by Bob Spitz
James Beard was an emerging force—The New York Times had recently crowned him the “Dean of American Cookery”—and Julia considered him “one of the best of the current cook bookers.” His Fish Cookery was becoming one of her all-time favorites. But Beard seemed more interested in domestic regional cuisine, recipes like pot roast, turkey hash, meat loaf, and bread pudding, and, therefore, was not much of a competitive threat.
Nor was anything written by Poppy Cannon, but for an altogether different reason. It was hard for Julia to even get a grasp on Cannon, the wildly popular “food expert” on NBC’s Home show, the forerunner of Today, and author of the best-selling The Can-Opener Cookbook. What could you say about someone who made “vichyssoise with frozen mashed potatoes, one leek sautéed in butter, and a cream of chicken soup from Campbell’s?” Or made a “French” variation of floating island with lemon Jell-O in the shape of miniature hearts, roosting on a “small golden sea of soft Royal Custard sauce?”
Only Louis Diat gave Julia pause. For years, Diat had been the chef at the Ritz-Carlton in New York before landing at Gourmet, where he wrote a series of articles on French recipes for the American cook. “He really is the only good thing in Gourmet,” Avis insisted, and Julia agreed. She and Simca thought he was “extremely good” when it came to preparing serious food, but still a long way off from approaching their level of accuracy. Diat’s measurements, in particular, drove Julia up a wall. His recipe for chicken chasseur called for a “half glass of white wine.” But how large a glass, Julia wondered—a shot glass, a tumbler? Risotto with sausages sounded divine, but what kind of rice, and what kind of sausages? How stupid, she thought, to spend one’s life juice on something, and have it a failure, just because of a faulty technical conception. She and Simca wouldn’t abide such oversights. It would be negligent on their part, a disservice to their reader. Their book—“this elephant of ours”—had to be meticulous, precise. “It must communicate and must be the cook’s best friend.”
BUT FIRST IT had to find its way into print.
They’d been grooming the elephant for six long years when the time came, at long last, to assess what they had. By the end of 1957 the book was far from finished. “Meat and fish are going to take several years, I think!” Julia admitted. Yet it wasn’t like they’d been sitting on their hands. The manuscript had swelled to a whopping 750 pages—frightful, considering there were only two chapters, sauces and chicken. They’d figured on ten chapters in all to cover the ground. The way they were going, it would be a monster in the end, an encyclopedia, which would intimidate most cooks.
But maybe, just maybe, that was just what the book needed to become: an encyclopedia—if not in girth, at least in form. If it were published as a series, Julia mused, then Houghton Mifflin could put out the initial volume fairly soon. Avis DeVoto was not so sure. “I would sort of hate to see two volumes,” she responded, “but then having too fat a book would be as bad, and hard to handle and use.” Avis suggested they run it by their editor, Dorothy de Santillana.
Julia proposed to do better than that. Simca was due to arrive for a three-month visit in January 1958 and they planned to present the finished chapters to Houghton Mifflin themselves, in Boston, on Monday, February 24. She would broach the format in person at that time.
One can only imagine the lead-up to the meeting. The women were “hard at it night and day,” whipping everything—the gamut of recipes, the loose ends—into shape. Upon proofreading, they discovered the manuscript was a mash-up: the product of two women with vastly different literary styles working on vastly different subjects an ocean apart. When finally put together, it was like yin and yang. The sauce chapter alone was a recipe for disaster. It was written in 1952, before Julia knew much about cooking—or writing, for that matter—and lay untouched since that time. There were sections in the poultry chapter that still needed polish. Haphazard as it was, their efforts were not in vain, and on February 23 they set out for Boston to bridle the elephant once and for all.
When they got to Union Station, however, their plans went awry. Every train north of Baltimore had been canceled, due to a monster snowstorm battering the northeast coast. Boston was buried under a foot of fresh snow. There was nothing going in or out, they were told.
Zut and double zut! All that sweat, all that toil—the sum of which, French Cooking for the American Kitchen, rested in a cardboard box at their feet. Would a couple of tough birds like Julia and Simca let a mere snowstorm ground them? Not a chance, not after six years of exacting work. Julia spotted a Greyhound terminal adjacent to the station. For some mystifying reason the buses were still running, so they boarded a coach bound for Boston.
The trip took eleven hours in all, as the bus “chugged and slithered through the driving snow.” Simca and Julia took turns holding the manuscript on their laps to keep it from sliding across the narrow aisle. The trip was grueling, draining. It was well after midnight when the bus finally pulled into Boston and another hour before they arrived at Avis’s house in Cambridge.
It was still snowing the next afternoon, when Julia and Simca made their way downtown, to the Houghton Mifflin editorial offices. The meeting, with Dorothy de Santillana, was more social than businesslike, all three women gratified to have finally met after years of billowing correspondence. De Santillana’s enthusiasm for the book was already well established. Not only was she “profoundly impressed” by the manuscript, but also delighted with the recipes, many of which she had tested with great success. She was gracious and agreeable, despite the elephant that had been dropped off on her desk. According to Avis DeVoto, Julia overheard various male editors express reservations about the book, saying: “Americans don’t want to cook like that. They want something quick, made with a mix.” But anything of the sort is probably apocryphal, the product of a memoir more than forty years later. Julia and Simca were treated warmly at Houghton Mifflin, introduced to staff around the office, and left without receiving any editorial critique. It was an altogether superficial kind of meeting. “Neither of us said much,” Julia remembered, on the way back to Cambridge.
When Julia finally got critical reaction from de Santillana, in a letter dated March 21, 1958, the book’s fate took an ominous turn. “With the greatest respect for what you have done (for the labor involved is gargantuan),” it began, “we must state forthwith that this is not the book we contracted for … It has grown into something much more complex and difficult to handle than the original book.” Julia kept reading but the verdict was emphatically clear. Houghton Mifflin was rejecting the book. After all that work, all that devotion. She was crushed, just crushed. How could she tell Simca?
They had no choice but to absorb the impact of the decision. They agreed that Americans probably desired a more “compact, simplified” cookbook, something that hastened the trend toward convenience. De Santillana had suggested they consider revising the manuscript, drafting a much smaller book or “perhaps a series of small books devoted to particular portions of the meal,” but neither plan lit a fire under the women. It would mean watering down each recipe to a leaky helping of shortcuts, nothing different from the atrocities offered in Woman’s Day or McCall’s. After brainstorming with Simca, Julia dashed off a letter to her editor, declining the proposal.
“The cook who interests us,” she wrote, “is the one [who] … has the time to devote to the more serious and creative aspects of cooking. She has to have a certain amount of sophistication, and the conception that good cooking, especially good French cooking, is an art-form requiring techniques and hard work.” Anything else was better left to the masters of abbreviation—the canned-soup connoisseurs and frozen-food aficionados. “We therefore propose that our mutual contract for ‘French Cooking for the American Kitchen’ be cancelled, and the advance of $250 be returned at once.”
That was it. They’d pulled the plug, they were finished. It seemed incredible that their dream project was over just like that. But after sleeping on it, Julia drew a
slash across the letter and backed away from their hard-nosed stance.
“We’ll just have to do it over,” she told Simca.
Overnight, the two women had a change of heart. They’d come to the conclusion that it made more sense to do what their editor asked—“to compress the ‘encyclopedia’ into a single volume, about 350 pages long”—than to try and place the book with a new publisher. The new book, they proposed, would be “short and snappy,” the kind of work that appealed to the “somewhat sophisticated” housewife. They might even take on canned soups and frozen vegetables—at least, ways to improve them using French techniques. “Everything would be of the simpler sort,” she wrote, “but nothing humdrum.” In any case, they promised to deliver a new, complete manuscript within six months’ time.
Beneath the compromise, they saw that cutting was inevitable. The whole trend in America was for easy solutions, to pull off functions like dinner without torment or effort. One hugely popular craze did away altogether with the stove. Outdoor cooking, on the grill, was a post-war phenomenon that was as low-down and prevalent as TV dinners. It had even won endorsement from the culinary establishment. By 1959, no less a maître than James Beard had written four anthologies on backyard barbecuing, and Houghton Mifflin had a Texas version on its current list. If Julia and Simca wanted to break into what they called cookbookery, they realized that French classicism needed a modern twist. Their “emphasis would [have to] be on how to prepare ahead and how to reheat.” There was no middle ground. Julia had learned this much since returning to the States: if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Nothing complicated or French about that.
“HOW TO SAUTÉ” was out; “How to Brown” was out, too. So was “How to Caramelize a Mold.” “How to Boil an Egg” and “How to Boil a Potato” were also scratched, along with half the recipes for elaborate sauces.
Julia and Simca had taken a cleaver to their manuscript in an effort to trim and cut the fat. Anything that smacked of excessive labor was dispatched to the bin. Jerusalem artichoke soup—gone. Oxtail soup—ditto. They bade adieu to fennel soup and tarragon cream. The grande cuisine of Escoffier and Brillat-Savarin was edited to reflect a simpler, more accessible cuisine bourgeoise. Estouffade aux trois viandes—a Norman three-meat stew—was dropped in favor of bœuf bourguignon. Fish aspics and quenelles gave way to more fundamental mousses. As for pressed duck, the authors recognized that it was a tall order for an American housewife to locate a bird suffocated properly so that its blood remained in its body for the sauce. Julia initially explained that they could use a French restaurant trick—substituting fresh pig’s blood mixed with red wine instead—but there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in a hot oven of that one flying.
The revisions grew increasingly more difficult. How do you cut corners for a true French roast chicken? The original recipe ran more than five pages long, covering each essential point, from trussing through carving. For Julia, it was the ultimate ordeal. “I can’t get oven-roasted chicken down to less than 2 pages,” she protested. “If you leave out the basting and turning, it ain’t a French roast.”
In their new form, the recipes required retesting and rewriting, both of which took time and patience, and as far as patience went, Julia was down half a quart. The cookbook experience had been so damn trying. She’d put everything she had into it—and more. Now she was back at square one-and-a-half, giving it whatever was left in the tank just to make it to two. As a distraction, she decided to resume teaching. Throughout the spring of 1958, she conducted a weekly cooking class in Philadelphia, driving four hours each way to and from Washington, while preparing demanding French dishes that showcased her recipes. She also taught a group of women in her Olive Street kitchen, as part of L’École des Trois Gourmandes.
At some point in 1958, Julia began wondering where all of this was leading. The book contract was fine in theory, but she no longer felt secure in its outcome. And Paul, although secure, wasn’t in love with his job. He enjoyed curating the exhibits for the USIA, but deplored the thicket of bureaucracy that constrained his every move. In another four years, he’d turn sixty and at that point he was calling it quits to work on his own art. Retirement wasn’t a word Julia had given much thought to, not at fifty anyway. It wouldn’t satisfy her one bit to sit around doing nothing, especially in Washington, D.C., which was a one-company town. There wasn’t much in the city to feed her, socially or intellectually. When push came to shove, neither she nor Paul were keen on settling there.
In effect, they were rootless. So many postings had left them living out of suitcases and boxes, their belongings hanging on temporary hooks. Like summer-stock actors, they had learned to pack up and move on the spur of the moment, itinerant and adaptable. Paul had been on the move since the early 1930s, Julia following not long after college. The gypsy life suited them—seeing the world, sharing new experiences. But the thought of dropping permanent anchor gave them real pause. Where would they go? What place could hold them?
Paris was always a possibility. They had been happiest there; the city was even more of a movable feast than Hemingway knew. But it was so distant from family and friends, and no matter how enthusiastically they immersed themselves in all things French they would always be outsiders. Pasadena, as far as Paul cared, was enemy territory, conservative to the core, with a father-in-law from hell. And Julia felt about New York the way she felt about pudding; it was fine once or twice a month, but not as an everyday staple.
During a visit to Avis’s, over the July Fourth weekend, the idea of Cambridge gradually entered the picture. It was a lovely, intellectual community, closely entwined with Radcliffe and Harvard. Paul had lived there, with Edith Kennedy, in the twenties, and had reveled in its bounty. Julia loved its “special, charming New England character,” its proximity to Boston and Maine. Her publisher was fifteen minutes away. And, of course, there was Avis. There was no one in America whom Julia felt closer to, a devoted friend and trusted adviser. It was Avis who had masterminded the book deal with Houghton Mifflin and Avis who plotted to keep the deal alive. More than anything, however, Avis remained an indefatigable cheerleader, urging Julia onward, upward, to “keep trying and slugging away.” True to form, Avis portrayed Julia’s publishing defeat as a triumph of culinary integrity. “You have come nearer to mastering a good many aspects of cooking than anyone except a handful of great chefs,” she reassured her, “and some day it will pay off. I know it will.”
What a treat it would be to live close to Avis. Paul agreed, and all three spent the weekend house hunting in Cambridge. With a real estate agent in tow, they strolled around the sleepy, unspoiled, intimate community, with its cluster of irregular crosscut streets and colonial-era homes. The Childs were convinced: they’d found the location they were looking for, where they could work and thrive in meaningful ways. It would give them the long-sought sense of resolution. They made inquiries about several nice places, but none of the houses were apparently for sale.
Avis agreed to stay on the case—to notify them as soon as something suitable came up—but by summer’s end, their plans had changed. Again. On August 6, 1958, the USIA sent Paul a new set of orders. The Exhibits Division was being shut down. He was being transferred, posted as Cultural Affairs Officer to Oslo, Norway, effective as of March 1959.
Norway! Halfway around the world. It struck like a bombshell, but Julia managed to take it in stride. Within days, she was telling friends, “I think this is wonderful, and we are getting excited.” It wasn’t permanent, and it certainly wasn’t French. At least Norway was someplace new, someplace different, someplace else, another new horizon to cross in their ongoing odyssey. They would start all over again in the Land of the Midnight Sun. But Julia had to wonder where it would eventually end.
Judith and Evan Jones on their penthouse terrace (Photo credit 14.2)
Fifteen
Julia’s Turn to Bloom
Debby Howe, the wife of the Childs’ old Ceylon intelligence pal, Fisher Howe, who ha
ppened to be the chargé d’affaires in Norway, told many stories about the “food obsessed” Julia Child. But her favorite had to do with the embassy wives’ luncheon she made to welcome Julia to Oslo. “This won’t be food you love,” Debby warned her as they filed into the ambassador’s private dining room. Julia reassured her friend with an easy, dismissive wave. She was tempted to remind Debby of her motto—Never Apologize—but refrained at the last moment.
“Big mistake,” Debby said, nearly fifty years later.
The plates put in front of them looked like a six-year-old had gotten into Mommy’s pantry. The main course was a cluster of grapes and sliced mushrooms floating in a kind of pink-gelatin amniotic sac with a crown of frozen whipped cream crusted with rock-hard fruit. This was followed by “a very thick slice of banana cake mix with a thick pale frosting,” a blob of molded lime Jell-O salad, and a Norwegian’s idea of key lime pie. A sticky cinnamon bun was served with tea.
Debby glanced across the table and caught Julia’s eye. The look in it said: Down on your knees, friend—and apologize!
If Julia had come to Norway in search of a new culinary frontier, she came to the wrong place. She might have fared much better across the adjoining border in Sweden where husmanskost—their version of cuisine bourgeoise—featured meatballs, gravlax, and potato dumplings filled with pork. But Norway was another world entirely. The local fare consisted of either sweet-and-salt-cured moose, lobscouse, or ptarmigan, and a funky delicacy called rakorret—uncooked salmon trout, brined and pressed until it became fermented “like sauerkraut,” eaten on flatbread, with a bracer. “If you had enough schnapps to go with it,” Howe recalled, “somehow it tasted good,” but others thought “the damn stuff stunk like a dead otter.” Otherwise, everything else was “boiled, boiled, boiled, boiled, boiled.” There were potatoes galore and a variety of berries, but very few fresh vegetables. And salad greens were practically extinct. Paul filled out his culinary scorecard with one word: “Vegetables: lousy; salads: lousy; meat: lousy.”
