(This is one reason the book was rejected by their first publisher, Houghton Mifflin, who wanted something that wouldn’t intimidate busy housewives.) The book, eventually published by Knopf, has few “easy” recipes. (The cookbook never assumes that there’s a woman in the kitchen.) In many ways, Julia’s greatest contribution to cooking was not bringing French food to America-although she did that, with help from restaurateur Henri Soule René Verdon, the Kennedys’ French chef and later Jacques Pépin and Madeleine Kamman-but in freeing Americans from the necessity of cooking for a purpose other than pleasure.Īlthough Child demystified French cooking, she and Beck refused to dumb it down. They ended up with a book “for the servantless American cook who can be unconcerned on occasion with budgets, waistlines, time schedules, children’s meals, the parent-chaffeur-den-mother syndrome or anything else which might interfere with the enjoyment of producing something wonderful to eat.” For the readers of MTAFC, cooking was an avocation, not a chore.
Most of the recipes in the first volume of MTAFC came from the French Beck but were rewritten by Child after she’d tirelessly vetted them on electric stoves with American cuts of beef and high-gluten American flour, and even American frozen vegetables.
Before Julia Child became TV Julia, Julia of the warbling voice and towering stature, fearless and flamboyant with the boning knife, there was Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the ambitious 1961 volume she co-authored with French friend and fellow cooking teacher Simone Beck (and officially, with Louisette Bertholle, whose contribution, it seems, was slim).
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