American home-cooking maverick Julia Child knew she had arrived when she made the cover of Time magazine in 1966, but Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz considers the accompanying article incomplete. In the ebullient Warming Up Julia Child: The Remarkable Figures Who Shaped a Legend, Horowitz spotlights the six individuals--"Julia's team," she calls them--without whom "Americans would have lost an important new way to understand and enjoy food and the pleasures of the dining table."
Julia had a mission: to publish a cookbook for Americans that made French cooking accessible. For emotional support and dishwashing help, she leaned on her husband, Paul Child. She obtained recipes (that she translated and tested) and legitimacy from Simone Beck, her French collaborator. Avis DeVoto was Julia's friend and an industry insider, who steered Child's manuscript to William Koshland at publishing house Alfred A. Knopf after others passed on it. Koshland believed in the project and directed it to editor Judith Jones, who ushered Mastering the Art of French Cooking into print in 1961. Rounding out the list is WGBH TV's Ruth Lockwood, who produced The French Chef. The show boosted the sales of Mastering, securing its status as a classic cookbook.
Horowitz (Traces of J.B. Jackson) does justice to all six of Julia's warriors and elucidates their connections by supplying excerpts from their written correspondence, made more endearing by Julia's hopeless misspellings. Warming Up Julia Child is, like its subject, a charmer; it's hard to imagine a reader who won't leave Horowitz's book on Team Julia. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer