The French Chef in America Page 9

  Julia took her culinary spelunking very seriously. In asserting herself in Volume II, she was determined to push her audience, and her collaborators, to new extremes. This gung-ho attitude occasionally put her at odds with Judith Jones, whom Julia accused of being fainthearted and capitulating to pallid mainstream tastes: “I am worried by your growing attitude of catering entirely to the timid and squeamish,” Julia admonished her editor. “Do not, please, forget that we have chefs, men, and professionals who also read and follow these recipes.”

  Julia wanted to encourage people to cook and eat boldly: “I shall try and urge people to toughen up, be earthy, etc.,” she wrote to Jones. In the case of lamb kidneys, for instance, she wanted her readers to take charge: “If they smell bad or strong, they are awful, and if timid people don’t dare smell, they’ll get rotten meat, fish, and everything else…On trimming your own beef tenderloin—if people will get scared off by being advised to watch a good butcher at work, where are we?”

  Julia was curious about every step of the food chain.

  At the end of her diatribe, Julia allowed, “I am not, naturally, discounting at all your suggestions, because I believe (almost) everything you say. I am resisting tendencies I do not like for our book.”

  With a wry smile, Jones conceded that Julia’s knuckle rapping still smarted forty-five years later. At the time, she replied to her author:

  I am distressed that you think I am suddenly defending the frightened persnickety American housewife because my whole thrust is to try to get them to do things they wouldn’t ordinarily touch. And that is your great talent. But I’ve been thinking back to the time I spent a summer in a small town in Minnesota. Where would I have found a butcher to demonstrate preparing a filet of beef for me? The whole point is that you’re instructing these ladies so carefully that they can do anything on their own. But if you say maybe you’d better watch a butcher first, you may have made that woman in Minnesota not quite trust your directions. By the same token a cook who has never used kidneys before might become too fussy by that very fresh-smelling note. I used some kidneys the other night that probably wouldn’t pass that very test but I rinsed them off to freshen them and they were absolutely perfect in our stuffing. (The supermarket habit of wrapping them in plastic tends to encourage a bit of odor that seems to be perfectly harmless.) I’m really not trying to argue. Obviously you know best what you’re after, but my comments were in the interest of encouraging people to be less timid and fussy.

  V. IT WILL BE DONE

  In December 1969, six months after Julia and Simca reverse engineered the loup, the manuscript for Volume II—which Julia called “Son of Mastering”—remained unfinished, and Judith Jones put her foot down. She had previously reduced the book from fourteen to eleven chapters, to save time, and then to nine. Now, in order to meet her production schedule, Jones further limited the book’s scope to seven subject chapters: soups, baking, meats, chicken, charcuterie, vegetables, and desserts. She set a final, hard-and-fast, absolutely nonnegotiable deadline of March 15, 1970.

  This left no margin for error. There was just enough time to finish and copyedit the manuscript, prepare the art, print the book, and ship it by the official publishing date of October 22, 1970, during the all-important run-up to the December holiday shopping season.

  The deadline was not just a psychological ploy, Jones explained: “We had to reserve the presses months in advance,” she said. “There was real money at stake.” Moreover, with McCall’s scheduled to run Patricia Simon’s three articles between October and December, Knopf was contractually obliged to produce Volume II on time. Meanwhile, Season Two of The French Chef was scheduled to begin shooting in the late summer of 1970.

  To add to the pressure, Julia had endured a biopsy on her right, remaining breast in January. “I am sure there is nothing wrong, but they won’t take any chances even with a pimple, it seems, once you’ve had the works” of a mastectomy, she wrote Jones. “Anyway, I…am plowing along as fast as possible, though it is never fast, as you know.”

  The biopsy was negative. Julia hardly paused before turning back to the stove and typewriter. Her kitchen table and home office were stacked with hundreds of files and dozens of notebooks filled with recipes, scientific papers, notes on meals eaten at restaurants, culinary inventions of her own, Paul’s food photographs, and references for temperatures, weights, and measures.

  The pace was relentless. “I just can’t do writing, indexing, testing, proofreading, and do anything else at all,” Julia wailed. “I work seven days a week. Up at seven, breakfast at nine, work, lunch, work again, tea, work, and then stop to hear the news.”

  —

  THE CRUCIBLE OF Volume II revealed Julia’s and Simca’s essential natures. Sometimes the two were in complete sync, other times they were in complete opposition; and there were moments when Judith Jones had to referee between them.

  Simca tended to be a romantic, who relied on an instinctual, pinch-of-salt, “French” style of cooking. Julia was a pragmatist, who preferred a step-by-step, researched and engineered, “American” style; and in spite of her disaffection from her father, Big John McWilliams, she had absorbed some of his brusque business acumen.

  An early point of tension between the writing partners arose in October 1967, when Julia wrote Simca a frank professional letter. In it, she stressed the importance of hiring separate lawyers to negotiate business issues between them, allowing Julia and Simca to preserve their friendship (the lawyers “can be tough for each of us and eventually the right solutions will be worked out”). They should also maintain copyright protection for Mastering, she advised, and ensure that “nothing that notre chère colleague’s heirs can do will hurt our mutual property.” Then Julia remarked: “One thing we have never taken into consideration at all is my role in publicizing the book.”

  Noting that sales of Mastering had started strong in 1961 but steadily weakened into 1962 (when only 103 copies sold in June), Julia observed that business “immediately picked up” after February 1963, when The French Chef began to air. Thereafter trade in Mastering was brisk—with 1,129 copies sold in March, 2,283 in May, and an average of 3,000 a month after that. When Time anointed Julia “Our Lady of the Ladle” and put her on its cover in November 1966, sales skyrocketed: between November and February 1967, 47,770 copies of Mastering sold, representing a third of total previous sales—figures that Julia called “tremendous” and “history for us.” This success was “due entirely to the television,” she wrote. But, she reminded Simca, “this has been a tremendous amount of work for me, for Paul, and for Ruth Lockwood…in fact, this has been a 7-day week since we began…almost without stopping.”

  Educational television was akin to “charity,” Julia wrote, and barely covered her expenses. Her only compensation for the elaborate preparation and work was through book sales. Julia considered The French Chef “a vehicle to promote our book,” and she often mentioned that the recipes and techniques she used on air were “based on Mastering.” This claim was somewhat disingenuous, she explained to Simca, as 70 percent of the recipes she used on television “had nothing to do with the book at all.” In light of this, Julia wrote, “Some serious consideration must be taken of my contribution…you would have to pay a minimum of 30 or 40% of your profits for this kind of publicity. I have never made a point of this, but I do think it must enter into our mutual thoughts.”

  This would be the only time that Julia raised the issue of proportionality and used the power of her television celebrity as a bargaining chip with her colleague. After some back-and-forth between their lawyers, Simca acquiesced, and they came up with an agreeable solution: They agreed to a revised share of revenue from Volume II; Julia would be responsible for expenses.

  When the two were not together in France, Julia and Simca corresponded daily, in great flowing letters that went on for thousands of words. They analyzed, tested, and evaluated dishes, and discussed them in minute detail. The letters were usually
typewritten, single spaced, and often filled two, three, four, five, or even nine pages. Simca typed in pale blue ink and signed her name with a big, swooping S in red pen. Julia liked to use capital letters and exclamation points for emphasis, XX-ed out mistakes, jotted additional thoughts in the margins, and usually signed off with a drawing of a heart pierced by an arrow.

  But the pressure was wearying. Often, Julia would work late into the night. “I don’t even have time to pee!” she wailed. “I need five more years to finish this book!”

  While Julia strove to make her recipes “idiot-proof” for the reader, Simca would modify measurements as she went, eschewing the teaspoon-by-teaspoon method. “Julia and I work very well together,” La Super Française told The New York Times. “She is more scientific. I never measure; I am perhaps more intuitive. I like to create out of my head. I consider myself an old-fashioned cook…Sometimes I go further with ideas than Julia. I test and retest before I share the results. My husband is my best taster…Julia thinks in American and I think in French. We speak in Franglaise.”

  But when Julia pushed Simca to be accurate and consistent, she would lash out, saying, “Non! We French would never do it that way. Ce n’est pas français!” (“This is not French!”)

  When it came to perfecting a formula for pâte feuilletée, Julia toiled on draft after draft while Simca wrote one version of the recipe and moved on. Pâte feuilletée is a light, flaky pastry that puffs up when cooked, and is made from hundreds of layers of dough separated by hundreds of layers of butter—“seven hundred and twenty-nine layers, to be exact,” Julia said. “Tremendously useful,” it ennobles everything from cocktail party tarts to turnovers, vol-au-vent (a pastry shell filled with, say, a seafood mélange, as Chef Haller did at the White House), or gigot en croûte (lamb wrapped in puff pastry), and desserts like Napoleons and pies. “It most definitely takes practice to perfect,” Julia wrote, “but when you have mastered puff pastry you will find it such a satisfying and splendid accomplishment you will bless yourself for every moment you spent learning its technique.”

  Judith Jones attempted to make a pâte feuilletée from a draft of the recipe, but her pastry was hard and lumpy. She was embarrassed, thinking she had done something wrong. But one of her roles as editor was to ask obvious questions. “Julia would give me assignments—investigate shallots, or mushrooms, or kitchen superstitions. I liked that,” she said. One day in Julia’s Cambridge kitchen, she summoned the courage to say: “Julia, I can’t visualize the pâte feuilletée. I can’t follow what you’re saying.”

  “Go into the pantry, dearie, and I’ll watch while you make it,” Julia instructed.

  As Judith struggled to knead layers of pastry and butter on the white marble slab, Julia took notes and gently coached from the sidelines. They spent two days reworking the recipe, trying different proportions of flour and butter, and, Jones recalled, “It suddenly made sense!” In a difficult recipe like this one, she said, “what you really want to know is what to expect: Why do all these layers? What are you gaining from all that butter and air? Julia was able to step back and give the overall picture, explain why it was worth the effort. Very few writers can do that.”

  In writing to Simca about a similar recipe, for pâté en croûte (pastry dough filled with pâté and baked in a hinged mold, used for charcuterie), Julia stated the method behind her madness: “I shall make several more, or as many as necessary. I want to be sure that we have the best possible croûte, and that all problems and pitfalls are solved. I shall also take notes on every method of pâté-en-croûte making that I run into—I am sure this drives you crazy, but it is the only way I can work—I want to know everything, and why, and what’s no good and why, so that when our master recipe is done there are no unsolved questions.”

  Julia’s perfectionism was rooted in a desire to encourage home cooks. She cooked each recipe ten or twelve times to ensure that she had anticipated every mistake her readers might make, and she included advice on how to avoid pitfalls or recover from missteps. Clarity and accuracy were mandatory for Julia, who chided herself for not catching errors before they went into print. But perfection is elusive. Despite her attention to detail, a few of Julia’s recipes included errors. And she was vexed to discover that Simca had barely checked the recipes she contributed.

  In the years since Mastering was first published in 1961, Knopf had received a steady stream of letters from confused readers who found that this or that dish did not work, even when they had followed a recipe to the ounce or teaspoon. Simca blithely dismissed such concerns as unimportant details. But, said Jones, “Julia was appalled by the mistakes” and insisted on making corrections to almost every edition of the book. “Julia took it personally.”

  “You’re only as good as your worst recipe,” Julia averred. “I assume all the responsibility for the contents, even down to the commas. I test and retest my recipes until they come out perfect. The book is not Judith’s responsibility. It’s mine.”

  —

  THE CLOCK SPUN, the calendar pages fluttered off the wall, and the deadline for Volume II loomed. Clickety-clack went their typewriters. “I have no desire to get into another big book like Vol. II for a long time to come, if ever. Too much work,” Julia wrote Simca. “I am anxious to get back into TV teaching, and out of this little room with the typewriter. Screw it.”

  Simca, meanwhile, continued to produce reams and reams of recipes. Julia tried many of them, and if she found them unclear or incomplete, she would query her friend. Frequently, Simca would rear back and claim that “this—this—is la véritable cuisine à la française!” (“real French cooking”). As their deadline approached, Simca began to lash out at Julia, the United States, and even her own work.

  In January 1970, Simca wrote a memo to Julia titled “Petites Remarques et Modifications, si possible” (“Small Remarks and Modifications, if Possi ble”), in which she made a suggestion about egg whites that Julia agreed with. But then Simca added, “I regret that you have omitted in the introduction on broccoli that this vegetable is also a delicious accompaniment to roasted pork and veal.” In the margin, Julia scribbled in irritation: “Why did she not suggest this before? When she had the carbons? Not the place.”

  In February, Julia fact-checked a Simca missive entitled “Lettre avec Commentaires Indispensables” (“Letter with Indispensable Comments”), in which La Super Française criticized a recipe that she had submitted. Julia wrote:

  Ma Chérie: You did this commentary when at Bramafam, without the rest of your files, and have done ta mauvaise habitude [bad habit] of wanting to change everything in the recipes as soon as you have seen it again. You have been reading Pierre Lacam…His Crème a succès has a crème anglaise with 16 yolks…but that is neither our Volume I anglaise…Nor have you remembered your own recipe, ma Chérie—but that is the way life is. You had this same recipe for Les Succès, Feb 1969, and you reported that everything was just fine. I am therefore not going to pay too much attention to this “letter with commentaires ‘indispensables’ ” because I am sure when you see the recipe again (were it changed as you have directed), you would say NON NON NON—ce n’est pas correct, ce n’est pas français—and as often happens (as it does in this case) that it is your very own recipe (that you have forgotten about) that you are now attacking.

  And when Simca insisted “I know officially that this cake we brought from the Bordeaux region,” Julia typed in a self-therapeutic note that she did not send to France: “Why not give the source of Lacam? [meaning the pastry chef Pierre Lacam, who wrote Le Mémorial Historique et Géographique de la Pâtisserie in 1890]…This is entirely M*A*D—like dealing with a madwoman!”

  At a certain point Julia stopped reading Simca’s letters.

  “I’m feeling terribly the pressure of time as I know you are,” Jones wrote from New York. “How are we doing?”

  With just days left before the nonnegotiable cutoff, Julia lamented that “it is like a sweat shop around here,�
� and warned Jones: “Under no circumstances shall we send any galleys or page proofs to Simca—that is hopeless, and would really ruin us.”

  With a final push, Julia managed to hand the finished manuscript in on time. She was exhausted, but she had finished. Consoling her partner over the recipes sacrificed to deadline triage, she had written: “It may not be the book of your dreams, ma chérie, but it will be done.”

  4

  The French Chef in France

  I. TO PRESS A DUCK

  As Julia’s chipper voice narrated, bouncy theme music swelled and the camera zoomed in on a heavy, silver-plated machine about the size of a mailbox standing on end. It was a shiny round canister, with a small spout, elegant metal feet, surmounted by a metal wheel that would have looked at home aboard a dreadnought.

  “This elaborate, expensive, silver-plated instrument is a duck press. Its only purpose is to squeeze the juices out of a duck,” Julia narrated. “We will do two flaming duck recipes today—one in France, the other here—not in a press, en salmis. Today, on The French Chef!”

  The camera pulled back, and viewers found themselves transported to the dining room of La Couronne (The Crown), the oldest restaurant in France. It was in Rouen, the capital of Normandy. A large fire crackled in the fireplace, with a row of glistening ducks roasting before it. For an American TV audience in 1970, this was an exotic, appealing, mysterious scene. And it was just the kind of presentation Julia enjoyed most: a sumptuous, traditional meal made with great care and presented with elegance and drama.

  Julia called this scene “The Battle of the Duck.” It was part of a series of short documentary films that she and a crew shot in France in a concentrated, three-week burst in the spring of 1970, between finishing Mastering, Volume II, and the book’s publication. The short films were later spliced into sixteen of the thirty-nine episodes of The French Chef, Season Two, and Julia rounded out the package with voice-overs and cooking demonstrations in the WGBH studio.