by Bob Spitz
Still, Oslo was “a fabulous place to be posted,” according to a diplomat at the embassy. World War II had left Norway relatively untouched. The German occupation invited minimal retaliation by the Allies, and a post-war resilience was evident across the kingdom. People seemed to enjoy a simple, uncomplicated lifestyle, to judge by their “relaxed, sweet, direct, at-ease-with-the-world healthy faces.” There seemed to be an almost religious attraction to biking, hiking, or just strolling about. Soon after their arrival, Paul and Julia were struck by the Norwegians’ communion with nature. “We both have an extremely pleasant sensation that we are now living in a place much like America 200 years ago,” Paul wrote, “where nature is close about, where it is loved and used … where the nervous pressures and complications and Madison Avenue–inspired wants are relatively unknown.”
Julia found Oslo to be “a great big old city of no distinction,” “undistinguished architecturally,” but “cozy”—a “family-oriented place, and small enough,” with a population hovering around two million or less. “There are virtually no fat people at all,” Paul observed, an aspect he found “astonishing” after Germany and America. No doubt the environment contributed to a vigorously wholesome lifestyle. On the days when the weather cooperated, which were frequent, there was no finer place to dwell. “The whole glorious spread of spring” cast its spell—a “blindingly bright” sun, “air smelling magically of fir forests and blossoms.” The view from almost any lookout was breathtaking. The city was a basin surrounded by dense, interlocking spruce-covered hills through which appeared the fjord, with its veiny weave of tributaries, inlets, and islands. Ferns and blueberry bushes abounded. The landscape reminded Paul and Julia of Mount Desert in Maine.
They settled in with spectacular ease. The Howes found them a white clapboard house “two steps down a hill” from their own place in Ullern, a neighborhood some distance out of town with “a heavenly view of the fjord.” There was a sunken living room overlooking flowering fruit trees and a berry garden with rose hedges, and “an attic as big as Great Hall.” The kitchen was sunny and large, although the “tired old Norwegian electric stove” was “preposterously unworkable,” even for Julia, who had cooked on some broken-down beasts in her time. Ever obsessive, Paul hung her vast collection of pots and pans on a wall-size pegboard, each utensil given its own fixed place and then inventoried—“74 separate objects,” he recorded, “arranged in a distinguished and classy fashion.”
They were both eager to master Norse, a guttural Germanic dialect that swooped between low, flat pitches and high, sharply falling flourishes—not a bad approximation of Julia’s trademark hooting. In fact, Julia picked it up quickly with her keen ear for language. In no time, she was making the rounds of shops and errands relying on a brand of “kitchen Norwegian” to see her through the day. Paul, on the other hand, had trouble communicating from the get-go. His ineptitude was baffling, considering that a battery of tutors had begun coaching him in Washington. “He’d made a real art of studying Norwegian,” recalls Debby Howe—except it wasn’t Norwegian, but Danish, and by the time he realized it, frustration had taken hold. After that, he could “never quite get the phrasing right.”
Julia liked “the Wegians,” as she nicknamed them, “very much,” but realized there would be “no real soulmates” from among their new acquaintances. This was a blessing in disguise, as she soon discovered. “I am purposely being a bit of a mole, so I can get this book done as fast as possible,” she explained. Great progress had been made since landing in Oslo, and throughout the summer of 1959 nothing interfered with the intense daily grind. “She was full-time occupied with it,” says Debby Howe, who wandered over each day to observe “this dynamo” whirling through her kitchen. She’d be boning a lamb or perfecting béarnaise or peeling asparagus that her brother, John, sent by airmail, none of which Debby knew how to do.
“None of the embassy wives cooked French food,” Howe recalls, “or any kind of food, for that matter.” Later, in the fall, Julia would give them cooking lessons, but that summer distractions of any kind were strictly off-limits. There was more at stake than making new friends, she recalled. “After nearly eight years of hard labor, Simca and I could see the end in sight.”
WHEN THE END finally came it took her by surprise.
Throughout Norway’s unexpected summer heat wave—“one of the few in the memory of man”—Julia labored persistently over a blistering hot stove. Recipes that had languished in various stages of scrutiny were resolved, once and for all. It was her last chance to make crucial decisions. Her push to the finish line demanded total concentration. Even her forty-seventh birthday passed without note. But on September 1, 1959, thirteen years to the day of her marriage to Paul Child, the gears of cookbookery ground to a halt. It was time to celebrate—her anniversary, of course, but another event demanded an equal share of the spotlight: “The revised French Recipes for American Cooks was finished at last.”
She and Simca exchanged their last set of notes and decided it was high time to lay down their tongs. The book was finished, but by no means complete. They’d made countless concessions in their push to edit and revise, with gems that wound up on the cutting room floor. It was no longer an encyclopedia, but a primer—“a primer on cuisine bourgeoise for serious American cooks.” Nevertheless, it retained a certain heft: 750 manuscript pages of classic French cuisine, the same length as Madame Saint-Ange but without the esoterica, like thrush salami (“Take out the intestines, the liver, the head, and the feet for use in the coulis, and add a couple of whole thrushes to it, which will then be chopped and put through a drum sieve … ”) or pork head cheese (“cut the ears off at their base … cut the tongue and lean meat into large cubes … ”). No, it was pretty concise for 750 pages, and thorough and modern in its approach.
And finished!
“I can hardly believe it,” Julia told a close friend. To another, she said in a jokey brogue: “It has weighed so like a stone these many years, but now it is off me back.”
From here on in it was Dorothy de Santillana’s baby to nourish and wean until publication. Julia was no longer on deadline. For the first time in years, opportunities beckoned away from the stove. She joined a class in Norwegian at a local university and played tennis daily with Debby Howe. Gardening engrossed her. There were receptions at the embassy, lectures, visitors to entertain, “so many office things going on in the evening,” all done without preoccupation or guilt.
But—oh, the postpartum depression! Two weeks after delivering the manuscript, the vacuum it created had left Julia bereft. “Meself, am feeling quite lost without my book,” she wrote to family in America. It seemed like the floor had given way beneath her. “I feel rootless and empty.” Aside from Debby Howe there was no one to hang out with—“no friends,” Julia lamented, “nobody to hug”; she missed that most at times like these. As such, she said, “I have descended into a slough of discombobulation.”
There were still plenty of arrangements to look after back home. Before Julia and Paul had left Washington for Norway, Avis alerted them to a house in Cambridge that had come up for sale. “Drop everything,” she advised, “and get up here right away.” The Childs didn’t immediately respond. “By that time,” Avis realized, “they had almost given up the idea of Cambridge and were less than enthusiastic.” Besides, it was sleeting and pouring, “the worst possible weather,” but—what the hell. They jumped on a train to Boston, and the next morning, in a squall of wind and icy rain, poked about the rooms of 103 Irving Street.
It was an unprepossessing gray-shingled house on a rather prepossessing street smack in the middle of Harvard’s Estate Row. John Kenneth Galbraith lived across the street, Arthur Schlesinger a few doors away, with distinguished professors and statesmen rounding out the roster. The place had been built as a cottage in 1889, then jacked up on posts and additions built under it. The last owners had left it in pretty good condition. Paul showed Julia the sturdy plaster walls and hardwo
od floors, and they all admired the well-appointed kitchen with a restaurant stove and double pantry. Out back, a good-size yard and garden came with the property. By the time they made their way up to the attic, the die was cast. “Well, this will suit us,” Julia said, turning to her husband. “It’s exactly the kind of house we want.” But another couple was downstairs and had come to the same conclusion; they told the real estate agent they were going home to talk it over. In the interim, Julia and Paul bought it on the spot.
They had rented it back to the previous owner while they were posted in Norway, but agreed to give it a good updating, which required constant paperwork. Julia saw to many of the details while awaiting word from her editor.
The first critical response came in a letter at the end of September, and it left her “mightily encouraged.” Dorothy de Santillana wrote that she was delighted with the book, “truly bowled over at the intensity and detail.” She went on to say, “I surely do not know any compendium so amazingly, startlingly accurate or so inclusive … This is a work of the greatest integrity.” She’d compared the manuscript to another recently published cookbook, Classic French Cuisine by Joseph Donon, and declared theirs the winner, hands down. Though she still needed her publisher and his beancounters “to do their figuring” before putting the book into production, the project, she said, looked good to go.
But nothing remained good to go for long. On November 10, 1959, a letter from Paul Brooks, Houghton Mifflin’s editor in chief, arrived in the diplomatic pouch. “Your manuscript is a work of culinary science as much as of culinary art,” he wrote. “However … ”
However?
“This will be a very expensive book to produce and the publisher’s investment will be heavy … It is at this stage that my colleagues feel dubious.”
It was at this stage that Julia’s heart began to sink. Still, she read on through the haze of hollow platitudes and backpedaling.
“I suggest you try this book on some other publisher,” Brooks continued. “Believe me, I know how much work has gone into this manuscript. I send you my best wishes for its success elsewhere.”
A rejection letter. Julia couldn’t believe her eyes. It was the last thing she had expected after Dorothy de Santillana’s praise. No doubt the manuscript needed a good cut, maybe even some heavy-duty editorial polish. But … rejection? She hadn’t seen that one coming.
Avis had gotten the news earlier from Dorothy and attempted to give Julia a heads-up, but she’d sent her letter by post instead of the diplomatic pouch. When at last it arrived five days later, the blow had already landed. Julia was “devastated,” “shell-shocked.” She’d come to realize that the manuscript was “too difficult for Americans,” too elaborate, too this, too that. “Quite possibly,” she realized, “it is an unpublishable book.” But Avis wasn’t ready to throw down her cards. By the time Houghton Mifflin said no, she had other prospects in sight. Only recently, she’d become a talent scout for Alfred Knopf and his eponymous New York publishing house. There was an executive there she knew who not only “swings great weight,” but was himself quite an accomplished cook. As a matter of fact, Bill Koshland had already seen bits and pieces of the manuscript during a visit to Cambridge. Without even waiting for Julia’s approval, she’d ordered Houghton Mifflin to send it to him. “Do not despair,” Avis declared. “We have only begun to fight.”
But Julia wasn’t so sure she had it in her.
THERE WERE CERTAIN realities that Julia needed to come to grips with. Literary pursuits were fine for dilettantes, but she was a practical person, not a dreamer, and refused to romanticize her prospects. Was the book, as Brooks claimed, too expensive to publish—or was it basically too time-consuming for Americans to use? Julia had come across a copy of Helen Corbitt’s Cookbook, a Houghton Mifflin number that had already sold nearly seventy thousand copies. “It is such a wonderful example of easy looking recipes,” Julia said. Take its recipe for coq au vin, only twenty-four words long: “Cut up two broilers. Brown them in butter with bacon, sliced onions, and sliced mushrooms. Cover with red wine and bake for two hours.” Maybe that’s all it took to make coq, she thought. At four pages, maybe she and Simca had driven that recipe into the ground. “Did the American public want nothing but speed and magic in the kitchen?” she wondered. Or was it the writing—was Julia just the wrong collaborator? “NOBODY has ever wanted to publish ANY of our recipes in any publication whatsoever thus far,” she wrote to Simca, which “indicates that we’re not presenting things in a popular manner.”
Knopf was a “very interesting” prospect, but Julia wasn’t about to fall down that hole again. “I refuse to let more than a coal of hope glow quietly,” she said, preferring to let the publishing chips fall where they may. It was possible, just possible, that they were spinning their wheels. “So now what?” Julia wondered.
One thing was certain: she wasn’t going to sit around waiting for the Good Cookbook Fairy to descend. “Having now started to re-arrange my life in case there is to be no published book,” she reported in a letter to Avis, she decided that cooking would keep “the gloomies” at bay. She loved to cook. It was the one surefire way to take her mind off the perils of publishing, to “just continue on with my self-training.” There was still plenty to learn about French cuisine, particularly pastry, which she began to circle with typical intrigue. She was dying to try her hand at some of Simca’s sugary jewels—her bavarois à l’orange, a velvety mold of crème anglaise flavored with Grand Marnier; a thick, creamy, impossibly rich chocolate mousse; and the masterful charlotte Malakoff, an almond cream with ladyfingers that dazzled guests. Toward the end of November, Julia began baking in earnest—making petits fours and tuiles as a warm‑up before moving on to tarts, using the berries from her bushes in sweet short-paste shells. It didn’t take Paul long to appreciate his wife’s resilience, as she took refuge in the kitchen, “clacking dishes and whistling like a magpie.”
But the momentum of the cookbook could not be denied.
SELLING A COOKBOOK to Knopf in the late fifties was no mean feat. Unlike the novels of Sartre and Camus, cookbooks didn’t carry the literary prestige that distinguished Knopf’s list. Nor did they have the historical impact of The War Lover, by John Hersey, which the house had just published to great acclaim. They weren’t exquisitely modulated like John Updike’s The Poorhouse Fair or Roald Dahl’s Kiss Kiss. Although cookbooks were far from finely wrought narratives, they celebrated food and captured the imagination through an engagement with sensual pleasure, creativity, culture, and an account of the good life. “You read them like fantasies,” says Barbara Kafka. “They offered something different and exotic.” But they weren’t much of a factor in the overall publishing scheme. Of all the major houses, only Doubleday had anyone who functioned as a bona fide cookbook editor, a “good housewifely, home-ec type” named Clara Clausson, but the books she published were agonizingly simplistic, with “truncated recipes, no sensuous words, just straight directions, the most basic fare.”
Alfred Knopf fancied himself a gourmet. He belonged to a tony food-and-wine society and cultivated an excellent wine cellar—but he never went near the kitchen. Never! As far as cookbooks went, they were dumped willy-nilly on any editor willing to send them on their way. Herbert Weinstock, Knopf’s erudite music editor, got saddled with one of the company’s earliest French cookbooks, and when he questioned why the recipes served so many, the author replied, “But you have to feed the help.” Such was the state of Knopf’s cookbook publishing.
The closest Knopf had come to anything of a cookbook editor was Alfred Knopf’s wife, Blanche, an extremely charming but feisty socialite who was inexorably drawn to the cultural flame of Europe. She was the first person over there after the war and signed up every avant-garde author she could get her hands on. Cookbooks were something she handled by default; they fell to her because no one else dealt with them.
On Avis DeVoto’s recommendation, Blanche had signed up Elizabeth David, Britain
’s leading culinary star, and Classic French Cuisine, the Joe Donon book that Julia had admired. Under her aegis, Knopf also put out Cook, My Darling Daughter by Mildred Knopf, Alfred’s sister-in-law, and an Italian compendium by his brother Edwin, each of which sold a respectable ten or fifteen thousand copies. Yet food and cooking weren’t on Blanche Knopf’s radar, perhaps owing to an encounter with Joseph Conrad. During a dinner party at the Knopf brownstone on New York’s West Side, she overheard Conrad refer to her as “Quelle belle Juive!” To Blanche, belle Juive meant a plump Jewish dowager—and she immediately put herself on a fanatical diet. “Blanche knew nothing about food,” says a colleague, “because she refused to eat it. She became anorexic.” She took martinis at meals, but no food whatsoever. She was “a wraith, all skin and bones.” This was Knopf’s cookbook editor.
Normally, Bill Koshland would have sent Julia’s manuscript to her, but he must have figured she would reject it, sight unseen. The Donon French cookbook had more or less tanked and Elizabeth David turned out to be “an incredibly difficult author.” Word around the office was that Alfred Knopf had had his fill of cookbooks. But Koshland seemed to recognize the worth of this new submission. He’d taken home the manuscript and began cooking from it. He told Avis he was “impressed to death with it.” In fact, he thought it was “the best damn cookbook he ever ran into, and unique.”
