Mastering the Art of French Cooking
"Mastering the Art of French Cooking" Volume 1 was originally published in 1961 after some early difficulties. Beck, Bertholle, and Child initially signed a contract with publisher Houghton Mifflin, but Houghton Mifflin grew uninterested in the project. Child recalled one editor telling her, "Americans don't want an encyclopedia, they want to cook something quick, with a mix." Beck, Bertholle, and Child refused to make requested changes to the manuscript, and Houghton Mifflin abandoned the project, writing that the book, as it stood, would be "too formidable to the American housewife." Judith Jones of Alfred A. Knopf became interested in the manuscript after it had been rejected. After spending several years in Paris, Jones had moved to New York, where she grew frustrated with the limited ingredients and recipes commonly available in the United States. Jones felt that the manuscript would offer a lifeline to middle-class women, like her, who were interested in learning how to cook French cuisine in America, and predicted that "Mastering the Art of French Cooking", "will do for French cooking here in America what Rombauer's "The Joy of Cooking" did for standard [American] cooking." While Jones was enthusiastic about the book, Knopf had low expectations and invested very little into promoting it. In order to generate interest in the book, and without support from Knopf, Child appeared on several morning talk shows in 1961 to demonstrate recipes, which she later cited as the impetus for her own cooking show, The French Chef.
Edna Lewis
While in New York City, Lewis began throwing dinner parties for her friends and acquaintances - John Nicholson, an antiques dealer - was one of those friends. In 1948 on 58th Street, in East Side Manhattan, Nicholson opened Café Nicholson with Lewis as cook, which became an instant success among bohemians and artists. The restaurant was frequented by William Faulkner, Marlon Brando, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Richard Avedon, Gloria Vanderbilt, Marlene Dietrich, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Diana Vreeland. At the Café, Lewis served a neat menu of simple, Southern inspired dishes, including a chocolate soufflé, for which she was known. After five years there, Lewis left Café Nicholson and from there spent time as a Pheasant farmer in New Jersey until the entire flock died one evening from an unidentified disease. She opened and closed her own restaurant, catered for friends and acquaintances, taught cooking lessons, and even became a docent in the Hall of African Peoples in the American Museum of Natural History. In the late 1960s, she broke her leg and was temporarily forced to stop cooking professionally. With encouragement from Judith Jones, the cookbook editor at Knopf who also edited Julia Child, Evangeline Peterson and Lewis worked together to write "The Edna Lewis Cookbook" (1972). However, Jones found the cookbook "fashionable but tasteless" and in turn worked with Lewis on her own to write"The Taste of Country Cooking" in 1976. "The Taste of Country Cooking" contained as many recipes as it did information about Southern and African American food - successfully capturing the spirit and stories Lewis had to share - which was Jones' intention with the book"." In 1979, Craig Claiborne of "The New York Times" said the book "may well be the most entertaining regional cookbook in America". In 2017, nearly forty years after its publication,"The Taste of Country Cooking" saw an abrupt and newsworthy spike in US sales, ranking #5 overall and #3 in the cookbook category on Amazon's bestseller list - this spike followed its thematic inclusion in an episode of the cooking competition show "Top Chef."