Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (36 page)

Simca’s correspondence was equally loving and encouraging. She was testing Julia’s poultry recipes, as Julia was testing her vegetable recipes. Simca reported on “Chef Oliver,” Raymond Oliver, who cooked on French television. They used yellow and rose onionskin paper for their carbon copies to keep track of their chapters and responses to their responses, which they kept carefully filed. Theirs was truly a collaborative work, and one they believed would be seminal. Aware of James Beard’s new American recipes and each American cookbook
(Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book
had sold more than three million copies since 1950), they took seriously the few attempts to present genuine French recipes, such as in
Gourmet Cookbook II
, which they considered “poor.”
“Ach, la concurrence!”
Julia sputtered when a new book or recipe appeared. “Ours will have to be better!” They worked as hard as they could and would not compromise quality; the only compromise would be a multivolume publication.

Several issues were emerging that affected the development of their masterpiece. Most immediately, Julia noticed changes in the produce, equipment, and cooking habits of her native country. In Bonn, she had noticed at the commissary that America was enthusiastic about what culinary historians Karen and John Hess called “precooked frozen gourmet glop.” The Hesses criticized Craig Claiborne, the new food editor of the
New York Times
, who graduated from a Swiss hotel school, for hailing fifty-five new items from General Foods’ “Gourmet Foods” line and calling others “exciting products” of 1958: Seabrook’s “inspired beef à la bourguignonne,” Pepperidge Farm’s frozen puff pastries, Betty Crocker’s “glamorous” new instant meringue, Carnation’s “excellent and quickly made” Golden Fudge, Fluffo margarine, and Campbell’s frozen fruit pies. Very discouraging for two women who had spent the better part of five or six years preparing a book to teach French recipes.

Moreover, there were several issues related to the cookbook itself. On her first visit to Cambridge the month they arrived, Julia tried to convince her Houghton Mifflin editor, who was also testing their recipes, to publish what they had so far (soups, sauces, poultry, vegetables), then work on other volumes. They would need four or five more years to complete the fish and meat chapters, Julia argued, in order to make her appeal more convincing. (Privately to Simca, Julia acknowledged that a multivolume plan complicated their relations with Louisette.) At first the editor agreed, saying they would publish this first volume at Christmas 1958, calling it
French Cooking, Vol. 1: Sauces and Poultry
. Then Lovell Thompson, the general manager, said they wanted only one book, but Julia would not make a decision until Simca arrived in January 1958.

Cooking problems also delayed completion, from the oversized turkeys that had to be cooked differently from the French poultry to the difficulty of finding crème fraîche (Julia informed Simca that adding buttermilk or yogurt to cream and keeping it at room temperature for a day produced the same results). American veal was not as pale and tender as the French; U.S. butchers offered different meat cuts; except for parsley, few fresh herbs were available; Americans ate a lot of broccoli, which was rare in France—and so the discoveries went. Occasionally a recipe, when retried, did not produce the same results it had in Paris, Marseilles, or Bonn. “HELL AND DAMNATION, is all I can say,” Julia wrote Simca on July 14, 1958, in a rare expression of frustration: “WHY DID WE EVER DECIDE TO DO THIS ANYWAY? But I can’t think of doing anything else, can you?”

Two other, more personal factors, prolonged the completion of the book, though eventually ensuring its validity and longevity. First was the lack of experience on Julia’s part. Never having cooked seriously before going to Paris, she approached her work as a novice studying an established tradition instead of acting on a creative or instinctive level to discover recipes or taste combinations. She approached foods and recipes deliberately, asking basic questions of
why
and
how
, thus enabling her to write the clearest and simplest explanations for readers. Second was the influence of Paul Child’s rhetorical analysis (they were now taking memory classes together), which subjected everything to logic and thorough testing, sometimes six different ways. “Paul pushed her to a certain standard,” say his nieces and nephew. This influence from Paul cannot be underestimated in evaluating the quality of the manuscript Julia and Simca were preparing.

Julia was overjoyed when Simca and Jean Fischbacher (his stay was briefer) at last arrived from Paris in January, for she had done little else the final months of 1957 but revise the chapters and have them retyped. Simca stayed three months and would visit friends or former students in New York City, Chicago and California. But the great event was the trip to Boston, buried then in a blizzard. Because the trains were not running, Julia and Simca took the long bus ride from New York City and arrived on Avis’s doorstep at one o’clock in the morning. Avis recorded her memory thirty years later:

I waited up for them, and it was snowing fiercely. They went in to see Houghton Mifflin with this huge box of manuscript. [They] presented over seven hundred pages on poultry and sauces
alone
, which is when HM said they weren’t about to publish an encyclopedia. Although Dorothy [de Santillana] was extremely anxious to publish the book, because she had cooked with a lot of the recipes and knew they worked, all the men said, “Oh, Americans don’t want to cook like that, they want something quick, made with a mix.” They were pushing a cookbook, a Texas cookbook, by Helen Corbett—there seemed to be marshmallows in everything, and that’s where their advertising money was going. Houghton Mifflin has regretted it ever since.

When Julia heard them say, “We are not going to publish an encyclopedia…. Americans wouldn’t cook that way,” she said to Avis and Simca with her usual dogged determination, “We’ll just have to do it over.”

That is just what they did, said Avis, spending “the next two years completing a single book” to put in all chapters, including desserts. Avis was absolutely convinced of the uniqueness of the book, though she confided to a mutual friend that she had serious reservations about Julia’s writing ability. The talent she had nurtured after Smith had withered under the demands of government forms and recipe details.

L
A CUISINE CHILD VS.
CUISINE “GUNK”

Julia and Paul developed a style of entertaining that endeared them to Washington circles, a style in keeping with a truly modern kitchen and dining space (which opened onto the garden) and the demanding work her cookbook needed. She and Simca returned to Washington from Boston to devise a new strategy for the book and their work. Any entertaining Julia did during 1958 and 1959 would be connected to their book. She never chose a menu because it was her best work; she was constantly experimenting and testing. If a dish went wrong, she said nothing. This was one of her maxims: no excuses, no explanations. She informed Simca, “I am not doing any elaborate entertaining at all until I get this MS out of the way. What we do is to have 4 people in on Sundays.”

Guests long remembered the informal warmth of her kitchen here and later in Cambridge, where they continued their ritual. Lee and Gisele Fairley, both of whom worked with Paul in Bonn and were now stationed in Washington, remember many visits to the Childs’ “dollhouse”: “Julia was ensconced in her gleaming professionally equipped kitchen [and] we would sit around the kitchen table (a huge butcher’s block of wood) sipping Paul’s dry martinis … and watch Julia prepare the dish(es) of the day. After eating, there was a postmortem discussion, though mostly between Paul and Julia.”

Lyne Few and his wife, whom they met in Düsseldorf, were also frequent guests after being posted to Washington. Few remembers:

Julia’s impressive kitchen with beautiful pots and pans hanging everywhere, and a large rough-hewn table in the center. The guests would sit on comfortable benches and consume delicious cocktails which were Paul’s specialty. Julia would chat with us as she bustled around concocting fabulous dishes. Paul explained that she was working on a cookbook and hoped we would excuse her for using us as guinea pigs. Never were there more willing victims.

Paul usually made what they called “Ivan’s aperitif” or what Julia later called the “Upside-Down Martini”: in a red-wine glass, filled with ice, they poured both dry and sweet vermouth (they preferred Noilly Prat vermouth), then floated a little gin on the top, decorating with a twist of orange or lemon rind. “Hold it by the stem so it will ring,” suggested Julia as they touched glasses.

Rosalind and Stuart Rockwell—he was director of the Office of Near Eastern Affairs for the Department of State—lived next door and were frequent guests, along with another neighbor, Bob Duemling, who walked to work with Paul. Because Duemling was single (he had dated Rachel Child for several years), he was frequently a guest. The Rockwells remember the chicken dishes (with one portion removed by Julia for tasting) that Julia would bring over for dinner—Paul had had his fill of them. Rosalind would never forget Julia’s generosity to the mother of an active young son. “When Stuart took me to the hospital for the birth of our second child, Julia offered to take care of our son Steve. When I asked that she keep him out of the kitchen, she immediately moved all of the long knives.”

The following January, to celebrate five birthdays around January 15—Paul and Charlie, Freddie Child, Paul Nitze, and Stuart Rockwell—Julia cooked a grand meal and Paul wrote a poem for the occasion they called “The Pentapolloi Party.” Such care was typical of the Child hospitality, and Paul read his lengthy verse to:

Splendid Nitze, Rockwell Bold
and Glamor-laden Freddie,
Plus Charles and Paul, those brilliant men,
intelligent and steady.
Behold the dawn of greater days,
of love rejuvenate….

In its informality,
La Cuisine Child
matched what
House Beautiful
called “the Station Wagon Way of Life” in the 1950s. But in the quality of the food and the time spent in its preparation, there was no comparison. Americans were then eating canned vegetables with marshmallows melted on top, frozen chickens cooked in canned mushroom soup, frozen fish sticks, and dishes that could be served during commercials or cooked on the barbecue outdoors. They were shopping the center aisles of the supermarket, to use food editor
(Gourmet)
Zanne Early Stewart’s analogy, not the outside aisles where the fresh produce was waiting.

Processed food products and junk food led to unwanted poundage, which in turn stirred up a wave of dieting and diet books (sprinkled with saccharin and white sodium cyclamate powder), swelling by the end of the century into a tidal wave. Avis decried to Julia the “gunk” in American kitchens and the increasing number of manuscripts for diet books she was receiving, which would henceforth outnumber cookbooks. She described as “gruesome” one she had just received:

[There is] not a single honest recipe in the whole book—everything is bastardized and quite nasty. Tiny amounts of meat … are extended with gravies and sauces made with corn starch…. Desserts … [are] sweetened with saccharin and topped with imitation whipped cream. Fantastic! And I do believe a lot of people in this country eat just like that, stuffing themselves with faked materials in the fond belief that by substituting a chemical for God’s good food they can keep themselves slim while still eating hot breads and desserts and GUNK.

In 1959 chemists pushed the tidal wave with Metrecal, a powder to be added to milk to make a meal—an “adult version of baby formula,” as Harvey Levenstein called the “glutinous drink.” Within two years sales would total $350 million. These dieters and instant home cooks were also consuming women’s magazines, whose food editors and lifestyle or entertainment editors were setting the tone for the country. They, not the home economists or master chefs, were telling American cooks what to prepare and how to serve it.

Julia was completely outside the small but growing food world of New York City. She was familiar with many names from the national magazines she read in Europe and knew that Dione Lucas had a school and television program and that James Beard wrote many cookbooks and endorsed a stream of products (living, his biographer said, by “trade-offs, favors, freebies, and consulting”). But Julia had never met them or the real power brokers who edited the magazines, such as Helen McCully at
McCall’s
, the first food editor of a major magazine who was not a home economist, and certainly the most powerful food editor in the country. She was learning their names, but harbored a certain skepticism. She had yet to meet Craig Claiborne
(New York Times)
, Ann Seranne
(Gourmet)
, Poppy Cannon
(House Beautiful)
, or Cecily Brown-stone (Associated Press). But her time was coming.

T
HEIR AUDIENCE

When Julia and Simca put aside their weighty manuscript, began their streamlined version, and copyrighted the name L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes, they did not change their purpose or what they called their “intended audience.” Their purpose always remained to teach “the servantless American cook” authentic French techniques, not “adaptations,” to achieve, as nearly as possible, French results. The audience, as Paul once said, is
“Everybody
, like bird-shot from both barrels, from Brides to Guides and from Sophisticates to Wistful Mates.” Julia told Avis in 1952 that they wanted a book “understandable to the novice, interesting for the practiced cook.” She and Simca first agreed in 1954 that they were “writing for an audience that knows nothing about French cooking; that will follow every word that we utter … or be put off if we do not explain thoroughly.” For this reason, she occasionally—as in the case of
velouté aux champignons
—rejected a recipe that was “too complicated for our audience.” The following year it was “a literate audience that LIKES TO COOK AND WANTS TO LEARN.” Now, with her growing awareness of the shortcut cooking in the country, she suggested to Simca they include fewer
grande cuisine
and more
cuisine bourgeoise
dishes,