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By Root 272 0

Simca and Louisette had signed a contract for the teaser but never saw “What’s Cooking” before it was published. It turned out to be an embarrassment, full of errors, and the women were distraught. In August 1952, they turned to Julia for help. The original manuscript had to be put into decent English before anything else could happen with the book—Would she take a look? Julia sat down with the sauce chapter and started to read with a pen in her hand. She had been teaching from some of these recipes, reworking them whenever necessary; and she also had done a good deal of research and recipe writing for herself. Now she tried to take the point of view of an American homemaker opening a new cookbook. She went into the kitchen and tested a few, exactly as they were written, and found them unusable. Some recipes were too abbreviated, others ran on forever with needless complications, and the instructions were infuriatingly vague. She couldn’t see anything worth saving and said exactly that to Simca and Louisette. By the end of November, the three women had worked up an entirely new plan for the book, and Julia wrote to Putnam to explain what they wanted to do.

They would produce a teaching manual, she told Putnam, not just a recipe collection, and they would build it around fundamental themes and their variations. It would be written in what Julia called “the informal human approach”—a natural speaking voice, as opposed to the cloying tones of so many food writers whenever the subject was France. There were other French cookbooks for Americans, she conceded, but none was logical; none emphasized what Julia called “the ‘whys,’ the pitfalls, the remedies, the keeping, the serving”; none was specifically dedicated to rescuing the hapless and setting them on the right path. The new book would do all this while spanning the entire territory of basic and elaborate French cooking. She told Putnam to expect the revised chapter on sauces very shortly, and said the rest of the manuscript might take another six months.

Julia quickly became the de facto head of the project. The whole idea thrilled her: she would be a professional writer and culinary authority, Prof. Julia on a larger stage. The more she identified with this new public persona, the more eager she was to get a lawyer involved with the project in order to put it on a businesslike basis and help them deal with Ives Washburn. She had heard a lot of horror stories about writers’ experiences with their publishers. “I’ve gathered it’s a cut-throat game and that if you don’t get a lawyer or agent on your side who knows all the ropes, you can get your face peeled and all your efforts bring in the mazuma only for the publisher,” she explained to Paul Sheeline, a lawyer she trusted because he was a nephew of Paul’s.

Julia didn’t write this book or any other primarily for the money, but she hated to feel she was being cheated or exploited, and from the beginning of her career, she made a point of being involved in the finances. She was already dubious about Ives Washburn because of the way it had botched “What’s Cooking in France,” and since Simca and Louisette had no formal contract with the company, she decided they should jump ship and look for a better publisher. Their book was going to be a definitive contribution to French cookery, and she was adamant that the stature and dignity of the enterprise be taken seriously. For Julia, it was the same as being taken seriously herself. “Now I’ve started in writing, I intend to keep at it for years and years,” she told Sheeline. “So I think it wise to start out on a very firm footing.” Sheeline was no specialist in cook-books, but he did know how hard it was for first-time authors to get published, and he tried to get Julia to put the situation in perspective. “Almost any deal that can be made by a budding writer with a publisher is a good one,” he counseled, and said Julia should consider herself lucky to have any publisher at all interested in her work, even Ives Washburn. This sort of thinking infuriated her. “I quite appreciate the