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an article featuring the Belgian specialty waterzoï de poulet. It would be timely, since the 1958 World’s Fair was about to open in Brussels, and she felt the recipe would pose no special difficulties to the home cook. Because her editor, Dorothy de Santillana, was based in Boston, Julia sent the article to John Leggett, who was Houghton Mifflin’s New York editor, to “peddle around.” She urged him to explain to magazine food editors that although the recipe was long, it was not at all complicated—merely detailed. To her amazement, there were no takers, even though the recipe required nothing more than sweating the chicken, poaching it in wine, julienning and cooking the aromatic vegetables, and making a rather tricky sauce with egg yolks, cream, and broth. Helen McCully of McCall’s food section took one look and said that if she showed this recipe to her editor, “she would probably faint dead away.” McCully added that she herself could tell what a well-constructed recipe it was, but “to the non-cook it certainly looks like quite a chore.” Julia was not discouraged. She trimmed the recipe and sent it back to Leggett along with another possibility—boned stuffed duck in a pastry crust. “This is a marvelous dish, can be served hot or cold, and makes a splendid effect,” she wrote hopefully. “Most people think this is the kind of impossible thing only a chef could do, but it is quite within the range of even the modest cook if supplied with good directions such as ours.” She envisioned a spread in Life: “Life Bones a Duck.”

Leggett had no success with the articles. McCully said even the shortened version of waterzoï was too complicated for American housewives, and the other food editors had the same reaction. For the first time, Julia started to worry that she might be horribly out of step with the rest of the country. “I am deeply depressed, gnawed by doubts, and feel that all our work may just lay a big rotten egg,” she admitted to Avis. But she hated the thought of turning the recipes into baby talk just because a lot of magazine editors didn’t understand French cooking. “The completed volume will, I believe, speak for itself,” she told Leggett with dignity. Simca came to Washington, and the two women scrambled to finish by deadline day, February 24, 1958.

They made the deadline, but the manuscript they delivered did not speak for itself, at least in any language Houghton Mifflin could understand. The thing was a monster: eight hundred pages, and they covered only poultry and sauces. Julia’s idea was that the book would be published as a series of volumes, one every two years. The next would be eggs and vegetables, then perhaps meat, then soup and fish, and so on into the future—“up to the grave, as the subject is vast,” she predicted happily. She had tried to explain this plan a few months earlier to Dorothy de Santillana, who protested that Houghton Mifflin wanted a cookbook, not an infinite series of cookbooks. The misunderstanding had never been cleared up, and now De Santillana was gazing white-faced at recipes with a quantity of detail that bordered on manic. If you want to make pressed duck, Julia informed American homemakers, you’ll find it hard to locate the right sort of duck—one that was killed by suffocation in order to retain the blood that enriched the sauce—so go ahead and do as so many French restaurants now do, and add fresh pig’s blood mixed with wine to the duck press. “This is not the book we contracted for,” De Santillana said faintly. Julia objected, but when she was able to step back and gain a little perspective on the manuscript, she could see exactly what they had delivered to Houghton Mifflin: a huge, densely overgrown thicket of brambles, impossible to handle.

De Santillana rejected the manuscript outright, but she was still impressed by Julia and Simca, and she invited them to come up with a plan for a more salable book. She even picked up on Julia’s idea of a series, but said the books would have to be very different from the volume in hand. Each one must be very simple and very compact, written