ABSTRACT
Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction describes how consumption is “a stage in a process of communication, that is, an act of deciphering, decoding, which presupposes practical or explicit mastery of a cipher or code.” Before Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking (Mastering, 1961), French cookbooks written for an American audience had presumed their reader’s ability to “see (voir)” the highly-classed recipe language as culinary art. They had also assumed functional “knowledge (savoir)” of foundational methods and technique. Mastering would presume neither. Step-by-step narration written by Child teaches the interested but uninformed reader to decode the aesthetics of fine French cooking and confidently produce excellent food.
Mastering reframes the act of producing and consuming food from drudgery into a pleasurable hobby, one that offers value and satisfaction to a targeted reader. Its innovative narrative was not the result of happenstance. Letters, drafts, interviews, and memoirs document how its particular audience was conceived, rehearsed to test readers, and revised in the published cookbook. This is a book for the servantless American cook who can be unconcerned on occasion with budgets, waistlines, time schedules, children’s meals, the parent-chauffeur-den-mother syndrome, or anything else which might interfere with the enjoyment of producing something wonderful to eat.
In naming her ideal reader, Child did not coin a new term. Rather, she reclaims her protagonist from a long tradition of domestic literature, scholarly discourse, and popular media speaking to, or on behalf of, the middle-class housewife. Mastering’s narrative intervenes in a century-old textual debate about American domestic service. Departing from centuries of blame-shifting rhetoric of the wealthy and elite focused upon the “servant problem,” Mastering summons a reimagined consumer. This book meant to coach the beginner reader and home cook as they become the master of their home kitchen. It does not bemoan a lost position as a mistress of servants.
This vision sought to dramatically democratize French cooking for the middle-class American. Child rejected explicit gender markers and specific economic signals. She positioned the text to reject past hierarchies of taste to broaden the kind of person who could appreciate and produce fine French cooking. Although Child would decline the formal title of feminist in later years, her cookbook narrative prefigured the movement to name the frustration many women felt. While others would eschew the kitchen, she reclaimed cooking’s place of drudgery and overwhelming confusion into a confident, leisure activity. She saw cooking as pleasurable and fulfilling—so much so that literate readers would not want to pass off the work to a servant. Freed from the preoccupation of managing and educating a live-in cook, Child reframes good cooking as its own privilege. She sought to empower home cooks and to take away the “fear” of being a bad cook. Her point is not that a home cook will be required to spend hours each day in the kitchen. Not all meals will be elaborate and multi-course, but real joy and fulfillment can be found in cooking fine food.
