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to fit the time and attention constraints of the typical American cook, “who is so apt to be mother, nurse, chauffeur, and cleaner as well.” Julia knew this was sensible advice, but it didn’t appeal to her. She was still longing to write a big, fat treatise covering every single essential point about French cooking. Nonetheless, after conferring with Simca, she decided to give in and accept the American way of life in culinary matters, or at least to go along with the prevailing pessimistic view of it. Americans seemed intent on “speed and the elimination of work,” she conceded to De Santillana. “We have therefore decided to shelve our own dream for the time being and propose to prepare you a short and snappy book directed to the somewhat sophisticated housewife-chauffeur.” The book would run about three hundred pages and feature authentic French recipes as well as hints on the “pepping up” of frozen and canned products. “Everything would be of the simpler sort, but nothing humdrum,” she promised. “The recipes would look short. We might even manage to insert a note of gaiety and a certain quiet chic, which would be a pleasant change.”

She was proposing exactly the sort of book she despised. Yes, she would try to lift it above the inanity of most magazine treatments of French cooking—“quiet chic” might help, assuming the format could support such an innovation—but she would be addressing her least favorite people in the world, the ones who firmly resisted cooking. Housewives. Julia had never thought one way or another about the word, but she was growing to hate it. Editors, publishers, everyone who talked about recipes in America bowed and scraped to housewives, those ubiquitous females forever depicted as running frantically from laundry to car pool to scout troop, with no time to cook excellent meals and, it was universally assumed, no desire to learn. The task facing her now would be to win the allegience of this unappealing creature. Other cookbook authors had succeeded; maybe she and Simca could at least raise the standard. She asked Avis to send her a copy of one of Houghton Mifflin’s bestselling cookbooks, Helen Corbitt’s Cookbook, by a popular Texas food expert in charge of the restaurant at Neiman Marcus. Corbitt’s recipe for coq au vin was exactly twenty-five words long, not counting the list of ingredients. “It is such a wonderful example of easy-looking recipes,” Julia wrote; and her admiration was sincere, though not for the food.

But after thinking about the new book for a few weeks, she had to pull back. Canned soup sauces? Casseroles bulging with frozen vegetables? Convenience first, flavor and texture last? Julia just couldn’t bring herself to write for home cooks who bore such ill will toward food that they kept their contact with it to a minimum even while they were making dinner. If she and Simca were going to publish a cookbook, it had to have cooking in it; and if that meant the housewife would be frightened off, then the book would have to reach somebody else. By the time she wrote to De Santillana to confirm the new proposal, she had come up with a working formula for a book she and Simca could produce in good faith—a book that would be realistic about American life, but never cross over to the dark side. “This is to be a collection of good French dishes of the simpler sort, directed quite frankly to those who enjoy cooking and have a feeling for food,” she told her editor. Thus began the writing of the manuscript that would be titled, eventually, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

The goal remained the same—to reach le gout français by means of clear, precise recipes and supermarket ingredients—but Escoffier and the other old masters who had been peering over Julia’s shoulder as she typed were now banished. No longer was she flogging herself to be “complete and exhaustive and immortal,” she told Avis. The challenge was to cut down the number and size of the recipes and reduce the verbiage, while keeping the results pristine. “I can’t get oven-roasted chicken down to less than 2 pages,” she complained.