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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.1

– Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, and Simone Beck, Mastering the Art of French Cooking

In the fall of 1959, two years before she urged Americans to throw caution to the wind and produce “something wonderful to eat,” Julia Child was despondent. The manuscript on which she had spent much of the previous decade, and in which she had placed her hopes and ambitions, had been rejected a second time. Houghton Mifflin, the celebrated publishing firm, had initially been interested but was daunted by the size and scope of the proposed cookbook, with the editors concerned that the recipes would intimidate home cooks. The normally resilient Child wrote to her coauthors with an uncharacteristic tone of defeat: “We must accept the fact that this may well be a book unacceptable to any publisher, as it requires work on the part of the reader.” She clarified that the problem was that women, the presumed audience for the cookbook, were not well suited to this demanding form of cooking. Presaging the language she would use in the book, she wrote, “we are not presenting things in a popular manner. I am frankly not interested in the chauffeur, den-mother type of cooking, as we have enough of it.”2

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