The French Chef in America

by Alex Prud'Homme

  After three and a half years in France, the Joneses returned to New York and settled into a modest but comfortable apartment on East Sixty-sixth Street. Judith went in search of fresh mushrooms and good recipe books, but was quickly frustrated. “I wanted to keep cooking French,” she said. But the plastic-wrapped cabbages and lack of baguettes were dispiriting. Cookbooks of the day were crammed with short, uninstructive recipes. “Everything was supposed to be quick and easy,” Jones groaned.

  Evan worked as a freelance writer, and in 1957, Judith was hired as a translator and editor of French books by Blanche Knopf, the intimidating wife of Alfred A. Knopf. Publishing was a gentleman’s profession: Knopf held its sales conferences at the Harvard Club, and Jones was the firm’s only female editor. She translated leading French writers such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Later, she would edit American fiction writers such as John Updike, Anne Tyler, John Hersey, and William Maxwell. But it was in the underappreciated specialty of cookbooks that Jones made her mark.

  “By the late 1950s the food industry had pretty much convinced us American women that we should not get our hands dirty and be kitchen slaves, and that they would take care of the cooking for us,” she said. The result was food in a can, iceberg lettuce, and Jell-O with spray-on whipped cream. “Cookbooks were so demeaned then,” said Jones. “ ‘In a bowl, combine the first mixture with the second mixture. Set aside.’ But what size bowl? What’s in the second mixture? Set aside where—throw it out? It’s just bad thinking.”

  In the fall of 1959, a thick, heavy manuscript landed on her desk with a thud. It was a cookbook written by three unknown women—Beck, Bertholle, and Child. It had fared poorly with a small publisher, Ives Washburn, and had been rejected—twice—by a rival publisher, Houghton Mifflin, as too complicated: “Americans don’t want an encyclopedia,” a manager sniffed. “They want something quick, with a mix.”

  Undaunted, Jones took the hand-typed pages home and began to cook from them. Following the clear, logical steps, she learned to make boeuf bourguignon every bit as good as the one she’d had in Paris, how to flip an omelet the French way, and compose her first successful crème caramel. She was enamored of the authors’ innovations, such as listing the ingredients in a column adjacent to the cooking instructions.

  Though she had never edited a cookbook before, Jones took on the project. “It was exactly the kind of book I had been looking for. Revolutionary. I was bouleversée—‘knocked out.’ And I thought that if I was interested, then others would be, too.”

  After nine years of work, the last seven of which Julia had collaborated on, the book had arrived as a near fait accompli. “It was so beautifully thought out, a real teaching book, so I didn’t make too many suggestions,” Jones said. She cut a few recipes and, though she had no way of knowing how well the book would sell, told the authors to save them for a possible follow-up book.

  Mastering was a hit and helped ignite the American food revolution of the sixties and seventies. Jones recalled that roller-coaster ride as thrilling: “Once the lid was off and the respect for food and wine had started in America, you were awakened, and it was hard to turn back,” she said. “Who wanted to turn back? Some did. My cousin hated Mastering because the recipes were so long. But generally people saw there was so much to learn. And Julia made it fun.”

  The success of Mastering led Jones to edit books by chefs and writers who would become the vanguard of a new, multicultural culinary movement in America: “Ms. Jones may not be the mother of the revolution in American taste that began in the 1960s and transformed the food Americans cook at home,” The New York Times reported in 2007. “But she remains its most productive midwife.”

  For her first cookbook, Jones said, “Julia liked the gerund mastering in the title because learning to cook is an ongoing process. You never really master all of French cooking.” Volume II was a continuation of the first book, but it had to stand on its own merits and provide readers with new and significant information.

  For the second volume, Louisette Bertholle was no longer involved. (In what Julia called the “Louisette Purchase,” she and Simca purchased Bertholle’s 18 percent share of the business for $30,000 in 1968.) The third, unnamed, but crucial, partner on Volume II was Judith B. Jones. Unlike for Mastering, Jones played an active role in shaping the new book, undertaking culinary research, testing recipes, asking detailed questions, and pushing Julia and Simca to tackle recipes unprecedented in American cookbooks. The result was a series of master classes on French classics.

  IV. THE SECRETS OF VOLUME II

  Two of the star chapters, and most closely guarded secrets, of Volume II were detailed instruction on how to make French bread and charcuterie in the home kitchen. “They came out of my own frustration,” Jones recalled. In France one could buy expertly made croissants, brioches, petits fours, and pastries at the local boulangerie, and pâtés, terrines, and sausages at the neighborhood charcutier. But these delicacies were not available in the United States. Americans had two choices: they could pay exorbitantly to import them, or they could book a trip to Paris. Jones was determined to teach Americans how to make these foods at home. “Selfishly, I wanted a good baguette and some delicious pâté, and you couldn’t find them in New York,” she said. “So we decided to make our own.”

  In May 1967, Jones wrote Julia a provocative note: “Don’t you think Volume II should include a good honest recipe for French bread that would come as close as possible to the real thing? It is so hard to get even a phony Italian loaf in the sticks—and what’s a vrai [real] French meal without some bread to mop it up?”

  Early in her TV career Julia had considered then rejected a show about French bread because almost no one in France bakes bread at home, and she felt it would be “insincere” to pretend they did. Responding to Jones’s suggestion, Julia balked: “This is something we have been able to avoid, as no French home types ever make French bread.”

  But Jones had been impressed by the countercultural bread makers she’d met in Vermont who were churning out delicious multigrain loaves in their home ovens. And Paul was intrigued by the idea. He had been an avid baker as a young man, and volunteered to conduct a few baguette-baking experiments in Cambridge. He soon became obsessed. Happily covered in flour from head to toe, he worked on French bread at all hours. Noticing Paul’s glee, Julia couldn’t bear to miss out on the fun at “the Irving Street boulangerie.” The intellectual challenge of adapting traditional French recipes to the modern American kitchen drew her in, and when Paul decided to turn their home appliance into a domestic version of a professional baker’s oven, Julia was hooked.

  As they experimented, the Childs learned many lessons: that different types of flour and butter produce different loaves; that most American kitchens are kept warm, causing the dough to rise too fast; that dropping a superheated iron into a tub of water produces just the right puff of steam; that “bread should lie directly on a hot oven floor,” which the Childs simulated with a piece of asbestos tile. To create a home baker’s oven, “We even researched the medieval method of dampening a bundle of straw and throwing it into the oven to keep the air moist,” Paul wrote. “We used wet whisk brooms in our American electric oven…but it didn’t work.”

  Julia and Simca with the bread maestro Professor Raymond Calvel in Paris

  After baking sixty mediocre loaves, they had yet to crack the code.

  Ultimately, Paul and Julia took pounds of American flour and butter to Paris and apprenticed themselves to the master boulanger Professor Raymond Calvel. The first breakthrough was in chemistry: American flour is made from hard wheat, while French flour uses soft wheat; Calvel adjusted the recipe to compensate. The second insight was about technique: “It’s all in the folding and shaping of the loaf,” Julia reported. Voilà, with Calvel’s tutoring the Childs were able to produce nearly perfect baguettes in their American kitchen.

  It took something like two years of experimenting, and two hundred and eig
hty-four pounds of flour, but they finally got the recipe for French bread right.

  From these lessons, Julia composed a ninety-three-page chapter on baking for Volume II. It was a tour de force. The first section—which included a basic recipe for French bread, a tutorial on “Using the Simulated Baker’s Oven,” and a section titled “Self-Criticism—Or How to Improve the Product,” in which the authors diagnose common maladies, such as a tough crust, a heavy loaf with no holes, or unpleasantly yeasty-flavored bread—ran for twenty-one pages.

  (Around this time, Judith Jones pitched the idea of a bread book to James Beard. It took some prodding, but Beard on Bread was published in 1973, and remains a classic.)

  Simca was only peripherally involved in the Childs’ bread work. Like most French people, she bought her croissants fresh from the boulangerie every morning, and seemed uninterested in learning how to bake them at home. To Paul and Julia’s chagrin, Simca never attempted to create a Simulated Baker’s Oven to make baguettes at home.

  Yet, Simca had developed her own obsessive interest in bread and pastry, a preoccupation that began with a bad hip. In 1958, when she was fifty-four, Simca was diagnosed with arthrosis—a degenerative condition in which the cartilage of joints deteriorates—and osteoporosis, or brittle bones. To help ease the pain, and add bone-strengthening minerals to her body, Simca took to the “infernal hot baths” at Bourbonne-

  les-Bains, a spa in the Haute-Marne of Northeastern France. Like many of her compatriots, Simca believed that the mineral-rich spa waters were therapeutic, and indeed she never had to undergo a hip operation.

  Every morning Simca ate the delicious croissants served at the spa’s hotel, and, curious, she joined the chef at 5:30 one morning to cut and roll croissants. “I immediately understood the necessary speed, the ways elastic dough acts and reacts to your hands as you fashion the little triangles,” she recalled. Soon, she was allowed to make the détrempe, the layered butter-flour croissant dough. Dressed in her bathrobe at dawn, Simca participated in making 350 croissants every morning—“the routine so fixed in my head and hands that it would become automatic”—then breathlessly rushed away to her cure. “By the time I was finished with my first bath of the day I was ravenous. I’d sit there soaking in the hot water and feel I’d truly earned my breakfast!”

  In subsequent years, she met a master boulanger named Monsieur Boulanger (“Mr. Baker”), who made delicious baguettes in Bourbonne. Again, Simca volunteered. She found cooking to be therapeutic, an activity that made her sometimes painful and monotonous cures bearable. Starting at midnight, she would knead dough by hand until 2:00 a.m. “Knead that dough! Beat it around, let it rise,” Boulanger exhorted. “Yeast is a living thing!” It was hard work. “We pulled the dough, twisted it, threw it down on the table time after time, kneaded it. Started again. It smelled delicious,” Simca wrote. “By the time we had put the dough into straw baskets for the final rising and I heaved myself into bed, I felt as if I were a candidate for an Olympic weight-lifting contest, or maybe for a rest home, if not an asylum. But learning what goes into making a baguette made it all worthwhile.”

  In the sixties and seventies, Simca combined the methods of Boulanger, Paul Troisgros (another chef in Bourbonne), and Professor Calvel (the master baker in Paris) to teach baking to her cooking classes. As she “threw the dough around with abandon,” she instructed her students: “Don’t be afraid. You’ve got to knock the daylights out of this stuff to make it supple and light-rising.”

  —

  ANOTHER TYPE OF FOOD that Judith Jones craved for Volume II was the smoked meats, terrines, and savory pies sold at charcuteries, quintessentially French specialty food stores that don’t have an exact analogue in the States. “In Paris people are willing to stand in line for hours, with their toes sticking through their slippers, to pay for good charcuterie,” said Jones. “It’s an essential part of the French flavor. And I thought it would be a wonderful thing to bring to America.”

  In this case, Child and Beck immediately embraced her suggestion. But working together—and sometimes against each other—on this chapter led to one of their fiercest clashes.

  It began with cassoulet, the rich bean-meat combination that is “as much a part of southwestern France as Boston baked beans are of New England,” Child and Beck would write. “I just loved the sweet baked beans of cassoulet—it’s home cooking, close to the earth,” said Jones. As with their research into bouillabaisse à la Marseillaise for the original Mastering, Child and Beck discovered that every cook had his or her own recipe for cassoulet. Toulousains insisted the dish must include preserved goose; others said the dish came from Castelnaudary and was made only of beans, pork, and sausages; yet others suggested the dish originated from Arabian fava bean and mutton stews. In any event, Julia and Simca went at it with hammer and tongs, eventually producing a sheaf of bean- and pork-stained notes two inches thick. Jones felt overwhelmed, both by the number of pages and by the intensity of her authors. “That was my first exposure to how they worked together,” she recalled. “And how Julia got around, and accommodated, Simca. It was interesting.”

  A charcuterie stand in France

  Julia strove to make the dish—which can take hours or days to prepare—accessible by breaking the steps down into a simplified “order of battle,” and suggesting that components of the dish could be made ahead and assembled for the meal. She substituted store-bought Polish kielbasa for homemade sausage cakes, and left out ingredients like confit d’oie (preserved goose) not generally available in America.

  Simca was an originalist who shook her finger and scolded Julia on this point: “Non! We French—we never make cassoulet like this!” she asserted. “There is only one way to make this dish properly—avec confit d’oie!”

  “That was ridiculous, of course,” Jones observed drily. “Simca could be didactic.”

  After arguing in circles, the authors reached a compromise: Julia crafted a five-page “master recipe” (theme) to which Simca added “additions or substitutions” (variations), including the use of canned confit d’oie, which was available at certain imported food stores in America.

  As for the other delicacies found in French charcuterie, Julia and Simca characterized roasted hams, garlic sausages, and duck terrines as “a marvelous keystone of French civilization…there are few things more satisfying to the soul.”

  In pushing her writers, Jones was not above the occasional nudge or didacticism herself. When, for instance, she could not find garlic sausage—which she considered essential to cassoulet—in New York, she suggested that Julia develop a homemade sausage recipe. This was just the kind of aesthetic/scientific/engineering challenge that Julia relished. The next time Jones visited Cambridge, she was pleased to find Julia elbow deep in sausage meat and spices, with homemade links strung from cabinet handle to window frame to stove hood, curing. Paul had erected a giant piece of white cardboard on a wall in the kitchen, which Julia had covered with notes about her sausage experiments. “She was absolutely delighted with herself,” Jones said with satisfaction. In the resulting fifty-three-page chapter on charcuterie, the authors exhorted fellow cooks not to be intimidated by the details of sausage casings and caul fat: “It is so easy to make your own sausage meat and it is so good that you will wonder, once you have made it, why you were ever so foolish as to buy it.”

  In this spirit, Julia and Simca delved into traditional French dishes that had largely been ignored by American cooks yet were, Julia maintained, “perfectly delicious.” These included: cutting up a live lobster for bisque (“The serious cook really must face up to the task personally”); using cockscombs or braised sweetbreads (thymus gland) in a ris de veau; roasting a whole suckling pig (“not an everyday item,” but “wonderfully dramatic to serve, delicious to eat, and hardly more difficult to cook than a turkey”); beef tongue braised in aromatic vegetables (“makes such a welcome change from the usual fare…that you need have no hesitation at all in serving it for compan
y”); tripe (cow stomach: “Like scrapple and head cheese, it is a rather old-fashioned taste—a fragrant, earthy reminder of the past when every edible morsel of the beast was used…our forefathers consumed it with relish…If you are one of those who has never tried tripe before, yet enjoys new foods and new tastes, we think you will find this a happy introduction”); rabbit (“very much like chicken in taste and texture”); preserved goose (“The taste…has a very special quality quite unlike fresh goose”); and gooseneck sausage (“Pluck and singe skin thoroughly, then peel it off the neck in one piece, turning the skin inside out as you go”).

  Reading these instructions caused some readers to squirm or cry out in protest—“Disgusting!” “Lobster murderer!” “How could you eat a bunny rabbit?!” Others found them inspiring, challenging, or fun. Plenty of people bought Volume II with no intention of cooking cockscombs or gooseneck sausage at home, but simply because they enjoyed the vicarious thrill of reading about it.