Mise en place

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This article was published 04/06/2022 (1528 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Julia Child is having a moment right now. Celebrating her ebullient personality and her influential body of work, which helped change attitudes to cooking and eating in postwar North America, we have a recent documentary (2021’s Julia), as well as a new dramatized series (also called Julia and showing on Crave).

This latest entry into the Child bibliography is thorough and detailed, sometimes a lot of high-spirited fun but sometimes a trifle dry. If you are new to the cult of Julia, you might want to start with something more general, with a bit more whoosh. For Julia completists, however, this well-researched work, which involves a careful sifting of primary sources, will be a must-read.

Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz conveys a vivid sense of Julia Child’s talent for cooking, her passionate persistence and determination, and her hard-headed business sense. But the American cultural historian goes against the so-called Great Man Theory — or even Great Woman Theory — of history, to widen her focus.

According to Horowitz, two of Julia’s greatest assets were her genius for friendship and her gift for collaboration. In a sense, Warming Up Julia Child tells us about its central figure by telling us about six key figures who surrounded and supported her — what Horowitz calls “Julia’s team” — first as she worked on the revolutionary cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and later on her ground-breaking TV show, The French Chef.

“In the beginning, there was Paul,” Horowitz writes. Paul Child was a creative, encouraging and adoring spouse, and in a reversal of the usual gender dynamics of the 1950s and ‘60s, his work often supported his wife’s professional career. Simone (Simca) Beck was Julia’s French collaborator. When things were going well, Julia called her “our soeur [sister] — but better than a blood-born soeur, because you are of our own choosing.” When things weren’t going well, as when the two wrangled over something like adding bread to soupe au pistou, Simca was “an old goat.”

Avis DeVoto, who started writing to Julia as part of her husband’s quest for a truly sharp kitchen knife, developed a close friendship with Julia before they ever met in person. Judith Jones and Bill Koshland both worked at Julia’s publishing house, while Ruth Lockwood was a producer at WGBH, the Boston-based public broadcaster.

Horowitz gives some sense of the larger cultural context, but mostly her emphasis is on her characters’ close interactions, much of it through their correspondence, with letters packed with idiosyncratic expressions, fun period slang and Paul and Julia’s frequent misspellings. (The term “[sic]” gets quite a workout here.) The book’s 20 pages of endnotes are almost all references to letters, particularly the voluminous amount of mail flying between Julia and Simca, Avis and Julia, and Paul and his twin brother Charlie.

We see Julia and her team take the rigour and long tradition of French cooking and translate it for the supermarkets and kitchens of the American home cook — the “servantless” home cook, as Julia often pointed out. This wasn’t always easy, as when Simca wondered how one could possibly make cassoulet without preserved goose, or Julia struggled with the recipe for a very simple — but also very tricky — rolled omelette.

As Horowitz follows what became a 10-year process of backing and forthing, many readers might find themselves thinking, why is this cookbook taking so long? Or perhaps even, why is this book about the cookbook taking so long, as Horowitz’s middle section falls into a bit of a lull.

And ironically, for a book about a book that was endlessly edited, corrected, checked and argued over, Warming Up could have used another once-over. There are some repetitions of quotations mere pages apart and occasional spelling slips (Cordon “Blue” instead of “Bleu”).

Still, Horowitz ends with a flourish, moving from the cookbook to the wild adventure of live-to-tape television, during which Julia’s warbling delivery and magnificent handling of her occasional flubs and failures endeared her to the viewing public.

With her TV show, Horowitz suggests, Julia Child would become not just a cooking authority but a beloved personality, “known and remembered simply as ‘Julia.’”

Alison Gillmor has not managed to make Julia’s famous 14-second rolled omelette.