#1: Promoting Mastering the Art of French Cooking (Julia Child & Judith Jones)
Hello, Listeners. Welcome to I'll Probably Delete This, where I learn about the book publishing industry and podcasting by telling stories from successful writers and other notable people from the history of the publishing industry.
Speaker:In this episode, we will cover an introduction to Julia Child's start as kind of the popularizer of French cuisine in America, and I'm gonna focus on three things that contributed to the success of her first cookbook, which she wrote with two other authors.
Speaker:In future episodes, we'll cover stories from successful authors like Laura Ingalls Wilder or Charles Dickens, who by some accounts wrote history's best selling novel. We'll cover Mary Pope Osborne, the underappreciated author of the hugely successful Magic Treehouse book series aimed at kids or the publishing phenom that is James Patterson and the now more than hundred books that he's published as well as many others.
Speaker:Publishing house, Alfred A. Knopf published Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 1961. Judith Jones was an editor there, and she was central to Knopf acquiring the cookbook and getting it published. Essentially, it was a hard sell to persuade the publishing house that a cookbook, and this one in particular, would be a good bet. Part of the problem, obviously, was that the book was more than 700 pages, which would make it expensive to print, and Knopf, at least at the time, wasn't all that interested in cookbooks.
Speaker:Jones ultimately was successful in persuading the publishing house to acquire and release the book, but that's really when her work began. After acquiring the book in early 1960 , Jones then set out to revise the structure of the book and its writing. The book had come in with a title of French Recipes for American Cooks. It had three authors, two of them were French, Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck. And then the third, Julia Child, had been living in Europe for at least the last ten years. Her husband worked for the State Department.
Speaker:So Jones tried out the recipes at home, and in edits, she really focused on making sure that when the book described things like cuts of meat or vegetables or other produce, that the ingredients were available in American supermarkets, that the directions were clear for the American home cook and didn't assume too high of a level of skill on the reader's part, and that the recipes could be made with the stove in particular and the equipment that was available to the typical American household. The edits were extensive, and it was Child on the other end who took up the revisions for the trio of authors, and she really took it up with gusto. Jones and Child had a really good working relationship. As part of the editing, they went on to change the title of the book from French Recipes for American Cooks to Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in part to signal an aspirational quality to the cookbook.
Speaker:When Knopf finally releases the book in October of 1961 , it was a large and surprising success, although that success certainly built over time and took a while. There were three things that I wanna highlight that contributed to this success, probably among others, but I wanted to focus on on these three.
Speaker:The first is a kind of counter positioning. There was a lot of focus in American culture at the time, beginning in the nineteen sixties and really continuing on certainly through the early eighties, on things like prepared foods, canned and prepackaged food, and ready made food like TV dinners. And this book was very much a counter to that. It was encouraging people to take time and focus on preparation and focus on ingredients and to create a more refined dish for their family at dinner or for a dinner party.
Speaker:The second was really interest in the Kennedys. John f Kennedy is inaugurated in January of 1961 . Jackie Kennedy becomes first lady, and she brings to the White House a real style that captivated lots of Americans at the time. Importantly for our purposes is she also spoke French. She had lived in France for a time, and then most significantly for the cookbook, Jackie had hired a Frenchman to be the White House chef earlier in the year, earlier in the the year of the release of the cookbook, which had made the news and was kind of in the culture at the time.
Speaker:And then the last one is the media environment at the time. So as part of the book launch, Knopf had Gotten Child and her co author Beck booked on NBC's Today Show. They were they would do a live segment on TV. In 1961, it's worth noting that TV's reach at that point was pretty impressive from just a couple thousand TV sets that existed in The US in 1945. Americans had bought TVs by the millions, so that by 1960, more than 85% of US households had a TV.
Speaker:Julia Child in her late forties and her co author who was even older [were] worried about being seen as a couple of old ladies on TV [who] might not be appealing to the television audience, and she wanted to sort of show vigor and the appeal of French cooking and to make the book seem more appealing. So she prepared a cooking demonstration for live TV, which was a novel idea at the time. She gathered up the equipment, sort of the hot plate, the pan, butter, eggs, and was gonna make an omelet live on TV. And she got it all together and practiced repeatedly the night before so that she'd be ready and could describe what she was doing and talk about the book all while she's cooking and cooking the omelet. She was able to do that on the TV spot the next day, and 4,000,000 people, mostly housewives, saw her on the Today show. As evidence for kind of the reach, later that week, Child and Beck did a demonstration and a book signing at Bloomingdale's in New York, hoping to sell a few dozen, maybe a hundred copies, and when they pulled up before they were even scheduled to start, there was a line out the door and around the block of women waiting to meet them and to buy their book.
Speaker:The very next year, Child who had moved, kind of during the editing, from Europe to Boston was now living in Boston, and she ends up filming a cooking show for the Boston Public Television Station, WGBH. They had approached her. They did a couple pilots and wanted to see how it would work. They end up hiring her for a full season, but they offered no pay. And the deal was that Child would make the show and they would pay for the cost and the equipment and the ingredients, and she could promote her book while doing the show. WGBH, it's one of the most successful shows they they had ever done at the time. It gets picked up by public television stations across the country, and then the TV show really drove sales of the cookbook for years to come after its initial release.
Speaker:Those three things that we highlighted, you've got kind of a counter positioning to a dominant strand in in food culture, even though food culture really wasn't a a thing like it is now. As really specific prepared intentional meals; you've got, in a way, riding on the coattails of the fascination with the Kennedys and the style that they represented. And then you've got the technological innovation of TV that was used in a way by Julia Child, like really nobody before, to promote her book that really contributed to the success of Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
Speaker:If you found that story interesting, I encourage you to take a look at the book called The Editor, How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America. It was written by Sarah B. Franklin and published by Atria Books in 2024. And if you're interested in learning more about publishing Julia Child or the life of Judith Jones, that book is a great place to start.
Speaker:Thank you for joining me. I hope you'll join me for the next episode of I'll Probably Delete This, where we'll explore more stories of great books, unless, of course, I delete this before then, which I probably will. Thanks everybody.
