Julia Child_ A Life - Laura Shapiro [38]
Neither Alfred Knopf nor his wife, Blanche, who ran the company with him, had any interest in bringing out a new French cookbook. They had just published Classic French Cooking by Joseph Donon, a protégé of Escoffier. Surely that was enough of a nod to the emerging gourmet market. Alfred didn’t even glance at the manuscript, but as a courtesy to Avis he passed it along to Koshland, who was regarded as the in-house food expert. Koshland promptly handed it to a young editor named Judith Jones, who had lived in France and was a talented cook. The two of them, along with Angus Cameron—the editor who had helped launch Joy of Cooking years earlier at Bobbs-Merrill—worked their way through one recipe after another and grew more excited with every dish they turned out. Jones found the manuscript to be an extraordinary achievement, the first book she had ever seen that made it possible to reproduce the flavors she had loved in France. In Julia’s text, Jones could recognize not only an expert cook but a personable writer and brilliant teacher. Americans would respond to this book. But they wouldn’t even see it unless the Knopfs agreed, and Koshland knew what an obstacle that was. The book would be expensive to put out, he admitted to Avis, but he told her he was ready to “ram it through the board,” no matter how reluctant Alfred and Blanche might be. Julia had refused to let herself feel optimistic about Knopf, especially because of the Donon book, but when she heard this—and when she learned that several editors had actually gone to their stoves and used the recipes and loved them—she allowed the tiniest “coal of hope” to begin to glow.
Koshland won, and the book was formally accepted in May 1960 with Judith Jones at the head of the immense project. For the rest of Julia’s career, Jones would be the editor who counseled, inspired, steadied, and rescued her in countless ways, not only while they worked on books together but in the course of Julia’s work in television, magazines, and public life. It was Jones who came up with the title Mastering the Art of French Cooking—nixing “French Food at Last!,” “French Kitchen Pleasure,” and “Love and French Cooking,” among other contestants—and it was Jones who knew that even Americans might venture on board for a long, tumultuous voyage to cassoulet or French bread if Julia was piloting the ship.
Mastering the Art of French Cooking came out with a gratifying splash in October 1961. Craig Claiborne of the New York Times called it “glorious,” “comprehensive,” “laudable,” and “monumental,” and New York’s culinary elite swarmed to a publication party hosted by Dione Lucas, who had reigned since the 1940s as the nation’s leading expert in French cooking. But there was significant competition that fall, even in the small category of definitive French cookbooks. Gourmet brought out a fat volume called Gourmet’s Basic French Cookbook by Louis Diat, the chef at New York’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, whose columns in the magazine Julia had admired for years. The first American edition of the famous culinary encyclopedia Larousse Gastronomique also turned up, with one of Julia’s classmates from Smith, Charlotte Turgeon, as coeditor. And while Claiborne’s own book, The New York Times Cookbook, wasn’t specifically French, it was certainly sophisticated enough to appeal to many of the passionate home cooks Julia had counted on to buy Mastering. Earlier French cookbooks, including Samuel Chamberlain’s beloved Clementine in the Kitchen and his 619-page Bouquet de France, were still on people’s shelves, along with Dione Lucas’s two books and the first Gourmet cookbook, which had come out in 1950 and continued to sell nicely. There did seem to be talented, ambitious home cooks in America, but perhaps they were happy with the books they already owned. Despite rapturous