Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (40 page)

Simca lined up a series of articles to include their recipes in
Cuisine et Vins de France
, and Julia gave an interview and photographs for two illustrated articles in a Norwegian women’s magazine. Judith Jones was delighted: “If we can wrestle up the same kind of publicity that you have been getting for yourself in Oslo, when you are here in New York we should really get this book off the ground.” In a letter to Jones, Julia had revealed her understanding of the importance of promotion for the success of the book and her own career as teacher and journalist: “But [I] will not, under any circumstances, be a ‘figure,’ merely an authority, I hope. It is a tough racket to crack among the NY magazines, but I want to do it.”

Week after week the snow fell, melted, and fell again. The mails from Oslo to New York City carried letter after letter and package after package with illustrations and galleys. Avis DeVoto’s friend Benjamin Fairbank cooked the recipes and found several flaws in them, and a second copy editor found inconsistencies in the subdividing of the book, each with a different typography. These problems were all resolved to make this a book with clear directions and uncrowded pages. Julia was determined to complete the galleys in time to pack before the arrival of her family, which planned a last-minute holiday visit.

The Algerian crisis, and Julia and Paul’s recognition that the book was their first priority, led them to cancel the family visit and a final trip to Paris. They would go straight to New York City and devote their time to reading the final proofs, which incorporated the galley corrections. Julia was also determined to do the index herself. She had nine days after sending in the final galleys to pack and to attend farewell parties. The Howes said, “There were lots of farewell parties for them. People were in total tears when Julia and Paul left Oslo.” Bjorn Egge, who would soon go with the UN peacekeeping force to Zaire, expressed the sentiments of the Norwegians: “Julia and Paul [were] excellent representatives of their country in Norway…. We are also proud to underline the fact that Julia and Paul, after their return to the States, became the best ambassadors of Norwegian culture we could ever dream of.”

Chapter 16
L
AUNCHING THE
B
OOK
(1961 – 1962)

“Cook-books are fairy-tales for grown-ups.”

The Times
(London)

F
OR HER FORTY-NINTH
birthday and at the brink of a new career and a new home, Paul Child wrote his wife a birthday sonnet:

O Julia, Julia, Cook and nifty wench,
Whose unsurpassed quenelles and hot soufflés,
Whose English, Norse and German, and whose French,
Are all beyond my piteous powers to praise—
Whose sweetly-rounded bottom and whose legs,
Whose gracious face, whose nature temperate,
Are only equaled by her scrambled eggs:
Accept from me, your ever-loving mate,
This acclamation shaped in fourteen lines
Whose inner truth belies its outer sight;
For never were there foods, nor were there wines,
Whose flavor equals yours for sheer delight.
        O luscious dish! O gustatory pleasure!
        You satisfy my taste-buds beyond measure.

Staying in New York City and Lumberville after landing on June 5, 1961, Julia and Paul read proofs, then rushed to Lopaus Point for rejuvenation of body and soul, salt air, and the ministrations of many lobsters and fresh blueberries. They also corrected proofs for the index they had prepared before returning to Cambridge with George and Betty Kubler to show them their Irving Street house, recently vacated by the tenant. The day following Julia’s birthday, the furniture stored in Washington, DC, arrived at Irving Street. Architect Bob Kennedy (Edith’s eldest son) conferred with them on plans for renovating the kitchen and adding an elaborate entrance tower to the third-floor apartment, which they would rent out. While they were awaiting the shipment from Oslo, they joined Avis in Vermont, where she was working for the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference outside Middlebury. Paul’s photographs of the poets and writers were called, by the assistant director of Bread Loaf, “some of the best” ever taken “on the mountain.” Julia had little time to help Avis in the office because she was correcting the last page proofs. There was talk of Julia and Paul returning the following year.

L
AUNCHING THE BOOK

Julia was sitting at her desk in Cambridge at the end of September, the furniture and boxes from Washington and Oslo unpacked but the noise of construction in the kitchen disrupting the peace and quiet. She held in her lap her first creation,
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
, after a ten-year gestation, fraught with hard work and future hopes. “It weighs a ton!” she said of the three-pound, 734-page book. After months of physical labor on the book and the move from Oslo, her joy was tempered by personal crisis. She consulted with several doctors, who informed her that she needed a hysterectomy. There was no time now. She would wait until January, after the promotion of the book. After making the decision, she wrote the letters to arrange a tour for the last months of the year. In her letters to family and friends asking for help in setting up private demonstration classes, Julia emphasized, “I do not care at all for the public end of this … but I love to teach.”

Simca arrived in New York City for the launching of the book. They won the two biggest prizes just days before: a rave review in the
New York Times
and a coming spot on the
Today
show with John Chancellor. Craig Claiborne, the food editor of the
Times
, had called their recipes “glorious” in the first review, on October 18:

[T]he most comprehensive, laudable and monumental work on [French cuisine] was published this week … and it will probably remain as the definitive work for nonprofessionals…. This [book] is … for those who take fundamental delight in the pleasures of cuisine…. It is written in the simplest terms possible and without compromise or condescension. The recipes are glorious….

Claiborne, one of the premier food critics in America, singled out their cassoulet recipe, noting that it covered nearly six pages, “but there is probably not a wasted syllable.” His only criticism was their use of a garlic press and the absence of recipes for puff pastry and croissants.

In the middle years of her life and in the tradition of late bloomers, Julia McWilliams Child embarked on her public career. Her eight years in Europe, where she studied cooking techniques, her organizational skills developed in the OSS Registry and writing advertising copy for Sloane’s, even her drama productions for the Junior League—every life experience was used to bring her to this moment.

Carrying omelet pan, whips, bowls, and three dozen eggs, Julia and Simca appeared at NBC at dawn to practice on a hot plate. With their usual thoroughness, they worked out a routine together the night before at the home of Rachel and Anthony Prud’homme, cracking dozens of eggs. Julia, out of the country for years and without a television, was unaware of the
Today
show’s audience of four million. Until show time they practiced on this miserably inadequate hot plate, which was finally hot enough for the successful omelet demonstration. “We liked [John] Chancellor, who was so nice,” Julia said thirty-five years later.

The next day they gave a cooking demonstration at Bloomingdale’s, and Julia reported to her sister, “The old book seems, for some happy reason, to have caught on here in New York, and our publishers are beginning to think they have a modest best seller on their hands…. They have ordered a second printing of 10,000 copies, and are planning a third of the same amount.” They visited Dione Lucas, the most visible figure on the 1950s food scene, at her combination of restaurant and cooking school called the Egg Basket, where they got some pointers on doing public cooking demonstrations. They also visited James Beard (“the living being performing in his lair,” as Julia described his cooking school on Tenth Street). He responded to their book by saying, “I only wish that I had written it myself.” According to his first biographer, “he made it his role to see that the fledgling American food establishment did what was necessary to put
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
on the map.”

Lunch sponsored by
Vogue
at the Cosmopolitan Club was an elegant affair (“I’m no Voguey type, heaven knows,” she told Dort) arranged by their longtime friend Helen Kirkpatrick (now Milbank). The following day, after appearing on Martha Dean’s radio program, they met food editor José (pronounced Josie) Wilson to discuss articles they would write for
House & Garden
magazine (“All the fancy types like J. Beard and D. Lucas write for them,” she told her sister).

After the launch in New York City, Julia, Paul, and Simca traveled by train to Detroit, where Simca had done cooking demonstrations years before. By the time they got to Detroit, Knopf had published a second edition with twenty corrections (Knopf had mistakenly said in the note about the authors that Beck and Bertholle also graduated from the Cordon Bleu). From Chicago, they went to San Francisco, where Julia visited her sister and the Katharine Branson School and dined with the French consul (a cousin of Simca’s husband, Jean Fischbacher). They were traveling with pots, pans, whips, knives, and bowls, for Julia drummed up several private demonstration classes. In Los Angeles she met Beard’s collaborator, Helen Evans Brown of Pasadena, and she and Simca gave benefit demonstrations for charity. In Washington, DC, on the way home, Rosie Manell had a big dinner party for them.

It was a trip planned by Julia, not Knopf, whose publicity director, Harding LeMay, wrote to Julia’s sister, Dorothy Cousins, that his “wife” tells him the contents of the book “are every bit as extraordinary as the format.” Julia paid for her own tour, taking advantage of her network of friends and family to contact the press and set up demonstration classes. Avis also helped by sending books to the leading social figures in Georgetown (wives of McGeorge Bundy, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., George Ball, and Kenneth Galbraith, the latter in New Delhi). On this first book tour, Julia began to establish a network of food contacts.

In Chicago, they made the cake that would remain the favorite with readers for decades: Reine de Saba, the Queen of Sheba chocolate and almond cake. It was based on a more complicated and slightly different cake of the same name by Madame Saint-Ange. Julia and Simca carried their eight-inch pan, a blender to whip the egg whites separately, and pulverized almonds to blend with the butter, sugar, and melted chocolate. They assembled the following ingredients:

Reine de Saba
4 ounces or squares semi-sweet chocolate melted with 2 Tb rum or coffee
¼ lb or 1 stick softened butter
⅔ cup granulated sugar
3 egg yolks
3 egg whites (1 Tb granulated sugar at end
     of whipping process)
pinch of salt
⅓ cup pulverized almonds
¼ tsp almond extract
½ cup cake flour

While the audience watched, Julia and Simca creamed together the butter and sugar first. Then, as they blended in the egg yolks, they explained that the batter would become very stiff. Next they stirred in the melted chocolate and coffee, then the salt, almonds, extract, and half the stiffly whipped egg whites. Finally, they alternately folded in the remaining egg whites and the sifted flour before turning the mixture into a buttered and floured cake pan. While the cake baked 25 minutes at 350 degrees, they answered questions about the recipe and their book. Because the cake needed more time to cool before frosting, they served it warm without a butter chocolate frosting or almond decoration. The audience fell in love with the warm cake with its creamy center, and with Julia.

The last stop was culinary fireworks in New York City, where they had dinner at the Four Seasons with James Beard, chef Albert Stöckli, and Joseph Baum, president of Restaurant Associates. “I adore both women, and Paul came to life [for me],” Beard informed Helen Evans Brown, after he listed the menu: cheddar cheese soup, barbecued loin of pork, and coffee cup soufflés. In what Judith Jones calls “an extraordinarily generous gesture”—for neither she nor the Knopf staff then knew the food world—Beard planned a party at Dione Lucas’s restaurant, including its guest list.

Dione Lucas’s party for Child and Beck followed on December 15 at the Egg Basket, which was closed for the occasion. Julia and Simca soon realized they would have to do most of the food preparations for the thirty people, and, true to form, they pulled it off at the last minute. (Julia had sent out the invitations from Pasadena.) Lucas, who once owned the London Cordon Bleu with Patience Grey, made sole with white wine sauce, Julia and Simca a braised shoulder of lamb, with Lucas preparing the final courses
(salade verte
and
bavaroise aux fraises)
. The thirty people included those most important to the success of the book (though Claiborne and the Knopfs were absent): Judith and Evan Jones, James Beard, Bill Koshland, Avis DeVoto, and several of the press, including editor Poppy Cannon, the queen of molded Jell-O, frozen food, and canned soup
(The Can Opener Cookbook)
of
House Beautiful
and CBS’s
Home
show fame. Avis declared it the “snazziest dinner” she had attended, but Beard pronounced Lucas’s Bavarian cream “the worst.” Simca flew home to Paris the next day, and Julia returned to Cambridge to face surgery and bed rest after the holidays.

Julia made certain that “my husband, Paul, our manager” was included in every event. Not only were they partners, he was indispensable in the planning of trips, managing the heavy bags of equipment and the mechanics of the presentations. Some people found him “off-putting” and cool until “you earned your way with him.” According to Bill Koshland: “Paul was one of those people who knew his own worth, and he certainly knew what he regarded as Julia’s worth, and I think he saw it his mission in life to see that everything worked for her.”

“Paul was such a perfectionist,” Jones told a journalist. “Julia struck me as more a big Smith College girl.” Judith was a petite five-foot-five-inch New Englander with reserved old-school manners, and an intuitive businesswoman. She immediately formed a bond with Julia based upon their love of French cuisine and a mutual determination to make
Mastering the Art
the major success that would launch both their careers. Indeed, with the success of
Mastering
, she would become a powerful editor of cookery books, as well as fiction. In her opinion, “Julia has a highly analytical mind,” and the book would not have happened without her. “It was completely Julia’s contribution to analyze, to teach, to translate, to hold you by the hand because she had been that ignorant cook. [Simca] had not.”

Judith introduced Julia to Alfred and Blanche Knopf, the “Jupiter and Juno” of the publishing world, according to one of their authors. But according to Avis, “it was
years
before Alfred would admit that he had a great book on his hands. And Blanche was quoted as saying, ‘Oh, I don’t give a damn about Julia Child.’ Blanche was a very ill-tempered lady.”

The reviews of the book over the first few months were not numerous, but the reviewers that mattered took a strong and enthusiastic stand. In December, the
House & Garden
editor José Wilson declared she “flipped when she saw the first copies”: it was a “commonsense approach to French cuisine that dispenses with … the heady prose of so many recent books intent on building up a snob mystique of gourmet cooking. Wow!!” That same month the
Foreign Service Journal
, read by their OSS and USIA friends all over the world, ran a photograph of Julia and Paul and said the book was “sure to become a classic.” The following March, Naomi Barry in the
International Herald Tribune
called it “one of the most satisfactory cookbooks … in years.” And a year after publication, in
The Saturday Evening Post
, Claiborne, who privately told friends she was not born with a wooden spoon in her mouth, declared it “the most lucid volume on French cuisine since Gutenberg invented movable type…. This work is brilliant.” According to Avis DeVoto, “the only person who was less than enthusiastic was Charlie Morton, then on
The Atlantic Monthly,”
but Avis worked on him until he came around privately.

By contrast, Sheila Hibben in
The New Yorker
criticized them for underestimating the American cook by allowing canned bouillon and canned salmon and for “lack[ing] a certain intuitive connection” with their food. Some reviewers more gently criticized the detail, but others praised that very attention to detail. Raymond Sokolov later wrote, “Child, Beck, and Bertholle [possess the same] certitude about the fundamentally immutable structure and principles of French cooking [as] … Auguste Escoffier, had.” Evan Jones declared, “No previous U.S. culinary manual had been so detailed and yet so encouraging to those hesitant to try complicated procedures.”

Few critics, except for the Hesses in 1977, criticized the adaptations to American tastes, such as their firmer soufflé. The French soufflé is “fast and runny,” said André Soltner of Lutèce in 1996. “Julia adapted it to the American taste, yet even Escoffier said ‘a real chef has to adapt to his time.’” Culinary historian Barbara Wheaton adds: “But of course they were adapting the techniques to her American generation.” Using the language of 1996, Camille Paglia told a reporter, “What Julia Child did is deconstruct this French, classical, rule-based cooking tradition and make it accessible … as a source of pleasure.”

Mastering the Art of French Cooking
set a standard in three ways. The physical beauty and quality of the published book is superb. With large margins and print, it lies flat when opened. Thirty years later people stood in lines to have their food-stained copies autographed, only a few with the pages loosened from the cover. The presentation of the recipes set a standard for clarity and precision that changed cookbook writing and editing, heretofore chatty and sometimes sketchy in explanation. According to Beard’s latest biographer, soon after the publication of the book Beard did what he called “a Julia Child job” on all the recipes of his cooking school, retyping them clearly and precisely. The pedagogical style of Beck and Child became widely imitated. According to cookbook editor Narcisse Chamberlain (daughter of Narcissa and Samuel), who at that time was editing her first book by Michael Field,
“Mastering
put good authors on notice that cookbooks had to be honest. As an editor I greatly admire that volume.” Paula Wolfert, respected for her excellent books on Mediterranean cuisine, said in 1997, “Just as it’s been said that all Russian literature has been taken from Gogol’s overcoat, so all American food writing has been derived from Julia’s apron.”