Editor's note:Julia Child was known for distilling the essence of many classic French recipes—from boeuf bourguignon to croque monsieur—for Americans, but another one of her most famous recipes was for a traditional French baguette. When the first volume of Child'sMastering the Art of French Cookingwas published, back in 1961, a baguette was something you might savor at a French bakery or restaurant in the United States—but hardly something being made at home. Soon enough, viewers of Julia'sFrench Chef电视连续剧都强烈要求法式面包再保险cipe, and their wishes were fulfilled in the second volume ofMastering the Art of French Cooking,published in 1970.
What many fans may not know is that the iconic French loaf nearly didn't make it into the book. According to Bob Spitz's brand-new biographyDearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child,it was Knopf editor Judith Jones who realized the importance of the missing recipe and pressed Julia to include one.
In this exclusive excerpt from Spitz's book, you'll learn why this seemingly simple request was anything but, and read on for Julia Child'sbaguette recipe, detail by painstaking detail.
In her memoir,My Life in France, Julia wrote: "Simca had no interest in our breadworks and did not participate at all." But, in fact, it was Simca whose resourceful-ness eventually put them over the top. Since 1958, she had been taking breadmaking lessons with a面包师in Bourbonne-les-Bains, turning out dozens, if not hundreds of dozens of croissants, flutes, batards, and baguettes. Whether Julia asked her to help develop a recipe remains unclear. In their correspondence that summer there was a furious exchange of notes on the subject, dealing with flour, leavening, gluten content, and kneading. But there was no real breakthrough until Simca consulted the oracle.
In her time-travels, she had come across the name of Professor Raymond Calvel, the head of the state-run Ecole Professionelle de Meunerie in Paris and perhaps the world's leading authority on French bread. Calvel had an encyclopedic knowledge of flours and grains and a sculptor's flair for giving them form. Simca suspected he could solve their outstanding problems and arranged a one-day tutorial in December 1967. The moment she learned of this, Julia decided that she would attend, as well.
Calvel's advice was a revelation. It was as if he flipped a switch and suddenly the murky world of French bread zoomed into focus. "Every step in his process was different from anything we had heard of, read about, or seen," Julia recalled. For one thing, she'd been making "too stiff a dough." The mixing, rise, and shaping of loaves had been documented in the definitiveBoulangerie D'Aujourd' huithat had guided her through early experiments, but what inspired Julia most now was how Calvel applied the traditional protocols to the volatile dough.
Usually, Paul added a sprinkling of flour to the dough to make it more pliable and easy to handle. But for a perfect consistency, Calvel explained, the dough had to be sticky enough to create a sponge that would encourage rapid rising. This usually occurred in a warm, dark place, but Calvel preferred a slow, cool fermentation to develop a riper flavor and maintain humidity. "This seems to be the trick that gives the bread its interesting taste and texture," Julia marveled. He also explained how a gluten cloak enclosed the loaf to protect its shape.
Julia hung on his every word. Calvel's version of the "arcane craft" may have gone against conventional wisdom, but at least it was a version that could be duplicated and taught. During a hands-on session that lasted more than four hours, he guided Julia through the entire process, so that she could "learn through eye, ear, and by [her] own tactile sense." The ultimate goal, of course, was to control all the elements so it achieved the level of taste that Julia felt defined French cooking. "Each of the several steps in the process, though simple to accomplish, plays a critical role," she wrote in a related over-view, "and if any is eliminated or combined with another, the texture and taste...will suffer."
Raymond Calvel provided the foundation for Julia's fussy standards. With a mix of fondness and contentment, she later recalled how by the end of the day, after "taking copious notes on how the dough should look and feel, and the position of the baker's hands," she began turning out perfect loaves of French bread. They were finer specimens than anything she'd seen in the States and comparable to the Parisian gems. A postcard to Judith Jones, mailed directly from the Ecole, revealed a flush of exuberance in the card's single sentence: "It's all in the shape," which, of course, wasn't the case.
"What was lacking for our perfect loaves," Simca wrote, "was the right heat-and-steam combination." They still had to simulate the baker's oven to accommodate American cooks. "Paul Child's ingenuity finally helped us come up with the gimmick—to drop a hot brick in a pan of water." It worked perfectly, too perfectly, until Julia's niece, Phila, came to visit a few days before the manuscript was due. "I noticed the bricks they put in the oven had asbestos in them," she recalled. The discovery threw the Childs into "a complete tizzy." They'd read the recent warnings about asbestos exposure, how scientists believed it led to mesothelioma, a form of cancer that attacked the outer lining of the lungs. As the clock ticked toward deadline Paul flew madly around Boston ransacking the local building-supply stores, but there was a degree of asbestos in all brick. Ultimately, Julia gave her readers a choice: "plopping a heated brickor a stoneinto a pan of water," in addition to lining the oven floor with quarry tiles.
It had taken almost a year "and two hundred-and-eighty-four pounds of flour" to develop the master bread recipe with American ingredients. In the early rush to deliver it, so many mistakes were made. Paul recalled how "things were dropped on the floor, three times too much salt was put in, crusts were burned black, or the bread was only half-baked and the loaves were often rushed into the oven so fast they curled up like crullers." But finally the end results were perfect each time out. Even when Julia got carried away with tweaks and fillings, the loaves emerged without a flaw. According to Sara Moulton, who assisted Julia later in her career, "what came out of her oven was better than面包师iebread."
The question, now, was whether amateur cooks would actually make their own. Julia neededoperational proof, in this case from her retinue of volunteer analysts who would test the recipe and offer concise feedback. She needed to know if the directions were coherent, and if her ideal reader, a typical American home cook, could follow them with success.
The verdict was in even before the yeast began to rise. "I got this package in the mail, about an inch-and-a-half thick," recalls Pat Pratt, Julia's friend and neighbor in Cambridge. It was the final typescript for French bread. "I took one look at it and knew everything had gone bust: the recipe was thirty-two pages long."
