by Karen Karbo
It was all there: the stuff Julia geeked out over, everything you would ever need to cook anything, and a lot of things whose uses you wouldn’t understand even after someone explained them to you. The pots, sauté pans, skillets, roasting pans, and sauciers. The aspic molds and soufflé dishes. The enameled cast-iron Dutch ovens and ceramic baking dishes. The colanders, couscoussiers, and crêpe pans. The poultry scissors and brass-plated duck press. An entire aisle of pitted wooden shelves displaying rows of what appear to be tin loaf pans filled with every kind of knife on earth. A wall of whisks, separated according to size—pinky finger to baseball bat—in individual wooden cubbies.
A cream-colored pegboard, not unlike the one Paul made for Julia, rose to the ceiling; dozens of the famous Dehillerin tin-lined copper pots hung in haphazard lines. I pulled down a saucepan, appreciated its heft. There was no price tag on it, but I know from my online research that this size runs about sixty-five euros ($85).
As it happened, I had just finished reading (and loving) My Kitchen Wars, Betty Fussell’s great caustic memoir of marriage and cooking. Fussell, a cookbook author, food historian, and, by her own admission, angry, overeducated housewife, is only a year younger than my mother would have been, and Mastering the Art of French Cooking changed her life, just as it did my mother’s.
She raved about how Julia gave her, and all of her friends, permission to treat cooking—“the one activity, besides tennis, in which housewives were encouraged to excel”—as an art. She wrote about how Julia insisted that the servantless American cook have proper, professional tools, sending Betty and her friends dashing in their suburban station wagons into Manhattan from the New Jersey suburbs to buy tin-lined copper pots, with the requisite minimum one-eighth-inch-thick bottoms. “This was no undertaking for the poor,” wrote Betty Fussell.
Standing in Dehillerin, holding the copper saucepan, I remember reading that section and thinking, Huh, really? We weren’t rich, and then coming to a sentence farther down on the page: “Out went the Revere Ware at the first Hospital Charity Sale.”
Not at our house it didn’t, I thought. Even though we had a dishwasher, every night I washed our Revere Ware by hand, “to keep it nice.” Nice being maintaining the cheap copper wash on the stainless-steel bottom. My mother watched The French Chef in the den of our Southern California tract house in Whittier, with a steno pad on her knee. In the cupboard of her orange and yellow kitchen, gold-veined mirror tiles installed over the sink to “open up the room,” her copy of Mastering had folded-back corners and wine-stained pages, just as did the copies of the more educated, much more sophisticated Fussell.
The allure of Julia Child, my mother once said to me, was that she believed in doing things right. My mother cooked like a mad fool with her Revere Ware and “oven-safe” Pyrex baking dishes, and even though I longed only for Taco Night, I knew my mother’s food, her coq au vin and veal scallops, her beef bourguignon and Dover sole sautéed in some damn thing, was good. I imagine it’s a tribute to both Julia and my mother that she managed it with such crappy, low-brow cookware.
I put the saucepan back on the pegboard, although for a minute I thought about putting it on my head, as I used to my mother’s Revere Ware, when I was in a mood. I remembered that my own daughter used to wear my Revere Ware on her head as well. Was it genetic? Or a silent, subconscious reminder from little daughters to dutiful mothers throughout the ages: Remember the silly fun to be had with these pots and pans?
There’s no checkout counter to speak of at Dehillerin. There are frazzled Frenchmen with rolled cuffs and stubby pencils behind their ears who figure out how much you owe on a scrap of paper and then send you with your items and the bill to a desk, over which hangs a faded black-and-white still of Julia as The French Chef, behind not one, but two protective plastic covers.
THE ROAD TO SUCCESS AND THE ROAD TO FAILURE ARE ALMOST EXACTLY THE SAME*
At the end of 1956, Paul was summoned home by the State Department for home leave, and he and Julia resettled in the house they’d purchased just after they were married on the outskirts of Georgetown, in Washington, D.C. Julia used some of her inheritance money to renovate the kitchen: new gas range, dishwasher, and a “pig” (an in-sink garbage disposal), readying herself for the final push in completing what she and Simca had come to call, simply, The Book. Simca came from France,† and they worked fourteen-hour days, completing the final poultry recipes and retesting some of the first sauce recipes they’d concocted five years earlier. They enjoyed that special hell reserved for people who’ve spent so long on a project that the sheer effort of creating it has forced them to evolve into such different people from the ones who’d launched into it years earlier; all the early work, once thought to be excellent, is seen for what it is: the work of someone just starting out.
At the same time, prompted by both Avis and the people at Houghton Mifflin, Julia tried to place some of their recipes with Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, and other women’s magazines. Julia gave it a shot, but she disparaged the “ladies magaziney” approach to a lot of cooking—like using a paper bag to dredge a piece of poultry in flour instead of just using your hands—and she was disappointed when she found no takers. Even her simplest recipes were deemed too difficult. Editors replied saying that not only were Julia’s highly detailed, complex instructions a waste of time but also in some cases they were, frankly, a little demented.
One of her original motivations in writing the book was to clarify and unpack confusing instructions that had become accepted as part of cookbook vernacular. “Brown the chicken” means what, exactly? “Sauté the mushrooms”: Is that like browning the mushrooms in the same way you brown the chicken? Do you cover the pan? Do you stir them or bounce them around, or what? “Add the cream and wine”: Which one goes first or does it matter? Do you stir them in?
In her recipes, “detailed” and “complicated” as they were, Julia was attempting to banish forever the vague language that tripped up home cooks, giving them a way to re-create the same perfect dish now and forever more. Before Julia, recipes were not unlike the one for gingerbread that M.F.K. Fisher rhapsodizes about in Serve It Forth. After the “old black honey, the older and blacker the better” is heated and combined with flour, the cook is instructed to put the resulting paste in a cold place for as long as she can.* When she can stand it no longer, she retrieves the bowl, adds the rest of the ingredients, and then is instructed to beat it “for a painfully long time.”
That said, as right as Julia would turn out to be, she wasn’t always as in touch with her audience as she imagined herself to be. While magazine and book editors tended to view housewives as being only a few IQ points smarter than a well-trained Labrador retriever, and with much less daring,† Julia sometimes overestimated their dedication and underestimated their degree of squeamishness.‡ In her effort to help home cooks with their pressed duck, she suggested that since it was unlikely they would be able to find a duck that had been suffocated rather than shot—there is too much blood loss when they are shot; duck blood is necessary for enriching the taste of the sauce—“go ahead as so many French restaurants do now, and add fresh pig’s blood mixed with wine to the duck press.” A terrific suggestion, had her goal been to create a nation of vegetarians.
The first deadline for The Book was February 24, 1958. The official title was French Cooking for the American Kitchen, and it was nearly eight hundred pages long.
The story has been told many times, how Julia and Simca delivered an unwieldy behemoth, not the smart French cookbook geared for the American housewife/chauffeur that Houghton Mifflin had contracted for, but a mad, not to say obsessive, compilation of every sauce and poultry recipe in the known French culinary universe. Still to be addressed were eggs, vegetables, fish, meat, and desserts. In a letter to Avis, Julia wrote, “We intend to take an attack position. That this is the type of series of books we plan to do, and that Volume II will be ready well within a year of the publication of Vol. I;
and that Volume III will be ready within about six months of Volume II. This is going to mean hard and constant application but we feel it must be done …”
Houghton Mifflin did not feel the same, and it was a good thing, too. Eight hundred pages of sauces and poultry? As Dorothy de Santillana pointed out in her respectful rejection letter, length aside, the two don’t have anything in common, aside from the fact that Julia and Simca happened to focus on those sections first. Oh, I know. The romance of this kind of saga demands that the suits get a bad rap for thinking only of the bottom line, for quashing Julia’s creative integrity and genius, but the meanies and the pencil pushers aren’t always wrong. Houghton Mifflin saved Julia from herself and helped her to refocus. In case there’s any doubt, after Julia became the most famous cook in America, with a spate of best-selling cookbooks and a hit TV show, with Emmys, honorary doctorate degrees, and a running spot on Good Morning America, did she call Judith Jones on her private line at Knopf and say, “We must publish an eight-hundred-page book on sauces and poultry?” No, she did not.
Her letter acknowledging the rejection letter was determinedly upbeat, her attack position abandoned. She acknowledged that what she and Simca had slaved away on was not what they’d been contracted to do, and that they were prepared to write a “short and snappy book directed to the somewhat sophisticated housewife/chauffeur” of about three hundred pages that would include “unusual vegetable dishes including the pepping up of canned and frozen vegetables” and, hopefully, even “insert a note of gaiety and a certain quiet chic.”
Julia was frustrated and heart-bruised. Avis, who never lost the faith, consoled her with the truth that nothing we learn ever goes to waste, and that someday her work would pay off.
It could not be said of Julia that she was no quitter. She’d quit quite a few things in her time. At Smith she quit the basketball team when it was obvious she wasn’t the star her mother had been. She quit the Packard Commercial School after a mere month,* quit her good job at W. & J. Sloane and New York City entirely after she’d been jilted by Tom, her literature major boyfriend. Julia’s passion and sense of theatrics cut both ways; she could throw herself out of something as easily as she could throw herself into it.
There was no reason why she shouldn’t have quit The Book, too. Why persist? The project had occupied her time, given her a sense of purpose, and enriched her life beyond measure, while Paul was overworking at his various embassies. Creating The Book had given her a métier and a raison d’être, words that find feeble translation in English. Also, unlike writing an eight-hundred-page novel that no one wants, the recipes you’ve created for a cookbook are useful. You still have to eat. It’s the nature of cookery-bookery that several times a day you can still practice the thing that inspired you to want to write a cookbook in the first place. Indeed, for people who have a tortured ambivalence about cooking, the exact same thing plunges us into Sisyphean despair, that not ninety minutes after we’ve cleaned up after one meal it’s time to start preparing the next one. But this is cause for great joy for a devoted foodie like Julia. She and Paul would still need to eat, and she could still cook up a storm, dirtying every copper pot in the place. That would never change.
It couldn’t have helped her frame of mind to witness firsthand the state of American cuisine. She and Paul had been abroad for many years, and they had only heard about the invasion of entire frozen meals that were served in the compartmentalized tin tray in which they were heated and then consumed on trays in front of the television. Julia and Paul didn’t own a television, nor had they ever watched it. Craig Claiborne, the then-new food editor and restaurant critic for the New York Times, bemoaned the state of cooking in America.
At any rate, life was moving on. Paul had just accepted a posting in Norway, at the Cultural Affairs Office in Oslo. Publicly she was grateful for the posting—Paul needed to work, and this was a promotion—but Julia sobbed in private at the thought of packing up her batterie de cuisine and leaving her new gas range, the dishwasher, and pig in the sink for another tiny kitchen in another foreign country that was not France.
The obvious lesson in all this, knowing how it all turned out, is that when faced with a setback of this magnitude, there is nothing for it but to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and soldier on with renewed determination to succeed! If only it were that easy. Julia was in a funk. How did she manage to persevere, turning a stupendous failure into a groundbreaking success?
Keep trying, keep failing.
Paul and Julia sailed for Europe on the SS United States, stopping in France for a few days to indulge in a bilious-inducing tour of their favorite restaurants and see old, beloved friends. Julia’s first friend in Paris, Hélène Baltrusaitis, had just organized a special exhibit at the US Information Agency (USIA), Paul’s old haunt: “The Twenties: American Writers in Paris and Their Friends.” Julia and Paul missed the exhibit by a few days, but not the chance to make the acquaintance of Sylvia Beach, owner of Shakespeare and Company and publisher of Ulysses. If anything could coax the famously reclusive playwright Samuel Beckett from his hidey-hole on the rue des Favorites, it would be a celebration of his beloved James Joyce.
Until the end of her long life, Julia was never afraid to seek the advice of experts.
In all the Western world, no one was a bigger expert on failure than Beckett. If Julia was happiest in the kitchen, the author of Waiting for Godot was happiest in the pit of despair. Who better, then, to advise her on how to go on when you simply couldn’t go on?
They met for dinner at La Closerie des Lilas on Boulevard du Montparnasse and sat on the lamp-lit terrace. Since it was spring, chances are it was depressing and gray, just the kind of weather Beckett preferred. Inside, the same piano player who entertained Hemingway, Picasso, Apollinaire, and all the rest, played his old standards. The two feasted on escargots with garlic and parsley butter, duck foie gras terrine, steak tartare, and white asparagus. They enjoyed one of those beautiful, perfectly matured Bordeaux that made Julia swoon.
Beckett, who resembled a bird-of-prey, with his large, bony nose and thick, cowlicky, stand-up gray hair, was known to be a man of few words. But Julia wielded her polecat-charming genius and had him waxing philosophical before the end of the first course. He nodded sagely—also something at which he was an expert—as he listened to her tale of cookery-bookery woe, then reminded her that as long as you take even one step forward you haven’t failed.
Success was complicated, he said, but failure is easy. All you had to do was keep going, one step at a time. All you had to do was solve the problem in front of you.
“Try again. Fail again. Fail better,” he said, over the cheese course.
Of course, this meal is a figment of my butter-addled imagination. This meal never happened, or not that any of the Julia scholars know of, but given how Julia proceeded, it might have. She spent the last two days in Paris working with Simca, who was recovering from an attack of gout, on a failed recipe for jambon en croûte, determined to give Houghton Mifflin a cookbook they would be proud to publish.
Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Given Julia’s dedication to doing things right, her passion for teaching, and her aversion to shortcuts, she was never going to be able to produce the “short and snappy” three-hundred pager she promised Dorothy de Santillana. Even if she could do it, there’s every chance that Avis, who was not only her best friend, confidant, and mentor, but also an important publishing-world contact, would not have let her.
Avis was that outlier, the most excellent housewife-chauffeur, and Julia’s perfect reader. Without Avis, there could have been no Julia Child, The French Chef. Houghton Mifflin was DeVoto’s publisher, and it was Avis who hooked Les Trois Gourmandes up with Dorothy Santillana, but her greatest gift was guiding Julia so that her zeal didn’t get in the way of her message.
Julia loved French cuisine only a smidge less than she loved Paul: the discipline it required and the respect it demanded, but
she was also, at heart, a populist. She wanted the people most disparaged by the world of gastronomy—American housewives—to have a shot at making something great to eat. She was on a mission to demystify French cuisine. She was Toto, pulling away the curtain to reveal the Great Oz.
Despite her dedication to process, about taking the proper amount of time and never heeding the siren call of shortcuts, Julia was never a food snob. Once, when she and Paul were living in Germany, they made a trip back to the States, and she claimed the only good thing she ate was a foot-long hot dog with sauerkraut. When they moved back to the States, for good, settling not far from where Avis lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Julia went on record as saying the only thing wrong with McDonald’s was that they didn’t serve red wine.
In editing the original book-length chapter of sauces and poultry, Julia struggled to simplify, while still being thorough. She’d gotten the message, finally, that for someone who wasn’t naturally and perpetually high on life, love, cooking, and Paris, her recipes could be a lot of work, especially since her potential readers suffered a dilemma completely foreign to French women: having to bust ass in the kitchen while being expected, at the same time, to float among their guests, the serene hostess. Even when she and Paul remodeled their kitchen in Georgetown, she refused to entertain the notion of installing a professional stove, because she knew her housewife audience would never own such a thing. To that end, she tried to structure her recipes so that some steps could be done in advance.
Avis was a genius at helping Julia strike the right balance. Reading the first draft Avis made a note, “I have a strong impression that very few American butchers these days know how to pull tendons.” Yet she also encouraged her not to dumb down the book: “Use finesse as often as you like—once you have explained what it means once or twice.”
