Julia Child by Laura Shapiro

Author:Laura Shapiro
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781101202937
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-03-01T10:00:00+00:00

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 reviews and an exhilarating cross-country publicity tour—which Julia and Simca organized and paid for themselves—Mastering sold only a modest sixteen thousand copies the first year it was out.

“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.

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