and Simca organized and paid for themselves—Mastering sold only a modest sixteen thousand copies the first year it was out.

  “The sales may not be spectacular, but I have complete confidence that word of mouth will keep this going forever,” Koshland assured Julia. “Word of mouth” did not impress her too much; she’d have preferred to see some advertising. Knopf had produced a splendid-looking book but didn’t seem to be doing much to push it. Most of what the public knew about Mastering came from media attention she and Simca had generated on their tour. “Our publishers really are about as unbusinesslike as any I have encountered,” she fumed to Simca. “They remind me of the little café I used to go to after my morning courses at the Cord. Bleu. One of the boys introduced me to the proprietress saying: I’ve brought you a new customer. Oh, she said, I have enough customers already!”

  But Koshland was right, in a sense. The sales did have a life of their own, independent of Knopf’s genteel way with promotion. The target population of enthusiastic home cooks may have been slow to get to bookstores, but to everyone’s surprise there seemed to be a hidden population very willing to take a stab at elaborate French cooking. In the fall of 1962, the Book-of-the-Month Club made Mastering a dividend selection, expecting to distribute around twelve thousand copies. By March, sixty-five thousand books had gone out, orders were still pouring in, and Mastering had become the most popular dividend in the history of the club. Meanwhile, The French Chef, which began in 1963, was making Julia a television star. As the program reached one public television station after another, bookstore sales boomed; and in 1974, Mastering appeared on the New York Times list of the century’s best-selling cookbooks, with 1.3 million copies sold. Nearly a half century after publication, the book had been revised once—to introduce the food processor, among other updates—and reprinted dozens of times. It was still selling steadily at the rate of some eighteen thousand copies a year.

  Once the success of the book was established in the mid-1960s, Julia and Simca started thinking about a second volume. By this time Julia was beginning to wriggle free of what she would finally term the straitjacket of traditional French cooking; and Volume II reflects her willingness to take liberties she didn’t allow herself earlier. On the whole, Volume II was devoted to characteristic French food, including charcuterie and pastries, as well as a nineteen-page recipe for French bread, but the section on broccoli shows Julia’s new frame of mind. She had always loved broccoli and couldn’t resist including it in Volume I, even though it was rarely eaten in France. But she had confined herself to just a few instructions, almost apologetic in tone. In Volume II she stood up and gave it a trumpet fanfare: eight pages of French recipes from à la polonaise to timbales—“because this is a book for Americans, and broccoli is one of our best vegetables, and the treatment is à la française,” she explained firmly to Simca. (In truth, the charcuterie, the pastries, and the French
bread also identify the book as American—nobody in France would dream of making such things at home.) In her next book, From Julia Child’s Kitchen, she gave herself a truly free hand, right down to an apple betty she christened pommes Rosemarie, and she often said this was her favorite book. “Now I don’t have to be so damned classic and ‘French,’” she exclaimed to Jones. “To hell with that. I am French trained, and I do what I want with my background.” Although she continued to trust French technique as the best starting point for any sort of cookery, the distinction between “French” and “not-so-French” was no longer fundamental to her thinking about food. What emerged in its stead were two categories that had been lurking in the shadows until her career caught up with them.

  Early in 1961, as she and Simca were winding down their work on Volume I, Julia looked back on some of the issues they had been wrestling with for nearly a decade. “People are always saying WHAT MAKES FRENCH COOKING SO DIFFERENT FROM OTHER NATIONS’ COOKING?” she reflected in a letter to Simca, and she set down four principles that struck her as definitive.

  Serious interest in food and its preparation

  Tradition of good cooking…which forms French tastes from youth

  Enjoyment of cooking for its own sake—LOVE

  Willingness to take the few extra minutes to be sure things are done as they should be done

  Nothing on this list, except for “French tastes,” distinguishes French cooking from any other noteworthy cuisine. On the contrary, it’s a list that perfectly sums up Julia’s outlook on food even when she was most deeply committed to le gout français, as she was when she wrote this. Her highest term of culinary praise was never French, or professional, or delicious, though she regularly used such words to describe wonderful food. Her highest praise was the word serious—the very first word that came to her fingertips when she started to type these principles. A “serious” cook, to Julia, was a careful, mindful, thoroughly knowledgeable cook, whose pleasure you could taste in the food. Thus her great admiration for Diana Kennedy and Madhur Jaffrey in later years, though she had little interest in Mexican or Indian cooking.

  And at the opposite end of the spectrum from the serious cook was the dark angel who hovered over the last principle in the list, the cook who refused to put in those extra minutes it took to reach perfection. This cook—male or female, French or American, famous name or anonymous homebody—was fatally associated with the term housewife. Julia never did recover from her early, bruising experiences with that word, and she consistently refused to be associated with such creatures. As she put it many times over the years, whenever the subject of housewives came up, “We are aiming at PEOPLE WHO LIKE TO COOK.” Yes, supermarket ingredients could be transformed into authentic French dishes, but not without two ingredients for which there were no substitutes, and Julia named them often: time and love.

  Chapter 4

  The Performance of Me

  WHEN GUESTS CAME to dinner at 103 Irving Street in Cambridge, they spent the whole evening in the kitchen. The table was big and comfortable, and Julia liked having everyone around while she cooked: sometimes she invited people to pick up a knife or a whisk and join in. She would play culinary solos if necessary, but what she really enjoyed was chamber music—everyone on an instrument, chopping garlic or pouring wine or chatting, while a kind of Concerto for Food and Company rose up warm and fragrant in their midst. Cooking alone was very different, though in truth Julia was never really alone at the stove. Long before she cooked on television, she was aware of an audience—first her father and sister, impatient for breakfast as she frantically tossed pancakes and spilled coffee, and later the guests sitting politely in the living room, while she probed the beef with anguish and wondered if it was done, or overdone, or raw. As a bride, she practiced and practiced the role she called chef-hostess until she could give a dinner party without a glitch, or at least without any glitch she couldn’t smoothly mend, smiling and conversing all the while. “I always feel it is like putting on a performance, or like live TV or theater—it’s got to be right, as there can be no retakes,” she told Avis in 1953, nearly a decade before she saw a television camera for the first time. Testing recipes for the book, making the same dish over and over and over, she liked to pretend she was cooking in front of an audience. In part it was a form of culinary discipline, to keep herself from lapsing into casual, unprofessional methods; and in part she just enjoyed the company. When Julia did start cooking in front of a camera, her earliest fans constantly exclaimed over how “natural” she seemed on television, how “real,” how “honest,” how “homelike.” They were right. Performance had long ago become second nature to her.

  Her first appearance on television came about shortly after the publication of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She and Paul had decided some years earlier to live in Cambridge after his retirement, and they were still settling into their big clapboard house when Claiborne’s rave review appeared. “Presumably, with this puff, we are made!” she wrote jubilantly to Simca. “HOORAY.” Later that October, Simca arrived in the United States for the book tour, and the two women—suddenly newsworthy—were invited to be on the Today show. Julia wasn’t particularly nervous, maybe because she had never heard of it. She and Paul didn’t own a television set. But when she learned that four million people would be watching, she knew she needed a plan. “The quickest and most dramatic thing to do in the 5 or 6 minutes allotted to us was to make omelettes,” she reported to her sister afterward. “They said they would provide a stove.” What they actually provided was a reluctant hot plate, too feeble to heat up properly. But she and Simca brought three dozen eggs to the studio and spent the hour before their time slot practicing. Five minutes before airtime, they started heating up the omelet pan, and by a miracle it was red-hot by the time they needed it. Julia went away very much impressed with the show—everyone was friendly and informal, but the mechanics of the operation were absolutely professional and perfectly timed. It was exactly what she would aim for in her own television shows.

  The next TV invitation came along several months later, and this was the one that changed her life. A penciled note is the only thing that remains:

  Beatrice Braude UN4-6400

  WGBH-Chan. 2 CO2-0428

  84 Mass Ave

  opp MIT

  home = 354 Marlborough St.

  TV

  Beatrice Braude was an old friend of the Childs’ who had been fired from the USIS in Paris during a McCarthy purge. Now she was working in Boston at WGBH-TV, the fledgling public television station, where she arranged for Julia to be a guest on I’ve Been Reading, a book review program. “They wanted something demonstrated and had a hot plate!” Julia reported to Simca afterward. This time she had a full half hour, so she not only made an omelet, but gave a short lesson in beating egg whites and showed how to cut up vegetables and flute mushrooms. As far as she knew, the only people who saw the program were five of her friends and Jack Savenor, her Cambridge butcher. But twenty-seven ecstatic strangers wrote in to say they loved that woman who did the cooking, and begged the station to bring her back. At WGBH, twenty-seven letters was an avalanche. Startled and impressed, station executives asked Julia to work up a proposal for an entire series on French cooking.

  It’s possible that Mastering, and with it Julia, would have drifted into relative obscurity if she hadn’t been discovered by WGBH. She certainly wasn’t about to be discovered by anyone else. Even the other stations in what was called educational TV would have been unlikely to take a chance on a plain-faced, middle-aged woman who did difficult cooking with a lot of foreign words in it. But WGBH was in Boston, and that made all the difference. Dozens of colleges and universities, long-standing Brahmin institutions such as the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Museum of Fine Arts, and an unusually well-educated, well-traveled population made the area unique in the nation. The founders of WGBH intended the new station to be yet another jewel in the city’s cultural crown. French cooking f
it right in; and, as viewers quickly made clear, so did Julia.

  During the summer of 1962, she taped three pilot programs—omelets, coq au vin, and soufflés—and watched them at home on their new TV. She was horrified to see herself on-screen for the first time, swooping and gasping—“Mrs. Steam Engine,” she called herself—but she was determined to master the medium. “The cooking part went OK, but it was the performance of me, as talker and mover, that was not professional,” she told Simca. Everything had to be done more slowly, she decided, as if she were under water.

  Those pilot programs have been lost, but judging from the letters that poured in to the station, the Julia who ventured in front of the camera that summer had already tapped an instinct for television. “I loved the way she projected over the camera directly to me, the watcher,” wrote one of these original fans. “Loved watching her catch the frying pan as it almost went off the counter; loved her looking for the cover of the casserole. It was fascinating to watch her hand motions, which were so firm and sure with the food.” Years later, when a friend mentioned that she was about to cook on television for the first time and felt nervous, Julia’s advice was simple: “Think about the food.” Whether she was flipping an omelet on a hot plate or holding up an unwieldy length of tripe in a beautifully equipped TV kitchen, food was the spark that ignited her performing personality and set it free.