by Bob Spitz
Julia admitted, however, that sloppy, even indifferent, work had led to errors in Volume I. There were three recipes specifically that continued to gall her. “I’m not going to have anything in this book that doesn’t work,” she insisted. “Volume II has to be better than Volume I, and I ain’t going to be rushed over it.”
The real snag came not from Simca but an unexpected source. In a letter to her co-author, Julia wrote: “Judith Jones says she wonders if we shouldn’t have one good recipe for French bread.” It was the magic phrase that Julia had been dreading.
Since The French Chef began in 1964, she’d received dozens of letters a week from viewers requesting a recipe for good French bread. It seemed like a natural part of Julia’s repertoire and an essential element to any meal. But Julia knew better. Making French bread was an art not easily duplicated at home, much less with American ingredients and American ovens. God knew she’d never produced a decent baguette, nor, as far as she knew, had Simca. They’d given it a try together, during the posting in Marseille, going through fifty pounds of American flour with no good result. According to Simca, it was “a real disaster!” Since then, Julia skillfully avoided the issue, responding to requests for a recipe by saying “no French person bakes French bread in the home.” In France it was customary to make a daily trip to the neighborhood boulangerie to buy delicious, freshly baked bread crafted by an artisan in specially designed ovens. Granted, that wasn’t the case in the States. The so-called French bread found in American supermarkets was truly awful, a faux-crust with a spongy Wonder Bread core. It was nothing Julia could recommend. But baking it oneself was downright folly.
Viewers understood her reasoning—but Judith Jones was not to be dissuaded. No meal was complete without a baguette, she told Julia. “I thought it was absolutely necessary,” Jones recalls many years later. “Imagine the bible on French cuisine without a recipe for French bread! I wrote Julia back and urged her to research it.”
At the time, Julia was up to her eyeballs in puff pastry. She’d been busy baking fruit tarts, mille-feuilles, Pithiviers, petits fours, even beef Wellington and stuffed lamb baked en croûte—anything that mated with a fine flaky crust. She’d also been burning through a pack of chocolate cake recipes in an attempt to outdo the famous Reine de Saba that stole the spotlight in Volume I; it was a challenge, she discovered, “that was like trying to draw better than Leonardo.” Instead of breaking stride, she fobbed the bread gruntwork off on Paul, who laid claim to a few loaves in his pre-Julia days and was itching to participate.
It was impossible to bake bread at La Pitchoune, where Julia commandeered every inch of available kitchen space. Besides, between epic cooking marathons the Childs were constantly entertaining a clique of ex-pat writers and artists who fed their intellects: author Robert Penn Warren, who lived in the nearby village of Magagnosc; Surrealist painter Max Ernst; and novelist Sybille Bedford, who with her lover, Eda Lord, lived in a hill town just behind Bramafam. Between the dinners and the late-night sessions banging out recipe notes at the typewriter, there was no time left to devote to bread. It was all Julia and Paul could do to catch their collective breath. Once back in Cambridge, however, Paul kicked off what Julia called the Great Bread Experiment with typical obsessive intensity.
Perfecting French bread, he found at the outset, was ostensibly a pipedream. Paul wrestled again and again with the overly fussy active ingredients: flour, yeast, water, and salt. Who ever thought that four basic staples could spark such conflict? There were so many factors involved, too many variables in the magic. For the bread to be ideal, it had to hit all the notes of its chief characteristics: “crust, crumb, flavor, and color,” and, brother, that was easier said than done. Every baguette Paul made in those early attempts could have been stamped “Louisville Slugger” and shipped to the Red Sox for batting practice. “They were hard and heavy,” recalls Judith Jones, who received meticulously packed boxes of his samples in the overnight mail. “I remember opening them up, thinking: ‘Oh, dear—no!’ ”
He worked for months trying to perfect a decent specimen without much luck. By May 1967, Julia joined the fray, and independently, each employing their own systems and methods, they conducted “eighteen separate experiments leading toward the development of real French bread.” Solving the chemistry of the flour gave them a light, moist crumb, but the outside of their baguettes remained pale and paper-thin. They tried to achieve a golden-brown crust by creating a steamy atmosphere in the oven, which was essential to texture, using every trick in the book. “How to get it and how to regulate it and how much for how long are the bugs in the steam business,” Paul reported. A variety of contraptions were devised for just that purpose. First the obvious: a plastic spray bottle used to squirt the loaves proved grossly inadequate. A handful of ice cubes tossed into the oven fared no better. Their “wick system,” which consisted of a wet bath towel protruding out of a pan of water, gave off substantially more steam but the crust was obstinate and refused to color. Finally, a wet whisk broom was dragged across the oven grate, to no better result. “We even researched the medieval method of dampening a bundle of straw and throwing it into the oven to keep the air moist,” Paul recalled.
Julia got close when she heated an iron weight until it glowed red-hot and then dropped it into a pan of water. But “close” was a pedant’s curse. She’d come this far in her work demanding no less than perfection; that baguette recipe had to hit the same peak.
“We’ll lick it yet,” Paul assured her, but by August he wasn’t so sure. He had done “thirty-one careful experiments, and Julie about the same, and we still have not been able to say objectively, ‘this is it!’ ”
What about Simca? Usually, she would weigh in where there were problems to solve. In her memoir, My Life in France, Julia wrote: “Simca had no interest in our breadworks and did not participate at all.” But, in fact, it was Simca’s resourcefulness that eventually put them over the top. Since 1958, she had been taking breadmaking lessons with a boulanger in Bourbonne-les-Bains, turning out dozens, if not hundreds of dozens, of croissants, flûtes, bâtards, and baguettes. Whether Julia asked her to help develop a recipe remains unclear. In their correspondence that summer there was a furious exchange of notes on the subject, dealing with flour, leavening, gluten content, and kneading. But there was no real breakthrough until Simca consulted the oracle.
In her time travels, she had come across the name of Professor Raymond Calvel, the head of the state-run École Professionnelle de Meunerie in Paris and perhaps the world’s leading authority on French bread. Calvel had an encyclopedic knowledge of flours and grains and a sculptor’s flair for giving them form. Simca suspected he could solve their outstanding problems and arranged a one-day tutorial in December 1967. The moment she learned of this, Julia decided that she would attend.
Calvel’s advice was a revelation. It was as if he flipped a switch and suddenly the murky world of French bread zoomed into focus. “Every step in his process was different from anything we had heard of, read about, or seen,” Julia recalled. For one thing, she’d been making “too stiff a dough.” The mixing, rise, and shaping of loaves had been documented in the definitive Boulangerie d’aujourd’hui that had guided her through early experiments, but what inspired Julia most now was how Calvel applied the traditional protocols to the volatile dough.
Usually, Paul added a sprinkling of flour to the dough to make it more pliable and easy to handle. But for a perfect consistency, Calvel explained, the dough had to be sticky enough to create a sponge that would encourage rapid rising. This usually occurred in a warm, dark place, but Calvel preferred a slow, cool fermentation to develop a riper flavor and maintain humidity. “This seems to be the trick that gives the bread its interesting taste and texture,” Julia marveled. He also explained how a gluten cloak enclosed the loaf to protect its shape.
Julia hung on his every word. Calvel’s version of the “arcane craft” may have gone against conventional wisdom, but at le
ast it was a version that could be duplicated and taught. During a hands-on session that lasted more than four hours, he guided Julia through the entire process, so that she could “learn through eye, ear, and by [her] own tactile sense.” The ultimate goal, of course, was to control all the elements so the bread would achieve the level of taste that Julia felt defined French cooking. “Each of the several steps in the process, though simple to accomplish, plays a critical role,” she wrote in a related overview, “and if any is eliminated or combined with another, the texture and taste … will suffer.”
Raymond Calvel provided the foundation for Julia’s fussy standards. With a mix of fondness and contentment, she later recalled how by the end of the day, after “taking copious notes on how the dough should look and feel, and the position of the baker’s hands,” she began turning out perfect loaves of French bread. They were finer specimens than anything she’d seen in the States and comparable to the Parisian gems. A postcard to Judith Jones, mailed directly from the École, revealed a flush of exuberance in the card’s single sentence: “It’s all in the shape,” which, of course, wasn’t the case.
“What was lacking for our perfect loaves,” Simca wrote, “was the right heat-and-steam combination.” They still had to simulate the baker’s oven to accommodate American cooks. “Paul Child’s ingenuity finally helped us come up with the gimmick—to drop a hot brick in a pan of water.” It worked perfectly, too perfectly, until Julia’s niece, Phila, came to visit a few days before the manuscript was due. “I noticed the bricks they put in the oven had asbestos in them,” she recalled. The discovery threw the Childs into “a complete tizzy.” They’d read the recent warnings about asbestos exposure, how scientists believed it led to mesothelioma, a form of cancer that attacked the outer lining of the lungs. As the clock ticked toward deadline Paul flew madly around Boston ransacking the local building-supply stores, but there was a degree of asbestos in all brick. Ultimately, Julia gave her readers a choice: “plopping a heated brick or a stone into a pan of water,” in addition to lining the oven floor with quarry tiles.
It had taken almost a year “and two hundred-and-eighty-four pounds of flour” to develop the master bread recipe with American ingredients. In the early rush to deliver it, so many mistakes were made. Paul recalled how “things were dropped on the floor, three times too much salt was put in, crusts were burned black, or the bread was only half-baked and the loaves were often rushed into the oven so fast they curled up like crullers.” But finally the end results were perfect each time out. Even when Julia got carried away with tweaks and fillings, the loaves emerged without a flaw. According to Sara Moulton, who assisted Julia later in her career, “what came out of her oven was better than boulangerie bread.”
The question, now, was whether amateur cooks would actually make their own. Julia needed operational proof, in this case from her retinue of volunteer analysts who would test the recipe and offer concise feedback. She needed to know if the directions were coherent, and if her ideal reader, a typical American home cook, could follow them with success.
The verdict was in even before the yeast began to rise.
“I got this package in the mail, about an inch-and-a-half thick,” recalls Pat Pratt, Julia’s friend and neighbor in Cambridge. It was the final typescript for French bread. “I took one look at it and knew everything had gone bust: the recipe was thirty-two pages long.”
BREAD! BREAD! BREAD! The whole of 1967 seemed devoted to the stuff. Baking, in general, seemed so damned ungovernable (a reason, perhaps, that it was Simca’s specialty), but once demon bread had been exorcised, everything felt possible. If anything, the twelve months of unpredictability had given Julia and Simca even more perspective on the subject. In early 1968, they kept their ovens on overdrive, cranking out croissants, brioche, pound cake, spice cake, and a showstopper—a meringue-nut layer cake they called Le Succès.
Through it all, Julia persevered in her routine. Everything was geared to maintaining a rhythm. In the winter, she holed up in the south of France, away from the public hubbub, where she could bore undisturbed into Mastering II. Friends, even those who supported her through the first book, were astonished by the obsessively long hours she put in. (Simca’s nephew quipped, “That’s probably why Paul’s such a grouchy bastard.”) Mornings and afternoons were devoted to cooking. Then, after a dinner with guests that stretched long into the night, she retreated to a bedroom, dragged out her Hermès portable typewriter, and transcribed the day’s notes into the wee hours of the morning. She had a klatch of pen pals—Judith Jones, Avis DeVoto, James Beard, Ruth Lockwood, her sister Dort—with whom she kept up a running correspondence. Whenever Paul wrote to his brother, she added a few paragraphs. Every so often, she filched an hour or two to work in the garden or steal into Cannes for her weekly hair-do at Elizabeth Arden. No matter what, she was always ready around five o’clock when Paul emerged from his studio—his cabanon, as he called it—in time for a reverse martini (one part gin and three parts vermouth) or a tumbler of bourbon.
Julia also kept the reservations book for the revolving-door calendar of frequent houseguests. The most frequent, of course, being James Beard, who came often for long stretches during the winter and summer. From a table on the porch, he worked on recipes and notes for what would become American Cookery, to this day considered his chef-d’œuvre, and whenever possible he cooked with Julia and Simca, with whom he enjoyed a flirtatious repartee. They also ate like royalty; their table spreads resembled those of the court of Louis XIV at Versailles—whole lobes of foie gras, ortolan, black and white truffles, Iranian caviar—with wines that, by today’s standards, would cost $500 or $700 a bottle. M. F. K. Fisher was another of Julia’s periodic guests, though at first Julia found her “too self-absorbed” and “didn’t warm to her.” But Fisher, an eloquent, sensual, magnificent interpreter of the culinary landscape, persisted in pursuing a friendship by subordinating herself to Julia’s and Jim’s distinction, which touched Julia, although the admiration was mutual. “I saw you once on TV and thought you were exactly right,” Fisher wrote to Julia, breaking the ice, thus insinuating herself in the charmed Bramafam circle.
But once back in the States, Julia wasted no time in attending to a bulging calendar of obligations. In addition to preparing a full slate of new French Chef episodes, she also hosted a one-hour documentary special, The White House Red Carpet, a behind-the-scenes peek at its kitchen operation during preparations for a state dinner honoring Prime Minister Saito Makoto of Japan. President Johnson, she was told, would not appear, but as Julia and the crew were coming out of the White House flower shop, “a great field of blue” swept along the corridor with a dog in tow. “Mother of God, it’s the President,” Russ Morash realized, just as he and the blue blur collided belly-to-belly. Today, that would have sparked a code-one Secret Service intervention, but in less spooky times an introduction ensued. Morash recalled: “Johnson merely looked at us as if we were something nasty on his shoe, then at the dog—the same dog that he’d infamously lifted by the ears—and said, ‘Come on, Yuki,’ before hurrying away.” At least the food was more inviting. “The food could not have been any better,” Julia declared, much unlike her experience years later, when President Reagan’s chef served chipped beef, cream cheese, veal madeleine en croûte with mayonnaise, and purple sorbet with canned peaches.
There was hardly time for Julia to appreciate the White House affair as she spun right into a series of high-profile magazine interviews. The French Chef Cookbook had thrust her back into the spotlight with a media groundswell that took everyone by surprise. Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Vogue, all the big-ticket monthlies were clamoring for her time. Just when it seemed that Mastering sales were tapering off into a slow but steady flow, The French Chef Cookbook came on like a gusher. The first edition—that 100,000 splurge print run that Bob Gottlieb had requisitioned—sold out on release, triggering another huge printing. “We were staggered!” Paul exclaimed in a roundup to his
brother. Just the other month, he and Julia had detoured through the Harvard Coop, and saw two enormous stacks of the book forsaken on the floor. “Our hearts sunk,” he recalled, “and we thought, ‘My God, the poor bastards have got themselves way out on the limb and probably most of those books will have to be remaindered.’ ”
So much for prophecy. Only four weeks after its release, the cookbook shot onto the Herald Tribune’s best-seller list, the first of its kind on the vaunted registry.
The new wave of success got Julia to thinking. This wasn’t some overnight sensation that would soon fade. In fact, if the critics were right, if Mastering and The French Chef were not just groundbreaking but acknowledged classics, then their predominance might live on well after Julia and Simca were gone. But in what shape? And to whose benefit? She wanted to avoid the fates that befell Fannie Farmer and the Joy of Cooking. Both those books were modified by their respective literary executors and watered down to a pale shade of their original editions. “This must not happen to our books,” she insisted to Simca. They needed to address the future while they could still control it—perhaps decide who had the same sensibility as they and was qualified to re-edit the manuscript so that it maintained their standards, as well as how subsequent royalties would be dispensed. Even in 1968, at the age of fifty-six, Julia had already planned to leave her share to Smith College. Perhaps because of her mother’s strong ties, she felt a deep allegiance to the school that failed her academically and only recently had refused to honor her with the Smith Medal. In any case, she hired a lawyer, Brooks Beck, to protect her interests and urged Simca to do the same.
There was also a wild card they needed to consider: Louisette. She continued to profit from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which was fine by Julia; Louisette was entitled to her 10 percent share. But she remained part owner of the title of the book. Legally, that also gave her and her heirs the right to exploit and determine the future direction of the copyright, and that was not fine by Julia, not fine at all. In no way would she sign a contract with Knopf for Mastering II until that little road bump had been resolved.
