Deconstructing Julia

It began as a fixer-upper in 1952, when Beck and Bertholle asked Julia to groom a 600-page cookbook they’d sold to Sumner Putnam of Ives Washburn, French Home Cooking. In recasting the recipes for American kitchens, Julia tested them and found every one overcomplicated or unclear. She decided that they had to start from scratch—rethinking, researching, retesting—and with American ingredients, American measurements, and cultural translations (for instance, what the French call le carrelet, the British call plaice, and Americans, sand dab or lemon sole). During this deconstruct/reconstruct process Putnam fell away and Houghton Mifflin signed on as the publisher; the book got bigger, its ambition deeper. Six years and 700 pages later, the manuscript was so involved and encyclopedic it scared the suits at Houghton Mifflin. They asked for a scaled-down (dumbed-down is what they actually wanted), more user-friendly format, and this imperative brought focus. It would be, Julia told their editor, “A collection of good French dishes of the simpler sort, directed quite frankly to those who enjoy cooking and have a feeling for food.”

Our Lady of the Kitchen, Vanity Fair, By LAURA JACOBS August 2009

This is a wonderful, illuminating example of the deconstruct/reconstruct process in a medium that most all of us can relate to, cooking. Julia Child learned French cooking as an adult, which is possibly what gave her the necessary outsider’s view to take the whole thing apart and put it back together in a revolutionary way. As an outsider she could see this traditional and highly sophisticated cooking for its strengths and weaknesses, without the ownership and the pride of someone who might have been raised in France. The strength of French cuisine was its renown as being the world’s best food. The disadvantage, at least for everyone except for the advantaged few who grew up in France learning the traditions from their parents and grandparents, was that it was complicated, and archaic. In a way, French cooking was like witchcraft, pre-Child.

It was Child who had the presence of mind to realize that she could take apart the elements of French cooking. Her sense of humor and humanness, apparent in her TV shows, must also have helped to inject that dash of irreverence needed for messing with a classic. In doing this, she made the building blocks apparent, which she could then sort, adapt, re-edit and reorganize. In putting them back together, she demystified the process and made French cooking accessible. Her insight came from personal experience and in solving for it, she created a new and wildly successful product, every person’s French cookbook.

Julia Child also understood something about cultural differences when she bridged the cooking cultures of France and the States. She made Americans understand, desire and practice French cooking. Her book, and eventually her TV show, were really the communication tools for this wonderful achievement. Julia Child had the empathy, playfulness, courage and the creative thinking any designer would be envious of.

Here is a summary of what we can learn from Julia Child:

• It helps to be an outsider
• Deconstructing demystifies and liberates
• Even the best product can be taken apart to give birth to new solutions
• A degree of irreverence for what has come before you is the secret ingredient
• Seeing the elements for what they are creates a foundation for reconstruction
• Reconstruction is about rethinking, reorganizing and resolving
• None of this can happen if you don’t have empathy for people
• Every innovative product needs tools of communication to be widely understood and assimilated