FRENCH COOKING for American cooks? It had to be an oxymoron. How could these two incompatible beasts ever be yoked together? But Julia knew it was possible, because it had happened to her. Now she envisioned a culinary America where it happened to everyone: where ordinary home cooks made perfect creamy omelets, kept a useful supply of mirepoix on hand, boned the duck themselves, and always served a welcoming little first course when friends came to dinner. Alas, most Americans would never encounter the Cordon Bleu. The homemaker who wanted to cook something French had nothing to help her but recipes; and how miserably they could fail a hopeful cook, Julia knew well. She had spent years floundering in the awkward gap between the cookbook and the cook, until good teaching set her free. The book she would deliver to Houghton Mifflin must be just that teacher. There was no precedent for such a thing: a guide to authentic French cooking that sat on the kitchen counter calmly issuing instructions and advice in English on what to do, and what problems to expect, and how to fix them. Over the next seven years, as she worked on the manuscript, she circled round and round the core message she wanted to convey, phrasing it this way and that in an effort to pin down a heretical idea that kept prodding at her. What she wanted to tell everyone was this: French food is uniquely French, but a sure and precise route to it can be mapped in any language.
Julia’s approach to the cookbook project was simple and vast: she would look at every dish in the traditional home repertoire from every perspective she could think of, testing and revising until she came up with a recipe that was absolutely foolproof and irreproachably true to its origins. When Avis asked her once why the book was taking so long, Julia described a typical day’s work, in this instance a day devoted to cabbage soups. She had climbed upstairs to the kitchen with an armful of recipes: Simca’s cabbage soup, numerous other cabbage soups that Julia had gathered from authoritative French cookbooks, and several regional variations. After studying all of them, she decided to try three, following two of them exactly as written and adapting the third for a pressure cooker. Obviously pressure cookers were not traditional, and Julia disliked them on aesthetic grounds (“Stinking, nasty bloody pressure cookers, I hate them!”), but if they could be made to produce good soups, she wanted to know about it. This particular experiment was a flop; the soup had an overprocessed flavor she had come to associate with pressure cookers. Nonetheless, she would keep trying: “Maybe I don’t use it right, but I will persist with an open if distasteful mind.” The conventionally made soups were better, but she was still a long way from having a usable recipe. “I feel 1) there has got to be a good stock of veg. and ham before the cabbage is put in, and that that is one of the ‘secrets’ 2) that the cabbage must not be cooked too long.” Maybe the cabbage would behave better if it were blanched first. Or maybe a different variety of cabbage would be an improvement. “So, all these questions of how and why and what’s the point of it, have to be ironed out,” she concluded. “Otherwise, you get just an ordinary recipe, and that’s not the point of the book.”
One of the reference books she kept close at hand was La Bonne Cuisine de Madame E. Saint-Ange, first published in 1927 and a bible in millions of French households. Julia often said it was her favorite French cookbook, and she would have been very pleased to see the English translation that finally appeared in 2005. Little is known about Madame Saint-Ange, except that her remarkable expertise ranged from restaurant haute cuisine to economical family cookery; but whenever Julia opened this volume, she found a mission and a sensibility exactly like her own. The recipes didn’t just parade through the book: Madame Saint-Ange was teaching fundamental techniques as well as some thirteen hundred specific dishes, and she made constant reference to the history of French culinary practice and style as she moved from soups to meats to vegetables to desserts with the wisdom of a professional. Yet she could look at any given recipe as if she were an everyday home cook with a penchant for disaster. Her discussion of scrambled eggs started with a detailed scrutiny of the proper pan, then considered several methods of beating the eggs and compared the merits of a whisk versus a wooden spoon, then specified the exact shape of the wooden spoon if that was the utensil chosen, and finally proceeded carefully through the cooking, with instructions on how to avoid crises and how to undertake rescues as necessary. She did all this in a voice so calm and cheerful that whatever she was describing sounded perfectly within the reach of any attentive cook. Julia’s precise debt to Madame Saint-Ange is hard to quantify—the Frenchwoman’s recipes stand behind Julia’s along with many other sources of inspiration—but if Madame Saint-Ange had lived long enough to translate, modernize, and fully Americanize her great work, she might well have come up with Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
As soon as Julia started to focus on the manuscript in her sharply analytical fashion, she ran into a problem that would keep her in a simmering rage for years. In culinary France, women like Julia—ambitious, intellectual, and irreverent—were not supposed to exist. Madame Saint-Ange was a rare exception to the rule. Women’s place in French cuisine was an honored but quite specific one: it was back home in the provinces, where untutored mamans of legendary talent turned out the magnificent meals their sons remembered forever. This was not Julia’s view of her role. To make matters worse, she was an American; and everyone in France knew for a fact that Americans were pathetic dullards who subsisted on canned food and floppy bread and had never heard of garlic. Dearly though she loved the French, this curtain of smugness, condescension, and superiority that dropped into place whenever the conversation turned to food drove her wild. “There is just an enormous amount of dogmatism to be gotten through in this country,” she complained to Avis. “Cooking being a major art, there are all sorts of men’s gastronomical societies, and books, and great names, and ‘The real ways’ of doing things, many of which have become sacred cows.” Julia was painfully aware of how much she still had to learn, and she wasn’t about to put one word into print that hadn’t been backed up with research and testing. Yet this profound respect for accuracy seemed to count for nothing, compared with the airy certainties of Frenchmen whose culinary wisdom was based in sentiment, not science. “At the party was a dogmatic meatball who considers himself a gourmet but is just a big bag of wind,” she reported indignantly to Avis. “They were talking about Beurre Blanc, and how it was a mystery, and only a few people could do it, and how it could only be made with white shallots from Lorraine over a wood fire. Phoo. But that is so damned typical, making a damned mystery out of perfectly simple things just to puff themselves up. I didn’t say anything as, being a foreigner, I don’t know anything anyway.”
Practical down to her toes, Julia did not believe that mysteries were in any way related to good cooking. The idea that wondrous and ineffable traditions were granted pride of place among French gastronomes, while her own rigorous testing was seen as the pleasant little pastime of an embassy wife, infuriated her. “Discuss—Dogmatism,” she scribbled on the Trois Gourmandes class schedule one day. She wanted the pupils to be aware that whenever they heard a French food lover talking about the “real” bouillabaisse, or the “real” cassoulet, they should be wary: different households made different bouillabaisses, and they were all “real.” To Julia, traditional French cooking was resilient, a living thing that flowed this way and that across time and through one kitchen after another. But if that was the case, if authenticity wandered from this household to that, what held the tradition together? What made French cooking French?
When it became apparent that this was how Julia was thinking about the project, and that work on the cookbook was going to be finicky, tedious, and research-driven, Louisette drifted away. Years later, she would produce cookbooks of her own, but she just didn’t think about the kitchen the way Simca and Julia did. From time to time she sent along a few ideas, but her participation was minimal. Julia wasn’t surprised. “I think the book is out of her depth,” she told Avis. “She is the charming ‘little woman’ with a talent and a taste for cooking, but a most disorganized and ultra feminine mind.” Still, the book had been Louisette’s idea in the first place; she was a good friend, and her home life was falling apart. Simca and Julia didn’t have the heart to turn their backs on her. Louisette’s name remained as coauthor, but she was allotted a smaller percentage of the royalties.
So the working team became Simca and Julia, two loving colleagues who fought their way through every recipe in the book. Fundamentally, they were incompatible—Simca wielded her intuition, Julia her intellect—which made for an exhausting collaboration but did produce a manuscript true to both of them. Avis, who watched them cooking together in Julia’s kitchen in Provence one winter, said afterward that Simca was too excitable to win most of their arguments: she was constantly waving knives in the air, clashing pans around, and speaking floods of high-speed French. Julia used similar tactics but kept her wits about her and wore down her opponent by sheer tenacity. Paul thought that the reason they never actually tore each other’s hair out was that for all their differences, “both have their eyes on the target rather than on themselves.”
The division of labor was clear from the start: Simca’s job was to be French, and Julia’s was to be American. Simca had no trouble with this assignment: her recipes and all her experience in the kitchen flowed from the culture in which she grew up. She had French cooking, as Avis put it, “in her blood and bones.” Many of her recipes were original, but they were all outcroppings from the culinary tradition she had inherited and tended with care. To stand back and scrutinize the tradition objectively did not come easily to her: it was like trying to diagram the flavor of apples.
Julia, by contrast, was an American by temperament as well as birth who heartily believed in the scientific approach. To her, French culinary tradition was a frontier, not a religion, and the evidence of things unseen was no evidence at all. Although her favorite cookbook from home was Joy of Cooking, Julia had in her more than a touch of Fannie Farmer—the dedicated, charismatic cooking teacher who introduced level measurements in the late nineteenth century because her students wanted to know what “a pinch” of salt was, and how much flour was meant by “a handful.” Like Miss Farmer, who was a leader in the moral and culinary reform movement known as scientific cookery, Julia saw a higher realm waiting for those who mastered the skills of the kitchen; and she shared Miss Farmer’s certainty that painstaking methods and precise instructions had the power to transform both the cooking and the cook. To be sure, Julia’s vision of a higher realm was one rampant with pleasure, conviviality, and the free play of the senses. This was hardly what the pious founders of scientific cookery had in mind for their students and followers, whose lessons sometimes culminated in an all-white dinner evoking a temple of purity. But Julia believed as they did that good cooking was pragmatic cooking, a matter of forming the right habits and using them daily—a discipline, not a burst of inspiration. One day she took a piece of notepaper and wrote “A good cook” at the top of it. Then she jotted down a definition: “is consistently good—not just a little flair here & there—She can turn out a good meal either simple or complicated, can adapt herself to conditions, and has enough exp. to change a failure into a success. If the fish doesn’t moose [mousse]—it becomes a soup. Matter of practice & passion.” Practice and passion: Julia put them together and kept them there in all her teaching and writing, twin imperatives that were useless when separated.
During the years that she and Simca were working on the book, they rarely inhabited the same kitchen. Paul was posted to Marseille in 1954, then to Bonn, then back home to Washington, and finally to Oslo before retiring in 1961. Although the two women were able to visit each other occasionally for marathon cooking sessions, most of their discussions and fights were carried on by letter. Recipes, notes, suggestions, additions, revisions, and corrections flew back and forth, sometimes in quantities that would have merited a doctoral degree in any other discipline. When Julia launched an assault on cassoulet—a rich and hefty assortment of beans, meats, and sausages that could take up to three days to prepare—she first rounded up twenty-eight recipes, all authentic from reputable sources, many of them contradictory. She and Simca winnowed them down, combining and refining and rewriting until they reached a single, triumphant version, all the while carrying on a blazing argument about preserved goose. Few American households were likely to have access to preserved goose, but Simca insisted it was essential: without it, they couldn’t call the dish cassoulet. Mutton stew, perhaps. But not cassoulet. Julia pounded her with source after source that omitted preserved goose. At length Julia won, though the two families ate many more cassoulets than anyone wished before a truce was declared.
Other recipes were simpler, but everything required numerous tweaks and tinkerings before both women were satisfied. Working on spinach, Julia picked up an idea from a book and dashed off a note in the scramble of French and English with which she always wrote to Simca. “Suggestion which comes from A. Suzanne, a contemporary of Escoffier, which is to put une pointe d’ail in les epinards, especially ‘au jus,’ and even à la crème. So small it is hardly noticeable, it does a certain amount of relevement which is very agreeable. Please try.” Every nuance counted; every minor shift in method had to be recorded. “I want every detail from you that you can think of,” Julia begged. “Whether or not I use the detail is of no matter, I want it anyway. People must say of this book, A MARVELOUS BOOK. I’ve never been able to make cake before, but now I can.”
This imagined reader, the desperate homemaker who couldn’t cook until the right book fell into her hands, had a permanent place in Julia’s consciousness and directly inspired the immense amount of detail that characterized her recipes. Like a ghost from Julia’s own past, she trailed Julia from kitchen to desk and back again, forever trying to figure out whether the roast was done, why the chops were steaming in the pan instead of browning properly, what made the cream puffs soggy, and exactly how thick the beef slices should be: a quarter inch? an eighth of an inch? Julia often called her “the young bride.” Simca, of course, had no such creature haunting her—she had been a young bride who cooked splendidly from the first day—and Julia had to plead with her to measure and test with scientific rigor. Take nothing for granted, she counseled Simca over and over. Don’t ever make a statement of fact until it has been tested so many times we “absolutely know” it is true. She sent Simca a meat thermometer and measuring cups, and issued constant bulletins on her own experiments. “I have just poached two more eggs,” she reported from deep within the egg chapter. “Well, the eggs weighed 60 grams or two ounces, and they do, effectivement, need 4 minutes. I also found, measuring everything again, that there should be but 1½ to 2 inches water, and the pan should be but 8 inches in diameter. Thank heaven I did it again to catch these two awful errors.” Simca had a hard time keeping up with this degree of microscopic fussing, and as she moved from recipe to recipe, she kept forgetting to use the methods they had worked out so exhaustively.
Simca was an extraordinary cook, and Julia knew it, but the recipes Simca contributed from her own repertoire were far too personal to go into the book without extensive testing and revision. Not only did they need to be made scientifically precise, but Julia wanted to be sure they represented the mainstream of French tradition. What horrified Julia about many French cookbooks, especially the ones written by Americans, was that the authors seemed to feel they were free to rewrite standard recipes in any fashion they chose, and then present the result as completely classic. She was frantic with worry that the recipes she received from Simca had been Simca-fied, made delicious in Simca’s hands but allowed to wander significantly off course. “It is not, my dear, that I do not have confidence in you!” she insisted in the course of a quarrel about clafoutis. “I think we are both interested, in this book, in making sure it is La Veritable Cuisine Française, and not just La Cuisine Simca/ Julia.” The book would have to depart from tradition at times, for instance when certain ingredients weren’t available in America, but Julia was adamant that whenever she and Simca altered a template, they had to say so up front. Once, when they were working together in Marseille on sauce à la rouille, Simca casually referred to the recipe they had developed as “Rouille Julia”—idiosyncratic, that is, and not traditional. Julia was aghast. “That is a SHOCKING remark coming from you,” she wrote after the visit. “It means that you have allowed me to perpetrate a little ‘popote Julia’ into a book on French cooking.” Simca’s role, Julia reminded her, was to protect the authenticity of the recipes, even and especially from Julia herself. The most crucial piece of equipment they had was Simca’s taste memory.
Simca would have been happy to rely on her own palate for the book she and Louisette had originally planned, but this book had far loftier aspirations, and they made her nervous. She and Julia were only a couple of home cooks, and women at that. How dare they contradict, in print, the old masters and professional chefs who constituted the priestly class in French cooking? The sight of the recipes she and Julia had worked so hard on, all typed up and ready for the publisher, filled her with anxiety. Often she demanded they go back and make changes in a recipe completed long ago, just because she’d come across a chef who had a different method—surely he knew better than the two of them. This stubborn diffidence made Julia impatient. “I consider ourselves just as much AUTHORITIES as anyone else,” she railed. What did the sages have that she and Simca lacked? The two women had training and experience, they consulted the sources, they did a vast amount of cooking, tasting, and testing. But the confidence Julia sported so comfortably was foreign to Simca. Though she could fight fiercely, she had a streak of what Julia called “obéissance,” or “obedience”—an instinct Julia thought was typical of Frenchwomen who tended to defer to men far too readily. A year and a half into their collaboration, Julia sent Simca—“Ma plusque chère Colleague”—three rules to live by:
Stand up for your opinions as an equal partner in this enterprise.
Keep the book French.
Follow the scientific method, respecting your own careful findings, after having studied the findings and recommendations of other authorities. Work with exact measurements, temperatures, etc. And, once having established a method, stick to it religiously unless you find it is not satisfactory.
(Then she tossed in a postscript: “Please, also, learn to cut professionally with a knife. Who knows, we may end up on television, and you must establish professional techniques.”)
For Julia, the moral barometer for this project was not fidelity to the old masters but fidelity to the food. Those first months in France, when she spent day after day plunging into flavors of an intensity she had never known before, had left a permanent stain on her senses. To have lived so long without this! Now she was determined to re-create that food by writing recipes so precise, so perfect, that each was a miniature version of the discovery that had transformed her. She was on a quest for le gout français—the very flavor of Frenchness. Like any flavor, this one was hard to describe in words, but instantly recognizable on the palate. Julia never doubted for a moment that the quintessential taste of France was portable, that it could be realized by any cook, anywhere, with the right instructions. She and Simca were going to capture that taste, press it like a butterfly onto every page of their book. And unlike Simca, she knew she would have no qualms about claiming victory. This was cooking, not alchemy; the only secrets were spread out on the kitchen counter for all to see: butter and eggs and string beans, whisks and saucepans and measuring spoons. Nothing mysterious, nothing unquantifiable. “If one is using French methods and French ingredients or as near an equivalent as can be found, one achieves GOUT FRANÇAIS,” she said flatly.
The moment she used the term French ingredients, of course, she had to qualify it. Many of the ingredients that Americans would have to use would be “as near an equivalent as can be found,” and some of them wouldn’t be all that near. But Julia was never the sort of gastronome who thought great cooking began and ended with perfect ingredients; she was far too pragmatic for that. It’s not that she was immune to their splendor: like every other American eating in Paris for the first time, she had been dazzled by the startlingly bright flavors of the fresh fruits and vegetables. “Strawberries, for instance, are dreamberries,” she wrote to Avis. “Beans are so deliciously beany. They haven’t yet gotten on to the system of growing a tough variety that will keep well in the markets.” Yet she quite forgot to include in the manuscript any mention of how important it was to use the best possible ingredients; and when she remembered, about a year before the book was published, she merely shrugged. Other errors in the manuscript—or worse, the index—dismayed her terribly, but not this one. It was far more important that the book fend off the popular assumption that every food item in France was superior to its American counterpart. Too many tourists came to Paris, swooned over the food, and went home convinced that meals so glorious must spring from wondrous ingredients unique to France. Not true, Julia insisted. Spinach was spinach, and even if it wasn’t, good cooking would make up for the difference.
Julia was so obsessively open-minded on the subject of American ingredients that she wouldn’t even exclude canned and frozen products, at least not without giving them a chance to prove themselves. French gastronomes thought packaged foods were barbaric, and sophisticated Americans were embarrassed by them, but Julia wanted her recipes to be within reach of every home cook who could summon the ambition to try them. If a box of frozen peas, or a can of bouillon, honestly merited a place in a traditional French recipe, the book should say so. There was nothing to be gained by snobbery. She shopped for such products at the embassy commissary and devoted long testing sessions to them, generally with grim results. “I have just served my poor husband the most miserable lunch of frozen haddock Dugléré, frozen ‘fresh’ string beans and ‘minute’ rice,” she wrote to Avis after an early effort in 1953. “It is just no fun to eat that stuff, no matter how many French touches and methods you put to it. It ain’t French, it ain’t good, and the hell with it.”
That afternoon, Julia went out for a restorative walk along one of her favorite streets, rue de Seine, and came home in a better mood. But she wasn’t going to quit: she would continue experimenting even though by their very nature these products threw a wet blanket over the kitchen. Where was the tactile pleasure of handling food, where were the smells, and where oh where were the flavors? “Got a frozen roasting chicken the other day,” she reported to Avis. “It was mushy, a bit chewy, and had very little taste. It had, also, a slightly rancid-fat overtone.” She tried warming half of it in a coq au vin sauce, which lent a little flavor but not enough to salvage the product or win it a mention in the book. “If things aint good, they aint; we are not in the frozen food lobby.” To her astonishment, instant potatoes turned out to be pretty good, though requiring quite a bit of butter, cream, and cheese. Uncle Ben’s Converted Brand Rice became such a favorite she took to calling it “l’Oncle Ben’s,” and she was so delighted with instant piecrust mix that she sent a box to Simca and told her she must try it. Simca was not impressed: she disliked the taste of vegetable shortening in place of butter. Julia admitted the flavor wasn’t really French. “However, they certainly are easy and certainly perfectly good. And certainly better for that average housewife, French or US, who would otherwise make a horrid crust,” she argued.
In a way, she was arguing with herself more than with Simca. At the time she tried piecrust mix, she was living in Washington, D.C., and taking careful note of how Americans behaved in the kitchen. So many of them lacked basic skills or were reluctant to take the time to do things well. Was the point of the book to get better-tasting food on the American table, by any means necessary? Or was the pur pose to make real changes, to move wonderful food to the center of American life? One day she was working on glacéed carrots and onions and decided to save time by using canned onions. The result was so awful she shot off a letter to Simca. “I DO NOT LIKE CANNED ONIONS AT ALL,” she announced. “I suggest that we say: WE DO NOT LIKE CANNED ONIONS. Period.” The incessant American preoccupation with saving time was getting on her nerves. “I think we cannot compromise on the techniques of making things taste the way they should taste even if some refusals to take the easy way result in some time-consuming operations,” she decided. “Our book is on how to make things taste the way they should.” In the end, piecrust mixes did not get into the pastry chapter.
But in other respects, the two years in Washington were revelatory. Supermarkets she found to be a splendid innovation: she loved pushing her cart through the aisles and getting a good view and feel of everything on display. Unlike a charming little French market, where the shopkeeper picked out the items for each customer, these huge, impersonal stores left her free to select exactly the mushrooms she wanted, the very bunch of parsley that looked best to her. “It is so heavenly to go to the asparagus counter and pick out each individual spear yourself, or each single string bean,” she exclaimed to Simca. “The asparagus is perfectly delicious! This is the season where they come by rapid transit from California, and are great fat green spears, sweet, tender and perfect.” Back in France she had been sure that if produce had to be shipped cross-country, there was no hope for flavor, but now she was eating fine springtime asparagus and doing so with delight.
At the same time, however, disappointments were piling up. Her quest for decent American chicken—whole or in parts, fresh or frozen, supermarket or butcher shop—went on for years. Butter, the most beloved ingredient in her kitchen, was tasteless compared with its French counterpart; and thick, matured cream with the nutty flavor of French cream was nowhere to be found. Shallots were expensive and rarely available; nobody would be able to buy a calf’s foot or a pig’s caul; the veal was inferior to French, and the only fresh herb in sight was parsley. What’s more, Americans had the irritating habit of not drinking wine. That was regrettable in itself, but if they didn’t drink wine regularly, they weren’t going to have it on hand for cooking, and wine was essential for flavor. Conceivably they might buy a bottle of inexpensive California red just for cooking, but the inexpensive California whites were dreadful, in Julia’s estimation. Avis wondered whether vermouth might be a substitute, since people tended to have it around for cocktails. Julia rejected the idea at first, because the “strong and herbal taste” would throw off the flavor of sauces. But after living in Washington for a while, she relented. “People just do not have bottles of white wine all the time to use in cooking,” she explained to Simca. “If they bought one for a bit of cooking, they wouldn’t know what to do with the rest of it. Therefore I think we must always specify the choice of White Vermouth, as everybody has that; and it will keep after having been opened.” She experimented with proportions and found that if she used vermouth more sparingly than wine in delicate sauces, the flavor was satisfactory.
Clearly, there could be nothing rigid or pristine about the concept of ingredients in this book. That didn’t bother Julia at all. On the contrary, she thought it was in the very nature of ingredients to be pliable, to serve the cook no matter where the cook was heading. She had always hated that brand of wisdom about bouillabaisse that insisted the only proper versions came from grizzled French fishermen in certain coastal towns. She had had a terrible bouillabaisse in the coastal town of Le Lavandou—“very rough, and flavored with nothing but saffron”—and decided she was probably a better cook than most grizzled fishermen. She proceeded to make bouillabaisse everywhere she lived, from Maine to Norway, using the likeliest fresh fish available, and found the results not only delicious but impeccably French. A slew of freshly caught pollack was the basis for her Maine bouillabaisse: with potatoes, fennel, and saffron, she reported to Simca, “It was very good, and had the correct taste…the necessary flavor was there.” What made a dish French wasn’t the raw materials, it was what happened to them in the hands of the cook.
Strawberries were dreamberries—she ate them with rapture every summer she found herself in France—but the key that unlocked French cooking for Julia was technique. Her lessons with Chef Bugnard had turned her toward a radiant future. In the logic and transparency of culinary method, each step a meaningful contribution to the complex beauty of the result, Julia had found her lifelong faith. She was a believer, not in the dogma set down by the sages, but in the notion of French cooking as a great master plan—fundamental procedures that could be applied to all the cuisines of the world. Learning to cook, moreover, had unleashed her imagination, her powers of analysis, her scholarly skills, and her addiction to hard work. Simple dishes, well prepared, would always win her respect; but Julia liked cooking best when it was akin to mountain climbing, not a stroll in the park. She went into the kitchen because that was the place where her mind was engaged most happily and energetically. Years later, when her friend Anne Willan was planning the curriculum for La Varenne, the Paris cooking school, Julia urged her to establish a place early in the schedule for “difficult or advanced items, like puff pastry.” The size and scope of the demand constituted, to Julia, the very essence of her chosen work. As she put it to Willan, “The sooner one gets to pastry, the more of a cook one begins to feel.” By contrast, the whole question of ingredients was negotiable. Canned and frozen foods, vermouth instead of wine—these couldn’t erode or undermine the Frenchness of the cooking. But when a French cookbook devoted to shortcut recipes appeared—Cuisine d’Urgence, or “Hurry-up Cooking”—Julia read doom on every page. If technique was lost, if careful methods gave way to speed for its own sake, the end was nigh. “I find the sauce-making methods horrifying, and also disturbing, and hope that too many people will not take to it,” she wrote to Simca. “It will be the death of La Cuisine Fcse.”
Yet even on the subject of technique, she was willing to consider modern innovations if they achieved the right results. At the Cordon Bleu she had learned to whip egg whites with a balloon whisk, to beat butter by hand, to keep constant watch over the egg yolks while making hollandaise to be sure they were thickening properly and absorbing the right amount of butter, and to employ hours of pounding and sieving and beating to make quenelles. Now she bought a blender and an electric mixer and started to experiment. “This whole field is wide open, that of using the electric aids for a lot of fancy French stuff, and we’ll be presenting something entirely new,” she told Avis. “No sacred cows for us.” She was delighted to outdo the old masters by using a mixer to beat cream into the quenelle paste, or using a blender instead of a mortar and pestle to make shellfish butter. But even when the electric aids did a good job, she was careful about how she expressed her approval. If a machine saved the cook from a truly laborious chore, she recommended it outright. But when machines became a substitute for the cook’s skill, for her practiced hand and her powers of observation—when they made it possible for someone to cook as if she, too, were a machine—Julia hedged. Yes, you can make hollandaise and mayonnaise in the blender, she assured readers, and included recipes for both the traditional and machine versions. But she begged readers to become adept at making these sauces by hand so they could examine close-up what was happening to the egg yolks. Even an eight-year-old could make blender hollandaise, she added—a remark that wasn’t necessarily an endorsement. Julia never believed good cooking was child’s play. As she scribbled in her notes while writing the introduction to the book, “Life is hard & earnest. Most pains—most results. If know what doing—half battle is won.”
Long hours in the kitchen, hard labor, page after page of instructions, unfamiliar food—Julia did wonder occasionally whether American homemakers were going to be as enthusiastic as she was about these recipes. American newspapers and magazines were constantly running stories about how modern women didn’t know how to cook and refused to learn, preferring to make dinner by opening boxes and cans. Even a gourmet meal, the magazines crowed, could now be put on the table in a half hour. “The advertisers have made people feel like fools if they even wanted to take time over things,” Julia wrote to Simca. “There are loads and loads and loads of books and articles on how to do things quickly, and very very very few on how to make things taste good.” Americans just didn’t think about cooking the way the French did. Homemakers looked at recipes and worried about how many pots and pans were going to get dirty; they liked to economize by using margarine and never dreamed it could affect the flavor of the dish; they put three or four ill-matched ingredients together and served it up as a casserole. “Casseroles,” Julia groaned to Avis. “I even hate the name, as it always implies to me some god awful mess.” Nor could she abide the way Americans made a fetish of nutrition. “I think one should get one’s vitamins in salads, and raw fruits, and what is cooked should be absolutely delicious and to hell with the vitamins.” At a luncheon meeting of the American Embassy Wives Club in Oslo, Julia was served what she described to Simca as “the most horrible meal I have ever had”—a particularly lurid example of what was going on back home. “As we sat down each guest was served a big plate on which there was a tower of pink stuff posed on a piece of lettuce. This tower turned out to be about ½ litre of frozen whipped cream mixed with mayonnaise, frozen strawberries, bananas, peaches, and grapes…everything as hard as a rock. And the lettuce leaf was so small one couldn’t hide anything under it. The next and final course was a banana and nut cake–mix cake, an enormous piece for each guest. Cake was surrounded with a very thick tan-colored frosting, also a mix I suppose, because I can’t imagine anyone making it. Ugh.”
But she refused to believe that frozen fruit salad had permanently numbed the American palate. Surely, if she and Simca could make their recipes clear and foolproof, American homemakers would convert. How could they resist the food, once they had tasted the first perfectly prepared chicken breasts of their lives? The first true omelets? The first cakes made light by their own billowing egg whites, not baking powder? The greater challenge would be to persuade homemakers to undertake such lengthy recipes, given their lackadaisical approach to cooking and the tremendous bugaboo of time. One solution was to do as much as possible ahead of zero hour, and Julia had long made a specialty of this strategy. The clock ticking inexorably toward dinnertime, the sense of panic, the bevy of details frantic for her attention—all this was deeply familiar to her. Throughout her work on the book, the needs of what she called “the chef-hostess” were at the forefront of her thinking. Every recipe, she told Avis, would include directions on how to prepare as much as possible of the dish ahead of time, and how to store and reheat it without sacrificing flavor or texture. “There are so many many things which can be done that way—green veg, fish in sauce, roasts, braises, sautés in sauce—etc.,” she explained. “There is no reason why one has to serve those bloody casseroles all the time.”
Toward the end of 1957, while Julia was living in Washington, she decided it would be a good idea to publish a few articles in American magazines. She and Simca were in the final stages of their work, readying the manuscript for delivery to Houghton Mifflin, and a little advance publicity would certainly benefit the book. After much thought about what might appeal to Americans, she prepared an article featuring the Belgian specialty waterzoï de poulet. It would be timely, since the 1958 World’s Fair was about to open in Brussels, and she felt the recipe would pose no special difficulties to the home cook. Because her editor, Dorothy de Santillana, was based in Boston, Julia sent the article to John Leggett, who was Houghton Mifflin’s New York editor, to “peddle around.” She urged him to explain to magazine food editors that although the recipe was long, it was not at all complicated—merely detailed. To her amazement, there were no takers, even though the recipe required nothing more than sweating the chicken, poaching it in wine, julienning and cooking the aromatic vegetables, and making a rather tricky sauce with egg yolks, cream, and broth. Helen McCully of McCall’s food section took one look and said that if she showed this recipe to her editor, “she would probably faint dead away.” McCully added that she herself could tell what a well-constructed recipe it was, but “to the non-cook it certainly looks like quite a chore.” Julia was not discouraged. She trimmed the recipe and sent it back to Leggett along with another possibility—boned stuffed duck in a pastry crust. “This is a marvelous dish, can be served hot or cold, and makes a splendid effect,” she wrote hopefully. “Most people think this is the kind of impossible thing only a chef could do, but it is quite within the range of even the modest cook if supplied with good directions such as ours.” She envisioned a spread in Life: “Life Bones a Duck.”
Leggett had no success with the articles. McCully said even the shortened version of waterzoï was too complicated for American housewives, and the other food editors had the same reaction. For the first time, Julia started to worry that she might be horribly out of step with the rest of the country. “I am deeply depressed, gnawed by doubts, and feel that all our work may just lay a big rotten egg,” she admitted to Avis. But she hated the thought of turning the recipes into baby talk just because a lot of magazine editors didn’t understand French cooking. “The completed volume will, I believe, speak for itself,” she told Leggett with dignity. Simca came to Washington, and the two women scrambled to finish by deadline day, February 24, 1958.
They made the deadline, but the manuscript they delivered did not speak for itself, at least in any language Houghton Mifflin could understand. The thing was a monster: eight hundred pages, and they covered only poultry and sauces. Julia’s idea was that the book would be published as a series of volumes, one every two years. The next would be eggs and vegetables, then perhaps meat, then soup and fish, and so on into the future—“up to the grave, as the subject is vast,” she predicted happily. She had tried to explain this plan a few months earlier to Dorothy de Santillana, who protested that Houghton Mifflin wanted a cookbook, not an infinite series of cookbooks. The misunderstanding had never been cleared up, and now De Santillana was gazing white-faced at recipes with a quantity of detail that bordered on manic. If you want to make pressed duck, Julia informed American homemakers, you’ll find it hard to locate the right sort of duck—one that was killed by suffocation in order to retain the blood that enriched the sauce—so go ahead and do as so many French restaurants now do, and add fresh pig’s blood mixed with wine to the duck press. “This is not the book we contracted for,” De Santillana said faintly. Julia objected, but when she was able to step back and gain a little perspective on the manuscript, she could see exactly what they had delivered to Houghton Mifflin: a huge, densely overgrown thicket of brambles, impossible to handle.
De Santillana rejected the manuscript outright, but she was still impressed by Julia and Simca, and she invited them to come up with a plan for a more salable book. She even picked up on Julia’s idea of a series, but said the books would have to be very different from the volume in hand. Each one must be very simple and very compact, written to fit the time and attention constraints of the typical American cook, “who is so apt to be mother, nurse, chauffeur, and cleaner as well.” Julia knew this was sensible advice, but it didn’t appeal to her. She was still longing to write a big, fat treatise covering every single essential point about French cooking. Nonetheless, after conferring with Simca, she decided to give in and accept the American way of life in culinary matters, or at least to go along with the prevailing pessimistic view of it. Americans seemed intent on “speed and the elimination of work,” she conceded to De Santillana. “We have therefore decided to shelve our own dream for the time being and propose to prepare you a short and snappy book directed to the somewhat sophisticated housewife-chauffeur.” The book would run about three hundred pages and feature authentic French recipes as well as hints on the “pepping up” of frozen and canned products. “Everything would be of the simpler sort, but nothing humdrum,” she promised. “The recipes would look short. We might even manage to insert a note of gaiety and a certain quiet chic, which would be a pleasant change.”
She was proposing exactly the sort of book she despised. Yes, she would try to lift it above the inanity of most magazine treatments of French cooking—“quiet chic” might help, assuming the format could support such an innovation—but she would be addressing her least favorite people in the world, the ones who firmly resisted cooking. Housewives. Julia had never thought one way or another about the word, but she was growing to hate it. Editors, publishers, everyone who talked about recipes in America bowed and scraped to housewives, those ubiquitous females forever depicted as running frantically from laundry to car pool to scout troop, with no time to cook excellent meals and, it was universally assumed, no desire to learn. The task facing her now would be to win the allegience of this unappealing creature. Other cookbook authors had succeeded; maybe she and Simca could at least raise the standard. She asked Avis to send her a copy of one of Houghton Mifflin’s bestselling cookbooks, Helen Corbitt’s Cookbook, by a popular Texas food expert in charge of the restaurant at Neiman Marcus. Corbitt’s recipe for coq au vin was exactly twenty-five words long, not counting the list of ingredients. “It is such a wonderful example of easy-looking recipes,” Julia wrote; and her admiration was sincere, though not for the food.
But after thinking about the new book for a few weeks, she had to pull back. Canned soup sauces? Casseroles bulging with frozen vegetables? Convenience first, flavor and texture last? Julia just couldn’t bring herself to write for home cooks who bore such ill will toward food that they kept their contact with it to a minimum even while they were making dinner. If she and Simca were going to publish a cookbook, it had to have cooking in it; and if that meant the housewife would be frightened off, then the book would have to reach somebody else. By the time she wrote to De Santillana to confirm the new proposal, she had come up with a working formula for a book she and Simca could produce in good faith—a book that would be realistic about American life, but never cross over to the dark side. “This is to be a collection of good French dishes of the simpler sort, directed quite frankly to those who enjoy cooking and have a feeling for food,” she told her editor. Thus began the writing of the manuscript that would be titled, eventually, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
The goal remained the same—to reach le gout français by means of clear, precise recipes and supermarket ingredients—but Escoffier and the other old masters who had been peering over Julia’s shoulder as she typed were now banished. No longer was she flogging herself to be “complete and exhaustive and immortal,” she told Avis. The challenge was to cut down the number and size of the recipes and reduce the verbiage, while keeping the results pristine. “I can’t get oven-roasted chicken down to less than 2 pages,” she complained. “If you leave out the basting and turning, it ain’t a French roast.” But she did it—roast chicken ran just over two pages in the published book, complete with basting, turning, sauce making, and ahead-of-time note. The new freedom in their approach also meant they could include some of Simca’s own recipes for cakes and desserts, which would turn out to be among the most popular in the book.
It took about a year and a half to produce the new version, and they sent it to De Santillana in September 1959 with a great deal of confidence. She had been reading the chapters as they were finished and after poring over the entire manuscript for four days, she wrote to say that she was stunned and thrilled. “I surely do not know of any other compendium so amazingly, startlingly accurate or so inclusive,” she told Julia. The good news sent Julia, Simca, and Avis soaring, but two months later they were brought back to earth with a thud. Paul Brooks, the editor in chief of Houghton Mifflin, had consulted with the business side of the company and could see no way to publish the book without losing a massive amount of money. Julia had promised a “short, simple book directed to the housewife chauffeur,” Brooks reminded her. What she had delivered was very different—a book so huge, expensive, and elaborate that it was certain to seem formidable “to the American housewife.”
The housewife. There she was again. Brooks assured Julia that if she wanted to give it another try, he would be glad to look at a much-reduced version of the manuscript; but Julia had gone as far into housewife territory as she was willing to go. No pressed duck, complete with history and folklore? Fine. But she wouldn’t cut back on the essentials in the roast chicken recipe. She wouldn’t write for any “chauffeur den-mother” who wasn’t willing to meet her halfway. Defeated, dejected, and feeling guilty about letting down Simca, Julia took herself into the kitchen and started to cook. Pastry skills—here was a whole area of French cooking she knew little about and really should study. She began with tuiles, those very delicate cookies that must be shaped into a curve around a rolling pin as soon as they come out of the oven. “Terribly simple batter to prepare, but in none of the French recipes have I found quite the exact explanation of what is what, so I must start out blind,” she told Avis eagerly. So many pitfalls! How hot should the oven be? What was the right consistency for the batter? What would keep the cookies from breaking as they were transferred from the oven to the rolling pin? Cooking—especially exploratory cooking, in search of the perfect recipe—was always the comfort zone. Now she returned to it.
While Julia was cooking, Avis was plotting. For the last several years, she had been talking about the book with her friend William Koshland, who recently had been made an executive at Alfred A. Knopf, one of the most distinguished publishing houses in the country. Koshland was a food lover and had been following the travails of the manuscript with interest. As a New Yorker with many friends in the culinary world, he was sure that Houghton Mifflin was being shortsighted and that this was exactly the right time for a good, definitive work on French cooking. Housewives might not have the time for long, unfamiliar recipes; but there were, he believed, “real cooks and hobby cooks” everywhere who would be fascinated. People were traveling, they were taking cooking lessons, they were subscribing to Gourmet, and they were buying the huge tomes on high-class cooking published by the magazine—“Never before has this country been so gourmet-minded,” he told Avis. Most of the soothsayers in publishing saw this trend as negligible, at least compared with all the high-speed cooking that was being promoted so adamantly in the media. But something told Koshland that this book, a genuine teaching tool, had the potential to create a market of its own. As the fortunes of the manuscript rose and fell at Houghton Mifflin, Koshland kept reminding Avis he wanted Knopf to be next in line. The moment Julia heard the bad news from Houghton Mifflin, Avis had the manuscript sent directly to Alfred Knopf himself, who—like everyone else in publishing—was a friend of hers. “Do not despair,” she wrote to Julia. “We have only begun to fight.”
Neither Alfred Knopf nor his wife, Blanche, who ran the company with him, had any interest in bringing out a new French cookbook. They had just published Classic French Cooking by Joseph Donon, a protégé of Escoffier. Surely that was enough of a nod to the emerging gourmet market. Alfred didn’t even glance at the manuscript, but as a courtesy to Avis he passed it along to Koshland, who was regarded as the in-house food expert. Koshland promptly handed it to a young editor named Judith Jones, who had lived in France and was a talented cook. The two of them, along with Angus Cameron—the editor who had helped launch Joy of Cooking years earlier at Bobbs-Merrill—worked their way through one recipe after another and grew more excited with every dish they turned out. Jones found the manuscript to be an extraordinary achievement, the first book she had ever seen that made it possible to reproduce the flavors she had loved in France. In Julia’s text, Jones could recognize not only an expert cook but a personable writer and brilliant teacher. Americans would respond to this book. But they wouldn’t even see it unless the Knopfs agreed, and Koshland knew what an obstacle that was. The book would be expensive to put out, he admitted to Avis, but he told her he was ready to “ram it through the board,” no matter how reluctant Alfred and Blanche might be. Julia had refused to let herself feel optimistic about Knopf, especially because of the Donon book, but when she heard this—and when she learned that several editors had actually gone to their stoves and used the recipes and loved them—she allowed the tiniest “coal of hope” to begin to glow.
Koshland won, and the book was formally accepted in May 1960 with Judith Jones at the head of the immense project. For the rest of Julia’s career, Jones would be the editor who counseled, inspired, steadied, and rescued her in countless ways, not only while they worked on books together but in the course of Julia’s work in television, magazines, and public life. It was Jones who came up with the title Mastering the Art of French Cooking—nixing “French Food at Last!,” “French Kitchen Pleasure,” and “Love and French Cooking,” among other contestants—and it was Jones who knew that even Americans might venture on board for a long, tumultuous voyage to cassoulet or French bread if Julia was piloting the ship.
Mastering the Art of French Cooking came out with a gratifying splash in October 1961. Craig Claiborne of the New York Times called it “glorious,” “comprehensive,” “laudable,” and “monumental,” and New York’s culinary elite swarmed to a publication party hosted by Dione Lucas, who had reigned since the 1940s as the nation’s leading expert in French cooking. But there was significant competition that fall, even in the small category of definitive French cookbooks. Gourmet brought out a fat volume called Gourmet’s Basic French Cookbook by Louis Diat, the chef at New York’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, whose columns in the magazine Julia had admired for years. The first American edition of the famous culinary encyclopedia Larousse Gastronomique also turned up, with one of Julia’s classmates from Smith, Charlotte Turgeon, as coeditor. And while Claiborne’s own book, The New York Times Cookbook, wasn’t specifically French, it was certainly sophisticated enough to appeal to many of the passionate home cooks Julia had counted on to buy Mastering. Earlier French cookbooks, including Samuel Chamberlain’s beloved Clementine in the Kitchen and his 619-page Bouquet de France, were still on people’s shelves, along with Dione Lucas’s two books and the first Gourmet cookbook, which had come out in 1950 and continued to sell nicely. There did seem to be talented, ambitious home cooks in America, but perhaps they were happy with the books they already owned. Despite rapturous reviews and an exhilarating cross-country publicity tour—which Julia and Simca organized and paid for themselves—Mastering sold only a modest sixteen thousand copies the first year it was out.
“The sales may not be spectacular, but I have complete confidence that word of mouth will keep this going forever,” Koshland assured Julia. “Word of mouth” did not impress her too much; she’d have preferred to see some advertising. Knopf had produced a splendid-looking book but didn’t seem to be doing much to push it. Most of what the public knew about Mastering came from media attention she and Simca had generated on their tour. “Our publishers really are about as unbusinesslike as any I have encountered,” she fumed to Simca. “They remind me of the little café I used to go to after my morning courses at the Cord. Bleu. One of the boys introduced me to the proprietress saying: I’ve brought you a new customer. Oh, she said, I have enough customers already!”
But Koshland was right, in a sense. The sales did have a life of their own, independent of Knopf’s genteel way with promotion. The target population of enthusiastic home cooks may have been slow to get to bookstores, but to everyone’s surprise there seemed to be a hidden population very willing to take a stab at elaborate French cooking. In the fall of 1962, the Book-of-the-Month Club made Mastering a dividend selection, expecting to distribute around twelve thousand copies. By March, sixty-five thousand books had gone out, orders were still pouring in, and Mastering had become the most popular dividend in the history of the club. Meanwhile, The French Chef, which began in 1963, was making Julia a television star. As the program reached one public television station after another, bookstore sales boomed; and in 1974, Mastering appeared on the New York Times list of the century’s best-selling cookbooks, with 1.3 million copies sold. Nearly a half century after publication, the book had been revised once—to introduce the food processor, among other updates—and reprinted dozens of times. It was still selling steadily at the rate of some eighteen thousand copies a year.
Once the success of the book was established in the mid-1960s, Julia and Simca started thinking about a second volume. By this time Julia was beginning to wriggle free of what she would finally term the straitjacket of traditional French cooking; and Volume II reflects her willingness to take liberties she didn’t allow herself earlier. On the whole, Volume II was devoted to characteristic French food, including charcuterie and pastries, as well as a nineteen-page recipe for French bread, but the section on broccoli shows Julia’s new frame of mind. She had always loved broccoli and couldn’t resist including it in Volume I, even though it was rarely eaten in France. But she had confined herself to just a few instructions, almost apologetic in tone. In Volume II she stood up and gave it a trumpet fanfare: eight pages of French recipes from à la polonaise to timbales—“because this is a book for Americans, and broccoli is one of our best vegetables, and the treatment is à la française,” she explained firmly to Simca. (In truth, the charcuterie, the pastries, and the French bread also identify the book as American—nobody in France would dream of making such things at home.) In her next book, From Julia Child’s Kitchen, she gave herself a truly free hand, right down to an apple betty she christened pommes Rosemarie, and she often said this was her favorite book. “Now I don’t have to be so damned classic and ‘French,’” she exclaimed to Jones. “To hell with that. I am French trained, and I do what I want with my background.” Although she continued to trust French technique as the best starting point for any sort of cookery, the distinction between “French” and “not-so-French” was no longer fundamental to her thinking about food. What emerged in its stead were two categories that had been lurking in the shadows until her career caught up with them.
Early in 1961, as she and Simca were winding down their work on Volume I, Julia looked back on some of the issues they had been wrestling with for nearly a decade. “People are always saying WHAT MAKES FRENCH COOKING SO DIFFERENT FROM OTHER NATIONS’ COOKING?” she reflected in a letter to Simca, and she set down four principles that struck her as definitive.
Serious interest in food and its preparation
Tradition of good cooking…which forms French tastes from youth
Enjoyment of cooking for its own sake—LOVE
Willingness to take the few extra minutes to be sure things are done as they should be done
Nothing on this list, except for “French tastes,” distinguishes French cooking from any other noteworthy cuisine. On the contrary, it’s a list that perfectly sums up Julia’s outlook on food even when she was most deeply committed to le gout français, as she was when she wrote this. Her highest term of culinary praise was never French, or professional, or delicious, though she regularly used such words to describe wonderful food. Her highest praise was the word serious—the very first word that came to her fingertips when she started to type these principles. A “serious” cook, to Julia, was a careful, mindful, thoroughly knowledgeable cook, whose pleasure you could taste in the food. Thus her great admiration for Diana Kennedy and Madhur Jaffrey in later years, though she had little interest in Mexican or Indian cooking.
And at the opposite end of the spectrum from the serious cook was the dark angel who hovered over the last principle in the list, the cook who refused to put in those extra minutes it took to reach perfection. This cook—male or female, French or American, famous name or anonymous homebody—was fatally associated with the term housewife. Julia never did recover from her early, bruising experiences with that word, and she consistently refused to be associated with such creatures. As she put it many times over the years, whenever the subject of housewives came up, “We are aiming at PEOPLE WHO LIKE TO COOK.” Yes, supermarket ingredients could be transformed into authentic French dishes, but not without two ingredients for which there were no substitutes, and Julia named them often: time and love.