Julia Child_ A Life - Laura Shapiro [39]
“The sales may not be spectacular, but I have complete confidence that word of mouth will keep this going forever,” Koshland assured Julia. “Word of mouth” did not impress her too much; she’d have preferred to see some advertising. Knopf had produced a splendid-looking book but didn’t seem to be doing much to push it. Most of what the public knew about Mastering came from media attention she and Simca had generated on their tour. “Our publishers really are about as unbusinesslike as any I have encountered,” she fumed to Simca. “They remind me of the little café I used to go to after my morning courses at the Cord. Bleu. One of the boys introduced me to the proprietress saying: I’ve brought you a new customer. Oh, she said, I have enough customers already!”
But Koshland was right, in a sense. The sales did have a life of their own, independent of Knopf’s genteel way with promotion. The target population of enthusiastic home cooks may have been slow to get to bookstores, but to everyone’s surprise there seemed to be a hidden population very willing to take a stab at elaborate French cooking. In the fall of 1962, the Book-of-the-Month Club made Mastering a dividend selection, expecting to distribute around twelve thousand copies. By March, sixty-five thousand books had gone out, orders were still pouring in, and Mastering had become the most popular dividend in the history of the club. Meanwhile, The French Chef, which began in 1963, was making Julia a television star. As the program reached one public television station after another, bookstore sales boomed; and in 1974, Mastering appeared on the New York Times list of the century’s best-selling cookbooks, with 1.3 million copies sold. Nearly a half century after publication, the book had been revised once—to introduce the food processor, among other updates—and reprinted dozens of times. It was still selling steadily at the rate of some eighteen thousand copies a year.
Once the success of the book was established in the mid-1960s, Julia and Simca started thinking about a second volume. By this time Julia was beginning to wriggle free of what she would finally term the straitjacket of traditional French cooking; and Volume II reflects her willingness to take liberties she didn’t allow herself earlier. On the whole, Volume II was devoted to characteristic French food, including charcuterie and pastries, as well as a nineteen-page recipe for French bread, but the section on broccoli shows Julia’s new frame of mind. She had always loved broccoli and couldn’t resist including it in Volume I, even though it was rarely eaten in France. But she had confined herself to just a few instructions, almost apologetic in tone. In Volume II she stood up and gave it a trumpet fanfare: eight pages of French recipes from à la polonaise to timbales—“because this is a book for Americans, and broccoli is one of our best vegetables, and the treatment is à la française,” she explained firmly to Simca. (In truth, the charcuterie, the pastries, and the French bread also identify the book as American—nobody in France would dream of making such things at home.) In her next book, From Julia Child’s Kitchen, she gave herself a truly free hand, right down to an apple betty she christened pommes Rosemarie, and she often said this was her favorite book. “Now I don’t have to be so damned classic and ‘French,’” she exclaimed to Jones. “To hell with that. I am French trained, and I do what I want with my background.” Although she continued to trust French technique as the best starting point for any sort of cookery, the distinction between “French” and “not-so-French” was no longer fundamental to her thinking about food. What emerged in its stead were two categories that had been lurking in the shadows until her career caught up with them.
Early in 1961, as she and Simca were winding down their work on Volume I, Julia