Julia Child’s letters reveal passionate, personal side

“As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto” by Joan Reardon, $26

In 1952, a middle-aged American woman living in Paris responded to a complaint about the poor quality of American-made kitchen knives by one of her favorite magazine writers and sent him a couple of

French-made ones from her neighborhood store.

If you believe history turns on specific moments, you could say that impulsive act of generosity was the start of the American culinary revolution.

The housewife was Julia Child, and if her “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” and accompanying television shows weren’t the catalyst for the change in American attitudes toward cooking during the 1960s, they were certainly its most recognizable symbols.

The writer was Bernard DeVoto, one of the country’s leading public intellectuals, a historian, author and longtime columnist for Harper’s magazine.

DeVoto didn’t answer the letter himself, of course; that was left to his wife Avis. And for that we can be thankful because her gracious thank-you letter to Child led to a long correspondence, which has been captured in Joan Reardon’s marvelous new book “As Always, Julia.”

If Child was the mother of the modern American interest in cooking, Avis DeVoto was its midwife. She’s the one with the publishing background who steered the novice author through the perilous shoals of the book world, cheering her on when she needed it, connecting her with publishers and editors, offering astute criticism, even copy-editing text, testing recipes and sending American ingredients to Child overseas so she could test with the same materials her audience would be using.

In the process, what began as a polite correspondence between well-bred ladies of a certain class blossomed into a kind of frank intimacy in which Child reveals sides of herself that were known to only a few of her closest friends.

Through the letters we see her grow as a cook and as an author. She begins tentatively, but her instincts are spot-on. She tests and retests, measuring, weighing and timing everything repeatedly to make her recipes as accurate as they could possibly be.

Child’s book didn’t come easily. It took more than 10 years from the time she started work on it until publication in 1961 (when she was almost 50).

Just as interesting is the far subtler picture that is painted of these two women, the times in which they were living and the friendship that grew between them.

What begins as a very polite “Dear Mrs.” very quickly becomes “Dear” and then “Dearest Friend.” As the formality passes, we witness a friendship and, eventually, a sisterhood being born.

Despite the fact that they were raised on opposite coasts, both women had roots in upper-middle-class New England (Child was from Pasadena, but her family was old Massachusetts, and she attended Smith College).

They shared sort of bien-pensant political liberalism that, while common among their Ivy League friends, was distinctly at odds with the mood of the country.

Indeed, some of the most striking passages in the letters describe the level of McCarthy-era paranoia.

“I must warn you to be careful what you say about McCarthy,” DeVoto wrote in 1953. “B(ernard) and I can say what we damn well please, and we do. But Paul (Child, Julia’s husband and a federal employee) has a job. And he could lose it.”

In fact, Paul Child was called back to Washington, D.C., to face questioning, though he did manage to keep his job.

Through everything that transpired in those 10 years — successes and failures, news and gossip, births and deaths — their friendship deepened.

Though “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” was definitely Child’s own work, along with her co-authors Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle (who helped in varying ways), there’s no mistaking how much she came to rely on Avis DeVoto’s advice.

In fact, at one point Child had proposed dedicating the book to her. “That you have taken all this time and devotion and energy to promote something by people you only know through two pieces of cutlery, rustable at that. … But how nice it is that one can come to know someone just through correspondence, and become really passionate friends.”