Julia Child_ A Life - Laura Shapiro [25]
But for the first seven years of their friendship, Julia and Avis talked more than anything else about the book. As soon as the sauces chapter was fully revised, Julia sent it to Avis asking for an honest opinion as well as any advice about publishing. Avis turned every page with mounting admiration. This was a revelatory approach to French cooking: the infrastructure of culinary methods was as pertinent as the recipes, and the recipes were the most precise and logical she had ever seen. A good American cook would be able to follow them, not necessarily with ease, but at least with a sense of confidence that the authors were never going to leave her in the lurch. And, as she found in the kitchen, the recipes worked. The ingredients came together just as the instructions said they would, and the sauces tasted French. She quickly wrote back to Julia: she must keep right on working; she must not sign with Ives Washburn; Avis was going to send the chapter to a friend at Houghton Mifflin, which was a major publishing company based in Boston, and the book would be handled the way it deserved.
Julia was overjoyed—“I would say excited, which is my real reaction, but am learning not to use that word because of its more carnal implications in French!” The chapter went to Dorothy de Santillana, managing editor at Houghton Mifflin, who was, Avis reported, “tickled pink” with the depth and expertise of what she saw. A contract followed, along with an impressive advance of $750. “HOORAY,” typed Julia. “The book will be dedicated to you, my dear, and to La Belle France.” Avis refused the dedication but agreed to be the chief editorial go-between. It had all happened in less than six weeks. Julia tried to be realistic about what lay ahead: she thought it would be a year, at least, before she and her two coauthors completed the manuscript. Her prediction was off by six years, but in every other respect she understood just where she stood in her life. As she said to Avis, the midwife who would see her through a long labor, “I realize with awesome seriousness that the real work is about to begin.”
Chapter 3
How to Make Things Taste the Way They Should
FRENCH COOKING for American cooks? It had to be an oxymoron. How could these two incompatible beasts ever be yoked together? But Julia knew it was possible, because it had happened to her. Now she envisioned a culinary America where it happened to everyone: where ordinary home cooks made perfect creamy omelets, kept a useful supply of mirepoix on hand, boned the duck themselves, and always served a welcoming little first course when friends came to dinner. Alas, most Americans would never encounter the Cordon Bleu. The homemaker who wanted to cook something French had nothing to help her but recipes; and how miserably they could fail a hopeful cook, Julia knew well. She had spent years floundering in the awkward gap between the cookbook and the cook, until good teaching set her free. The book she would deliver to Houghton Mifflin must be just that teacher. There was no precedent for such a thing: a guide to authentic French cooking that sat on the kitchen counter calmly issuing instructions and advice in English on what to do, and what problems to expect, and how to fix them. Over the next seven years, as she worked on the manuscript, she circled round and round the core message she wanted to convey, phrasing it this way and that in an effort to pin down a heretical idea that kept prodding at her. What she wanted to tell everyone was this: French food is uniquely French, but a sure and precise route to it can be mapped in any language.
Julia’s approach to the cookbook project was simple and vast: she would look at every dish in the traditional