THE STORY OF Julia Child’s first meal in France has been told and retold, most eloquently by Julia herself. In 1948, she and Paul were living in Washington, not quite sure of where his career was heading, when to their great joy the State Department posted him to Paris to become exhibits officer at the United States Information Service (USIS). They arrived at Le Havre on November 3, and as soon as their Buick emerged from the ship, they drove off toward the capital. Around lunchtime they came to Rouen. The name of the restaurant was La Couronne, and Paul—“in his beautiful French,” Julia recalled—ordered the meal. She described it lovingly in the fish chapter of From Julia Child’s Kitchen: first came oysters and Chablis, and then a splendid sole meunière was set before them. “It was handsomely browned and still sputteringly hot under its coating of chopped parsley, and around it swirled a goodly amount of golden Normandy butter,” Julia wrote. “It was heaven to eat, the flesh so very fresh, with its delicate yet definite texture and taste that blended marvelously with the browned butter sauce. I was quite overwhelmed.” This traditional dish, each detail put into place with care and all of it glorious with butter, had everything she would always adore about French cooking. She published the memory in 1975, and in time it joined Swann dipping his madeleine, and M. F. K. Fisher drying tangerines on the radiator, as a classic of culinary nostalgia.
Twelve years later, Julia wrote again about her first meal in France. In an essay she contributed to a book of Christmas food memories she described the same Buick, the same arrival in Rouen, the same restaurant—but a different menu. “We started with oysters, followed with one of their famous duck dishes,” she wrote. “While husband Paul commandeered a fat ripe Comice pear for dessert and an equally fat wedge of Camembert, I went for the pastries.” No sole meunière? Who knows? Most likely she’d forgotten the earlier version. And even the earlier version may have been conflated with other cherished menus. Paul, who described their first meal in France in a letter written from Paris to his brother that very day, said they had blissfully eaten oysters (“very strong of the sea”) and filet de sole, without specifying the preparation. But sole, especially meunière, came up again and again in his accounts of restaurant meals during those heady first weeks—“Julie had a delicious sole meunière,” “Julie can’t get over how good the sole is,” “Julie wants to spend the rest of her life right here, eating sole.” Julia, too, wrote home about it: “Sole meunière, crisp and bristling from the fire.” Plainly, that simple homage to freshness and butter made an impression on her. As for the “famous duck” of Rouen, it’s not clear how this particular dish made its way into her official past; but Julia loved storytelling, and she loved duck; maybe she had one roasting in the oven while she was typing that day. In 2000, she was asked to describe her “most memorable meal” for Gourmet, and once more she gazed back happily to Le Havre, to the Buick, to the restaurant in Rouen, and to the duck—“fire-roasted and then passed through a duck press.” What emerges from these memories, one folded into another and all of them touched with sepia, is the staying power of the encounter itself, which began when the ship docked and continued for months in a haze of rapture. The rapture was the part she never forgot, and never revised.
Soon after Julia and Paul settled in Paris, an old woman told Julia that France was “just one big family.” As far as Julia was concerned, that family was hers. At their favorite restaurant, Michaud, she couldn’t stop glancing over at a dozen people celebrating around a table spread with “innumerable courses of everything”—champagne, chickens, salads, cheeses, nuts—and everyone relaxed and goodhearted as they talked and ate and drank. “We keep being reminded of the Orient,” she wrote home. “Possibly because both are cultivated old civilizations, who enjoy and have integrated the physical and the cultural things in living.” Julia was at home here. The French struck her as wonderfully natural and earthy, and at the same time immensely civilized. They seemed to believe that the great pleasures of life—food, drink, sex, civility and conversation, pets, children, the splendor of Paris—were simply part of the fabric of being human, and that to enjoy them was as fundamental as breathing. Yet it was also taken for granted that stewardship of these gifts meant relishing them openly, discussing them, arguing about them, and keeping them meaningful through the very power of appreciation. Here was a whole country dedicated to being “worldly.” Right away she started French lessons at Berlitz: nothing was more important to her at this stage than becoming comfortable in the language. She was ecstatically absorbing the city, all her senses wide open and craving more; and she wanted the sounds as well, that constant chatter in the shops and streets; she wanted to “talk and talk and talk” and make a place for herself in the life flowing around her. “Oh, La Vie! I love it more every day.”
They found an apartment at 81, rue de l’Université, on the Left Bank of the Seine across from the place de la Concorde, in an old private house. Their rooms on the third floor were as French as the view of rooftops outside the windows. Sagging leather wallpaper, gilt chairs, moldings, and mirrors everywhere—Julia called it “late 19th century Versailles.” Up a narrow flight of stairs there was a roomy kitchen with appliances so small in relation to her height that she might have been standing over a toy stove. She decided she could live right there in that apartment forever, in perfect happiness. Already she regretted missing Paris in the twenties, an era Paul had seen in person; and she pounced happily on the occasional sighting of such figures as Colette, Chanel, André Gide, and Sylvia Beach. Once, when the Childs gave a Bastille Day party, Paul invited Alice B. Toklas, whom he had met back in the twenties. She arrived, drank a glass of wine, and left. Toklas was so tiny, and wore such a wide-brimmed hat, that the only way Julia could see her face was to be sitting down while Toklas stood directly above her.
Julia spent her first months studying French, walking through the streets with a map and a dictionary, and tasting, tasting, tasting. Everything she bit into was full of exhilarating flavors: the sausages, the tarts and petits fours, the snails, the Brie, “great big juicy pears,” and grapes so sweet she nearly swooned. Like most of their French and American friends in Paris, she and Paul had a maid who cooked and cleaned; but after living that way for a few months, they let her go. They hated having to show up on time for meals, and her cooking disappointed them. Julia was embarrassed to serve guests such inadequate dinners—her own could be alarming at times, but when they came off well, she took a great deal of pride in them. “Besides,” she wrote home, “it is heart-rending not to go to the markets, those lovely, intimate, delicious, mouth-watering, friendly, fascinating places. How can one know the guts of the city if one doesn’t do one’s marketing?” So they hired a cleaning woman to come in twice a week, and Julia gladly took charge of the food. At the market, she examined pigs’ heads and scrutinized fruits and vegetables, breathed in the smells of the boulangerie, carefully chose a terrine or pâté from the charcuterie, and chatted away with the shopkeepers. In France, food was a sociable enterprise: everyone had something to say about the turnips or the kidneys, and to be able to join that nationwide conversation—in French!—was Julia’s bliss.
But as the winter passed, she found she had time on her hands. She was never bored with Paris, or the daily delights of living there, but her own lack of direction bothered her. She and Paul would have liked to raise a family, but she was now thirty-six, and the possibility of children seemed increasingly remote. Surely there was something she could do professionally that would give her life substance and purpose. How about…hat making? She did have a bit of a background in fashion, having worked for Coast magazine before the war (she forgot how much she had hated the job), and Paris was certainly the capital of such things. She embarked on a few lessons and even made a dress and hat for herself that she wore to a wedding. “Awful, awful,” she admitted later. Paul, too, was thinking about her problem, and he mentioned it one day to the librarian at the USIS, a Frenchman who knew Paris well. “What does Julia like?” asked the librarian. Art, perhaps? Music? Sports? Paul reflected for a moment, then said decisively, “She likes to eat.” He went home with the address of the Cordon Bleu.
Despite the distinction of its name and history, the Cordon Bleu had plunged into mismanagement by the time Julia enrolled in the fall of 1949. Pots and pans went unwashed, equipment was broken, dirt was everywhere, and classes ran short of ingredients. More irritating for Julia, she found herself taking lessons with two women who had never cooked before and needed to start at the kindergarten level. After two frustrating days, she managed to get herself transferred to a professional course. Here she found eleven ex-GIs who were training to become restaurant cooks under the GI bill, and a distinguished teaching staff of master chefs long steeped in the tastes and techniques of classic French cooking. This was more like it. They started at 7:30 in the morning, Julia and the former soldiers peeling and chopping and watching and asking questions in a top-speed flurry while producing sauces, fricassees, custards, and whatever else the teachers ordered up. “It’s a free-for-all,” Julia told her family. “Being the only woman, I am being careful to sit back a bit, but am being very cold-blooded indeed in a quiet way (got to be cold-blooded and realistic, but retain appearance of sweetness and gentility).” At 9:30, the class was over, and Julia went home to practice on what would become lunch for herself and Paul. Then she returned to school for an afternoon demonstration class, watching intently as chefs prepared the thoroughly professional versions of soufflés, galantines, charlottes, and fondants that she planned to master. Then back to rue de l’Université, exhilarated, to make dinner. “After that one demonstration of Boeuf B, I came right home and made the most delicious one I ever ett,” she wrote home jubilantly.
“My cooking has been always on the experimental side, these courses will make them SURE.” She found she liked the demonstrations best, because she could learn so much from watching the chef make an entire dish from beginning to end, “giving the proportions and ingredients, and explaining everything he does, and making little remarks.”
Julia’s particular mentor was Chef Max Bugnard, who was seventy-four when she met him and had started his career sixty years earlier as an apprentice, later moving to London to work under Escoffier himself. Bugnard was the teacher who made Julia a cook. This generous and knowledgeable chef became a kind of culinary archetype who would rule her imagination for the rest of her life. Bugnard had a gravitas about him that came from his learning, his experience, and his respect for the work; and for Julia, such a sensibility would forever mark the difference between the real cooks and the dabblers. “He has that wonderful old-timey ‘art for arts sake’ approach, and nothing short of perfection satisfies him at all,” she wrote to a friend. “It’s an inspiration to work with such a man.”
Bugnard’s classes at the Cordon Bleu took place at a level far above the inadequate conditions of the school. He knew the repertoire intimately, and his standards were, as Julia often said, impeccable. As he demonstrated and explained the well-honed methods of French cookery, supervised and corrected her work, the doors she had been banging on so ineffectually swung open at last. After years of following recipes only to meet failure, enjoying a triumph only to see the same dish mysteriously go wrong the next time, planning lovely little dinners that didn’t get to the table until 10:00 p.m.—now she could understand what was happening and why. Now she could learn. Julia cooked all day, all evening, and all through the weekends; and when she wasn’t cooking, she was compulsively buying sieves and whisks and copper pots and larding needles. At the far end of an alley in the Paris flea market, she found a marble mortar and a pestle so massive Paul had to hoist them onto his shoulder to get them back to the car, which was parked two miles away. He was delighted to do it. “Julie’s cookery is actually improving!” Paul exclaimed to his brother. “I didn’t believe it would, just between us girls, but it really is.”
Ducks and rabbits and fish and eggs, every step of every dish, from the raw ingredients to the final garnish, everything performed by hand with only the most elemental equipment—Julia was rocketed to paradise. This was what she had needed without knowing it: a clear, rational guide to making every dish taste the way it should. No longer was she fortune’s fool in the kitchen. Her mind was on fire: every day, more mysteries fell away, and in their place was structure, system, and logic. The secret behind good cooking turned out to be that there were no secrets. There was only good teaching.
Studying French cuisine wasn’t just a matter of absorbing traditional rules and methods: Julia was learning to cook with all her senses engaged, to cook with a visceral understanding of raw ingredients that was increasingly out of fashion in the American kitchen. Ever since the late-nineteenth century, each generation had been purchasing more and more food that had been cleaned, cut, packaged, and sometimes partially cooked in a factory. The convenience was addictive, and so was the impressive rationale created by the advertising industry: these uniform, sterile products, “untouched by human hands” as one slogan put it, made cooking modern and far more sanitary. Why fumble around with messy, smelly chicken parts and carrot peelings the way poor Grandma had to do?
Cooking from scratch remained the standard in most households, but what women meant by “scratch” was continually changing. By the time Julia enrolled at the Cordon Bleu, an American dinner made from scratch might include beef that had been ground into hamburger before it arrived in the kitchen, bottled ketchup, fresh potatoes, canned peas, and a Jell-O dessert in the most popular flavor, namely red. In France, by contrast, to cook meant to sustain an intimate relationship with ingredients. Julia had to learn how to feel her way through a recipe even while she was following written directions, how to leave enough space from step to step to let the food itself tell her what to do next. How should the rice smell when it came out of the oven after its long baking in milk? How would the egg whites look when they had been beaten just enough? How much nutmeg would make the dish taste right—with no taste of nutmeg? She took to this approach avidly. She may have lacked the instincts of a born cook, but she was blessed with an excellent palate and skillful hands. And she loved the feel of food, loved letting her senses run riot at the kitchen counter, loved handling raw meats and vegetables and inhaling the aromas as they cooked. Learning to cook was an intoxicant; she could have been sipping her first glass of champagne. “It is beginning to take effect,” she wrote home after three months at the Cordon Bleu. “I feel it in my hands, my stomach, my soul.”
Yet the more she learned, the more she could see what a long way she had to go. If she were trying to play the violin, she reflected, the challenge would be the same: training and practice, training and practice. The fishmongers and butchers were nerve-rackingly good at identifying customers who didn’t know what they were buying (“Bluff is no good, you’ve got to KNOW,” she wrote home) and she was determined to “KNOW” every single thing about market and kitchen. One day she spent four hours on a lobster recipe—at the typewriter, not the stove. She had already worked on the cooking; she could prepare it just as it should be, and now she wanted to put the whole procedure into words. “Good practice, to make it absolutely exact and water-tight,” she wrote the family. She did a massive round of research on mayonnaise and wrote it up in more detail than any of her sources had, then went to work on béarnaise. These mini dissertations were for herself. She wanted to have in front of her the most explicit, flawless recipes ever written, so that she would never lose touch with what she had mastered. Failure still had a horrible way of seizing control of a meal. One day, after she had been several weeks at the Cordon Bleu, she made lunch for a friend and ended up serving “the most VILE eggs Florentine I have ever imagined could be made outside of England.” She didn’t measure the flour, which made the sauce thick and horrid; she couldn’t find spinach so she substituted chicory, and the whole mess was disgusting. Would she ever outgrow these bursts of ineptitude? Maybe not, but she wasn’t about to share her guilt and misery with the guests. It was bad enough that they had to eat the stuff; they shouldn’t be forced to claim it was delicious. “I carefully didn’t say a word, while they painfully ate it, because I don’t believe in these women who are always apologizing for their food,” she wrote home. “If it is vile, the cook must just grin and bear it, with no word of excuse.” Her famous advice to the hostess—“Never apologize”—was forged in crucibles like this one.
The harder she worked, the more impatient she became with her class at the Cordon Bleu. The GIs weren’t making much progress, and the course was slowing down and becoming repetitive. “After 6 months, they don’t know the proportions for a béchamel or how to clean a chicken the French way,” she complained. Finally she decided she’d had enough of the school but not nearly enough of Bugnard, so she dropped out of the course and hired the chef to teach her privately for another six months, while she practiced between lessons. Then, with a year of study behind her, she decided she was ready to take the exam and receive a Cordon Bleu diploma. Here she ran into a problem. Madame Brassart, director of the school, had always disliked the big American woman who thought she was too good for the amateur course, pushed her way into the professional program, then dropped out before completing it. Now she had the effrontery to demand a diploma. The director refused to schedule the exam. It took months before an increasingly furious Julia was allowed to take the exam, and Madame Brassart relented only after Julia sent a letter hinting that the embassy would soon start wondering why an American student was being treated so badly by the Cordon Bleu. When Julia finally received her certificate—Madame Brassart wouldn’t issue a real diploma, since Julia hadn’t finished the course—it was dated March 15, 1951, some two weeks before the date on the warning letter. The director was covering her tracks. For many years, Julia included Madame Brassart on the very short list of people she hated, which was headed by Senator Joseph McCarthy.
The exam itself sorely disappointed her, for it was superficial and made no reference to the complicated procedures she had practiced with zeal. Madame Brassart had decided to give this uppity student a beginner’s exam, the sort given to housewives who took a six-week elementary course. Julia was outraged, all the more so because she flubbed quite a bit of the test. She did well on the written section, in which she had to describe how to make a brown stock, how to cook green vegetables, and how to make a béarnaise sauce. But in the cooking section, she made mistakes everywhere. Asked to prepare an oeuf mollet, she made a poached egg instead of a soft-boiled one; she also put too much milk into the crème renversée, or “caramel custard,” and she forgot what went into an escalope de veau en surprise (veal, duxelles, and sliced ham, cooked and then reheated in a paper bag). Julia sautéed the mushrooms instead of making duxelles and left out the ham entirely. “All my own fault, I just should have memorized their little book,” she admitted in a letter home. “My mind was on Filets de sole Walewska, Poularde Toulousiane, Sauce Venetienne, etc. etc. etc. and I neglected to look at the primary things.” Her mistakes in the paper-bag recipe didn’t bother her, since it was an idiotic dish anyway—“the kind a little newlywed would serve up for her first dinner to ‘épater’ the boss’s wife.” The whole experience was frustrating: she could turn out flawless sauces, pâtés, and mousses; bone a goose without tearing the skin; clean, eviscerate, and cut up a chicken in twelve minutes—and she had tripped over her own feet when asked to take a baby step. When she opened her own cooking school, she vowed, she would turn people into cooks “through friendliness and encouragement and professionalism,” not the nasty methods of the mean-spirited Madame Brassart. Who, she added pointedly, was a Belgian, and not French at all.
During these months of intensive cooking, a friend who thought Julia might like to meet another food-struck woman introduced her to Simone Beck Fischbacher—a meeting as momentous for Julia as the day she encountered Paul. Here was her first culinary soul mate and a woman who could balance Julia’s classroom cuisine with real-life French home cooking. Simca, as everyone called her, had grown up in Normandy in a wealthy household with servants, but as a child she found the kitchen irresistible and soon began trying her hand. She became a brilliant, intuitive home cook, self-taught apart from a brief period of study at the Cordon Bleu, with a vast repertoire of recipes and techniques that she was continually expanding. Everything she tasted seemed to inspire her; Julia used to say she threw off ideas like a fountain. Like Julia, she was married and had no children, and cooking was at the center of her life. As soon as they were introduced, the two women started talking about French food and didn’t let up until Simca’s death forty years later. Their friendship, renewed year after year on the hillside in Provence where they both made second homes, launched both of their careers and spawned a huge correspondence that dissected every aspect of French cookery. They were “ma sœur” and “ma grande chérie” to each other, sisters whose volcanic arguments never quite shattered their bond. To Julia, in those early years, Simca was France itself—beloved, inspiring, wildly irritating, and fundamental to everything.
Simca belonged to a women’s gastronomical club, the only one of its kind in a country where haute cuisine was a well-guarded male preserve. No women cooked or even waited on tables in the great three-star restaurants; no women were invited to join the elite dining clubs that met over grand lunches and elaborate banquets; and the most revered authorities on classic cuisine were male. Out in the provinces, of course, women did some of the most distinguished and characteristic cooking of France; and it was a reflex among chefs to honor their mothers’ cooking above all other influences. But if women’s cooking was the sentimental favorite, men’s had the prestige, the exclusivity, and the cash value.
The lone exception to this gender divide was Le Cercle des Gourmettes, a group of food-loving women who began meeting in 1927, prompted by an incident at a sumptuous banquet held by one of the men’s gastronomical societies. Women were sometimes allowed to attend these feasts as guests, and on this occasion both men and women were at the table when a man was heard declaiming the ancient truism that women, of course, understood nothing about fine food and wine. A certain Madame Ethel Ettlinger—an American who had been living for decades in France but clearly hadn’t adapted—jumped up in fury to remind the men that in all their homes it was women who ran the kitchens, ordered the meals, and trained the cooks. The women then got the idea to stage a magnificent banquet of their own and invite the men. They held the dinner in a borrowed château, arranged to have each course introduced with a trumpet fanfare, and easily demonstrated that women could spend money on glorious food and wine just as knowledgeably as men could. (The women themselves didn’t cook, any more than the members of the male club would have.) After that, the women chose a name for themselves and met regularly for decades, most often at an elaborate lunch prepared by a chef. Any Gourmettes who wanted to come at 10:00 a.m. to watch the chef and act as his assistants were invited to do so. Simca showed up regularly for these cooking sessions; and Julia, who joined the group soon after meeting Simca, never missed one if she could help it.
These lunches glowed in her memory long afterward. She once said they marked “the real beginning of French gastronomical life for me.” The tradition she had been pursuing so ardently now sprang up before her like an edible diorama, complete with authentic chefs and guests. “I soon realized I had never really lived before,” she recalled. “There was always an elegant first course, such as fresh artichoke bottoms stuffed with sweetbreads and served with a truffled Béarnaise, or a most elaborately poached fish garnished with mushroom duxelles and lobster tails, and sauced with a creamy puree of crab. The main course might be boned duck, or game in season. Then came dessert, a sorbet aux poires, garnished with pears poached in wine and served in a meringue-nut shell, or a fancy mousse, a molded Bavarian structure, or a Vacherin with exotic filling.” And wines, of course, in abundance. What she liked most about the gatherings, along with the busy, gossipy cooking sessions and the dazzling food, was sitting down among women who talked food as intently as she did and ate with a gusto like her own. She was especially fond of the original members, a cluster of old-world dowagers in their seventies who dived into their lunches like ravenous teenagers. Normally Julia disliked all-female social events—she always came home grumbling afterward about how there hadn’t been any men in the room—but Le Cercle was different. She had never known so many women to whom she felt kin, and she identified herself as a Gourmette with pride.
One of Simca’s friends at Le Cercle des Gourmettes was a Parisian named Louisette Bertholle. Although she was a less-impassioned cook than Simca, and had none of Julia’s intellectual zeal—Paul Child called her “a charming little nincompoop”—Louisette was bright and chic and full of enthusiasm. Together the three women hatched the idea of opening a school, perhaps in Louisette’s kitchen, where they could teach cooking to Americans. But before they could do much more than think about the possibility, a couple of Julia’s friends from California turned up in Paris and asked Julia if she could give them cooking lessons. In January 1952, Julia, Simca, and Louisette hastily opened their school, using Julia’s kitchen because Louisette’s was being renovated. “A small informal cooking class, with emphasis on the ‘cook hostess’ angle, is ‘L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes,’ which is open for five pupils,” ran a notice in the embassy’s in-house newsletter. “The meetings are Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 10:00 a.m. through lunch, in the home of Mrs. Paul Child. The fee is 2,000 francs including lunch, which is prepared and served by the group. There are three experienced instructors, who teach basic recipes, bourgeoise or haute cuisine.” The three instructors were not quite ready for showtime, Julia admitted to her family, but they were learning as fast as they could. She knew that her life’s work had begun.
These classes became the template for all the teaching that followed, both on television and in books. The atmosphere was “homey and fun and informal,” and every time a student made a mistake, Julia launched a discussion of what had gone wrong and how to avoid it. After the school had been in operation for a few months, Julia typed out for herself a “petit discours”—a little speech she could give at the opening of each two-day course. Though it’s unlikely that she used these exact words when she addressed the pupils, it’s clear that her principles had settled into place. “Our aim is to teach you how to cook,” she started out. “We are prepared to show the basic methods of French cooking, which, when you have mastered them, should enable you to follow a recipe, or invent any ‘little dish’ that you want. We feel that when one has learned to use one’s tools quickly and efficiently one can then provide one’s own short-cuts…. The recipes we give you are basic recipes, with practically no frills. We want them to be as clear and complete as possible. And we want you to feel, after we have done something in class, that you really have understood all about doing it.” Everything was here—the emphasis on fundamentals, the commitment to precision and clarity, and the ultimate goal of instilling self-confidence in the cook. Later on, Paul designed an insignia for the school: a “3” in a circle, with “Ecole des Gourmandes” in flowing script around it. Julia wore it as a badge for decades, and it was always pinned to her blouse when she appeared as the “French Chef.”
For each two-hour class, Julia typed up and distributed all the recipes they would be working on; and she also prepared a detailed teaching plan so that each instructor—“Prof. Julia,” “Prof. Simca,” and “Prof. Louisette”—would know exactly what she was supposed to do, and when. On March 12, 1952, for instance, the lesson for the day included blanquette de veau, or veal stew; risotto and plain rice; salade mimosa; and two tarts, banana and fruit. First came the introductory remarks by “Prof. Julia.” Then work on the blanquette began, with Prof. Julia teaching the meat, the shallots, and the parsley, and Prof. Simca working with the onions and mushrooms. (Prof. Louisette, who was caught in a terrible marriage and was trying to get out, did less teaching than the others in the early years of the school.) “During this time, Prof. Julia cleans up, puts rice water to boil,” the schedule read. Prof. Simca took charge of the crème pâtissière, or pastry cream; Prof. Julia, the salad and the velouté sauce for the veal; and Prof. Simca the final liaison of cream and egg yolks. (Apparently the lesson went very well—Julia scribbled “good menu” on the sheet.) On the day the plan featured quiche lorraine, puff pastry, steak à la bordelaise, and the meringue layer cake known as a dacquoise, Julia admitted the menu had been “too rich”; and on another occasion she decided the recipes were just too complicated for beginners. No matter what problems may have plagued the cooking, however, every class ended with a triumphant lunch for the teachers, the students, and their guests, typically a husband or two. When school was not in session, Julia and Simca got together in the kitchen to put their teaching recipes into what Julia called “scientific workability.” They had to be “painfully exact,” she told her family—“viz: exactly how much gelatine in exactly how much liquid per exactly how much mayonnaise so you can make pretty curlicues on a fish.” At her request, the family sent over a set of measuring cups and spoons, which were unknown in France.
Julia also gave solo lessons, the first to a French woman who wanted to learn puff pastry. Though Julia had made it dozens of times and thought she understood it, she gave herself a practice session before the class and analyzed every step of the teaching to make sure it would be clear and accurate. Even so, there were two mistakes in the course of the lesson. Afterward, she decided she still lacked the “divine self-confidence” that identified a fine cook. “I want every technique to be perfect,” she told the family with determination, “and if there are errors, they must be made on purpose.” More and more, she could envision teaching at her own school, which she pictured in the kitchen of their Washington house.
Many of the recipes used at L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes originated with Simca and Louisette, who had been working for years on a French cookbook for Americans. Their idea was to produce a wide-ranging collection of recipes with sections on wines, cheeses, and regional specialties, all authentically French, but written in English and published in the United States. Louisette, who was half American and had a number of friends and contacts in the United States, had taken the manuscript with her on one of her trips to New York and offered it to Sumner Putnam, head of a publishing company called Ives Washburn. Putnam was interested, but he had no experience with cookbooks and was unsure of the market. The manuscript, moreover, was in poor shape. Simca and Louisette had written it in French, and although they had come up with a rough English translation, it needed a great deal of work. Putnam hired a translator and cookbook author, Helmut Ripperger, for the job and asked him to produce a kind of teaser for the book—a little recipe collection drawn from the manuscript and titled “What’s Cooking in France.” Simca and Louisette had signed a contract for the teaser but never saw “What’s Cooking” before it was published. It turned out to be an embarrassment, full of errors, and the women were distraught. In August 1952, they turned to Julia for help. The original manuscript had to be put into decent English before anything else could happen with the book—Would she take a look? Julia sat down with the sauce chapter and started to read with a pen in her hand. She had been teaching from some of these recipes, reworking them whenever necessary; and she also had done a good deal of research and recipe writing for herself. Now she tried to take the point of view of an American homemaker opening a new cookbook. She went into the kitchen and tested a few, exactly as they were written, and found them unusable. Some recipes were too abbreviated, others ran on forever with needless complications, and the instructions were infuriatingly vague. She couldn’t see anything worth saving and said exactly that to Simca and Louisette. By the end of November, the three women had worked up an entirely new plan for the book, and Julia wrote to Putnam to explain what they wanted to do.
They would produce a teaching manual, she told Putnam, not just a recipe collection, and they would build it around fundamental themes and their variations. It would be written in what Julia called “the informal human approach”—a natural speaking voice, as opposed to the cloying tones of so many food writers whenever the subject was France. There were other French cookbooks for Americans, she conceded, but none was logical; none emphasized what Julia called “the ‘whys,’ the pitfalls, the remedies, the keeping, the serving”; none was specifically dedicated to rescuing the hapless and setting them on the right path. The new book would do all this while spanning the entire territory of basic and elaborate French cooking. She told Putnam to expect the revised chapter on sauces very shortly, and said the rest of the manuscript might take another six months.
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.”