Julia Child_ A Life - Laura Shapiro [37]
It took about a year and a half to produce the new version, and they sent it to De Santillana in September 1959 with a great deal of confidence. She had been reading the chapters as they were finished and after poring over the entire manuscript for four days, she wrote to say that she was stunned and thrilled. “I surely do not know of any other compendium so amazingly, startlingly accurate or so inclusive,” she told Julia. The good news sent Julia, Simca, and Avis soaring, but two months later they were brought back to earth with a thud. Paul Brooks, the editor in chief of Houghton Mifflin, had consulted with the business side of the company and could see no way to publish the book without losing a massive amount of money. Julia had promised a “short, simple book directed to the housewife chauffeur,” Brooks reminded her. What she had delivered was very different—a book so huge, expensive, and elaborate that it was certain to seem formidable “to the American housewife.”
The housewife. There she was again. Brooks assured Julia that if she wanted to give it another try, he would be glad to look at a much-reduced version of the manuscript; but Julia had gone as far into housewife territory as she was willing to go. No pressed duck, complete with history and folklore? Fine. But she wouldn’t cut back on the essentials in the roast chicken recipe. She wouldn’t write for any “chauffeur den-mother” who wasn’t willing to meet her halfway. Defeated, dejected, and feeling guilty about letting down Simca, Julia took herself into the kitchen and started to cook. Pastry skills—here was a whole area of French cooking she knew little about and really should study. She began with tuiles, those very delicate cookies that must be shaped into a curve around a rolling pin as soon as they come out of the oven. “Terribly simple batter to prepare, but in none of the French recipes have I found quite the exact explanation of what is what, so I must start out blind,” she told Avis eagerly. So many pitfalls! How hot should the oven be? What was the right consistency for the batter? What would keep the cookies from breaking as they were transferred from the oven to the rolling pin? Cooking—especially exploratory cooking, in search of the perfect recipe—was always the comfort zone. Now she returned to it.
While Julia was cooking, Avis was plotting. For the last several years, she had been talking about the book with her friend William Koshland, who recently had been made an executive at Alfred A. Knopf, one of the most distinguished publishing houses in the country. Koshland was a food lover and had been following the travails of the manuscript with interest. As a New Yorker with many friends in the culinary world, he was sure that Houghton Mifflin was being shortsighted and that this was exactly the right time for a good, definitive work on French cooking. Housewives might not have the time for long, unfamiliar recipes; but there were, he believed, “real cooks and hobby cooks” everywhere who would be fascinated. People were traveling, they were taking cooking lessons, they were subscribing to Gourmet, and they were buying the huge tomes on high-class cooking published by the magazine—“Never before has this country been so gourmet-minded,” he told Avis. Most of the soothsayers in publishing saw this trend as negligible, at least compared with all the high-speed cooking that was being promoted so adamantly in the media. But something told Koshland that this book, a genuine teaching tool, had the potential to create a market of its own. As the fortunes of the manuscript rose and fell at Houghton Mifflin, Koshland kept reminding Avis he wanted Knopf to be next in