The United States of Arugula (15 page)

BEHIND THE KOOKY, HAPPY-GO-LUCKY PERSONA THAT JULIA CHILD PRESENTED TO THE
world was a determined, competitive woman. In the first three decades of her life, she had few outlets for this drive, save the theater stages and tennis courts of the schools she attended and the country clubs she belonged to. In her early thirties, she found some semblance of mission in her fervent pursuit of Paul Child. But it wasn’t until she was thirty-eight years old—when, in the spring of 1951, she at last received her Cordon Bleu diploma—that she started to channel her formidable energy into her belatedly discovered main purpose: to educate Americans about French cookery.

A novice just three years earlier, literally fresh off the boat, Child opened a cooking school, L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes, in January 1952. Her students were mostly rich American wives, brought abroad by their husbands’ jobs in business or government. The other two “Gourmandes” were a pair of Frenchwomen seven years Child’s senior, Simone Beck, who preferred to be called Simca, and Louisette Bertholle. Child and Beck, a fellow tall, spirited food obsessive, had become close friends through their membership in a Parisian women’s gastronomical club called Cercle des Gourmettes. Beck introduced Child to Bertholle, with whom she had written and self-published
What’s Cuisine in France
, a modest booklet of French recipes that
they’d had translated into English for American women living in France. Working on this project had given Beck and Bertholle the idea of writing a larger book for American wives in America; Bertholle had visited the United States with her husband and witnessed the groundswell of Francophilia there, and correctly deduced that there was an audience for such a book—if only there was some way to adapt French measurements, methods, and ingredients to the American kitchen.

By the time Beck and Bertholle had attracted interest in this new book from a small American publisher, they had already opened L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes with Child. So when their publisher suggested that the book would work only if the Frenchwomen took on an American collaborator, there was no question about who this might be. Child proved to be their greatest asset, a ferocious researcher, typist, recipe tester, and networker. One of her first orders of business was dumping the small-time publisher and securing a contract with a major American house, Houghton Mifflin. Adept at working her connections, Child had struck up a friendly correspondence with the Boston-based Avis DeVoto, a fellow culinarian and the wife of the historian Bernard DeVoto, a Houghton Mifflin author. Mrs. DeVoto gladly obliged Child’s request to forward some of the ladies’ recipes and manuscript samples to her husband’s publisher. By early 1953, Child had a $200 advance for
French Home Cooking
, as the book was called at that point.

As time went on, Child emerged as the project’s de facto leader, with Beck a strong second-in-command and Bertholle, the only woman of the three who had children to raise, functioning as more of an adjunct. (Child and Beck eventually worked out an agreement whereby they both received 41 percent of the royalties for the finished book while Bertholle received 18 percent; all three women were credited as co-authors on the book’s cover.) The Houghton Mifflin deal coincided with the end of Paul Child’s USIS stint in Paris, which meant that much of the Julia-Simca collaboration took place via correspondence over the next six years, as the Childs bopped from one posting to the next—from Marseilles to Germany to Washington, D.C., to Norway, with visits to Paul’s native New England interspersed throughout,
including one, in 1959, to purchase a house on Irving Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Paul and Julia planned on settling down when he retired.

Tireless in her enterprise, Child consulted all manner of French texts, from Escoffier’s
Le guide culinaire
and the culinary encyclopedia
Larousse gastronomique
to local, regional cookbooks, the French equivalents of spiral-bound Junior League recipe booklets (though Frenchwomen never offered recipes that called for mini marshmallows and carrot-flecked Jell-O). She canvassed grocers, butchers, and fishmongers for their takes on the best way to prepare whatever dish she was researching, whether a
navarin printanier
(lamb stew with spring vegetables) or a bouillabaisse. She took a private course with Claude Thillmont, the pastry chef of the Café de Paris (where Henri Soulé had worked); cultivated her old Cordon Bleu teacher, Max Bugnard, as a sounding board; and befriended Paris’s most famous writer-gastronome, the aged but still influential Curnonsky (né Maurice Edmond Sailland),
*
a sort of proto–James Beard figure of massive girth and unimpeachable taste who was so revered by the city’s best restaurateurs that they all kept a table open for him every night, just in case he happened to toddle in. Child also assiduously vetted the competition, worrying that her book’s impact might be blunted by Louis Diat’s mid-fifties cooking columns for
Gourmet
, and such hot sellers
The Dione Lucas Meat and Poultry Cook Book
(1955) and the popular 1958 gastro-tourist primer
The Food of France
, written by an American named Waverly Root. “With our snail’s pace,” she wrote to Beck, “we have a chance to study our competitors.”

Taking their time, testing, tweaking, and teaching their recipes to the point of exhaustion, Child and her collaborators effectively road-showed their book for the better part of a decade; there was no sense of quick-buck expediency to the project, no desire to hustle the thing out into the marketplace. Indeed, Child, at one point in 1957, agitated for a long-term multi-volume
approach, arguing that Houghton Mifflin publish a “Volume I” devoted just to sauces and poultry in 1958, and then allow her and Beck another few years to do the meat and fish chapters. But Houghton Mifflin insisted on a single, well-rounded volume, which took Les Trois Gourmandes until 1959 to complete.

The triumph of
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
lies as much in its long gestation as it does in Child’s charismatic publicizing of it. Like a band that had played live for years before entering a studio, Child and Beck (and, to a lesser extent, Bertholle) had developed into a tight little unit by the time they committed their recipes to print. There’s probably no other cookbook in American history that better combines breadth, thoroughness of explanation, culinary authenticity, distinctive authorial voice (“There is something un-French and monotonous about the way the blender reduces soup to universal baby pap”), and reliability. Whereas Escoffier’s
Le guide culinaire
was effectively written in shorthand, presupposing that its reader was already schooled in “mother sauces” and other fundaments of French cookery,
Mastering
did the amateur cook the best favor possible—it assumed that she knew nothing. The recipe for a basic omelet ran to seven pages and six illustrations, and advised what kind of pan should be used and where such a pan could be procured (“from one of the shops importing French kitchenware”).

While Beck’s contribution is not to be underestimated—much of the book’s content originated in her collection of recipes—it was Child who went the extra mile to make
Mastering
America-friendly. So that Americans could experience the flavor of crème fraîche, then unavailable commercially in the United States, Child figured out a way to thicken American whipping cream by adding buttermilk to it at low heat and letting the mixture sit for a day, resulting in something very much like the real thing. When she devised her recipe for bouillabaisse, she researched which American fish would work as substitutes for such Mediterranean fish as the red rascasse—rockfish and cod seemed to do the trick—and didn’t guilt-trip her readers if all they had at their disposal were “frozen fish and canned clam juice,” because “the other essential flavorings of tomatoes, onions or leeks, garlic,
herbs, and olive oil are always available.” Similarly, when she explained how to cook with frozen peas, she did so not, as Beard had, as a sop to her corporate benefactors—she had none—but in fairness to American housewives who didn’t have enchanting spring gardens of
petit pois
from which to harvest.

The finished manuscript of
French Recipes for American Cooks
, to use the book’s circa-1959 working title, was a marvel of pan-social recipe compiling. It covered aspects of French cookery from
the grande cuisine
of upscale restaurants (the very involved
suprêmes et mousse de volaille en chaud-froid
, breasts of chicken coated in an aspic of cream, stock, and vermouth, chilled until set, decorated with tarragon leaves, and arranged on a platter around a little mountain of chicken mousse) to the
cuisine bourgeoise
of bistros and servant-equipped homes (the dinner-party standby
boeuf bourguignon)
to the simpler
cuisine de bonne femme
of rustic households
(potage parmentier
, a humble potato-leek soup, deliberately chosen by Child to be the book’s very first recipe so that her audience would not be intimidated). All things considered, the book was even a triumph of brevity, whittled down as it was from the thousands of recipes tested by Les Trois Gourmandes over the years.

Too bad, then, that Houghton Mifflin rejected it. In November 1959, Child received word that the publisher simply found the 800-page-plus manuscript too big, and therefore too expensive, to publish; the projected sales didn’t justify the projected costs. It was a huge blow, one that prompted bitter flailings from Paul Child, who railed against a stupid, bovine, home-ec’d, blinded-by-science America that wanted cheap, quick dinners made of chemicals. “It has GLYCODIN-32 in it! Only 89 cents!” he said mockingly. (In the same era, Beard privately despaired of “hearing a lot of people talk about saturated fats, atomic cookery, nuclear feeding, and all the rest of the shit.”) But Julia’s Boston friend Avis DeVoto took the initiative once again, sending the manuscript off to the publishing house Alfred A. Knopf, where she had once worked. The boxful of pages landed with a thud on the desk of the young editor Judith Jones, who had distinguished herself a decade earlier, when, working in the Paris office of Doubleday, she urged her bosses to
print an English-language version of
The Diary of a Young Girl
, by Anne Frank. “When I came back from living in France, I realized there wasn’t really a book that taught you how to cook French food at home,” says Jones, “so I got this in 1960 and thought, ‘This is it!’”

In this same period, the manuscript floated around the New York publishing world. Among those who got their hands on it was the great food-establishment dowager Helen McCully, who’d moved from
McCall’s
to
House Beautiful.
Bowled over and shocked that Houghton Mifflin had opted out—she deemed the book “an amazing piece of work”—she passed on the manuscript to one of her favorite members of her salon, the dashing young Jacques Pépin, to see what he thought. “I read it like you read a novel, turning the pages fast, late into the night,” he says. “I couldn’t believe that someone had broken it all down like that. I was jealous.”

Jones was convinced that she had an important book on her hands, but she was insufficiently senior at Knopf to green-light the manuscript’s publication. The decision to publish, she says, came straight from Alfred Knopf himself, over the fervent objections of his wife and business partner, Blanche. “Alfred Knopf was interested in food, if more from a connoisseur point of view—I mean, he never chopped an onion,” Jones says. “Blanche wasn’t interested in cooking. She was too concerned about her figure. She drank martinis.”

With the Knopf deal in place, Child refined the manuscript still further, beefing it up, literally, with more red-meat recipes to suit American tastes, and obliging specific requests of Jones’s, such as a recipe for cassoulet, the winter-night feast traditionally composed of sausage, beans, and confit of duck or goose. (Child, perhaps sensing that preserved duck and goose were not going to be easy sells to the American public, recommended using pork loin and mutton instead, with goose confit mentioned only as a possible variation if you could find it in “one of the food-importing stores.”) This still left Child and Beck with reams of unprinted recipes, but much of their fifties work would later get a proper airing in
Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume Two
(published in 1970 and credited just to Child and Beck, with
Bertholle out of the picture) and, for that matter, in the books that Child and Beck wrote later in their lives.
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The autumn of 1961 was a triumphal time for Julia and Paul Child. He had served out his final USIS posting, in Oslo, Norway, enabling the Childs to settle at last into their Cambridge house. In September, they received their first hardbound copy of the big book. The graphic designer Warren Chappell had devised the austere, soothing, soon-to-be-iconic fleur-de-lis pattern for the cover, the Knopf staff had come up with the title
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
, and Paul had written the book’s dedication, as eloquent and characteristic a summation of the era’s gastronomic Francophilia as any:

ON OCTOBER 18
,
Craig Claiborne gave
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
a rave in
The New York Times
, calling it “probably the most comprehensive, laudable and monumental work on this subject” and correctly predicting that it would endure as “the definitive work for nonprofessionals.” Jones recalls having to do a little arm-twisting to get Claiborne to review the book. “The trade-off was, my husband and I had a little penthouse apartment, and we got an outdoor grill, and we used to cook quite a lot on the outdoor grill,” she says. “People would look down from other buildings at this crazy couple, cooking.
Well, Craig loved that story. He was very good at getting stories about home cooks.” So, two months before
Mastering
’s publication, the
Times
ran an article headlined
THE JONESES DELIGHT IN KEEPING UP WITH CUISINE
, featuring a large photograph of Jones and her husband, the author Evan Jones, grilling a spitted leg of lamb. Judith was never described by her first name, being merely “Mrs. Jones” or half of “the Evan Joneses,” and the focus was much more on the manly, outdoorsy cooking of the bearded Evan, who, Claiborne wrote admiringly, “has the burly build of a Northwoodsman.”