ODE TO JOY

By Paul Gray

Blockbuster Flambe:

First, procure a copy of America's best-loved cookbook and shred it thoroughly. Add to the mix one cookbook scion, one volatile editor and a panel of food experts from across the country. Season with $5 million. Stir in large cups of envy, greed, backbiting and publishing gossip. Let simmer over high heat for three years, producing plenty of hurt feelings and howls of outrage from some of the food experts. Should serve 500,000 helpings and maybe a lot more if garnished with big, crisp publicity lettuce.

You won't find that recipe, with its characteristic boldface ingredients, in the brand-new Joy of Cooking (Scribner; 1,136 pages; $30) published this week, just in time for the looming holiday feasts. But there are some 2,600 others, all but a handful of them original or extensively revised versions of the recipes that have catered to American tastes for more than 60 years.

During that period, through six revisions, the Joy of Cooking became the most authoritative and influential guide to the evolving sociology of U.S. kitchens. If how people prepare and consume food reveals anything valuable about their culture--and surely it does--then the dog-eared, gravy-stained pages of the old Joys are an invaluable resource for future historians. With 14 million copies in print, it is not cookbookery's commercial champion; that title belongs to the Betty Crocker basic cookbook, which has moved roughly 60 million copies. But Joy earned pride of place as the one indispensable kitchen reference source, and a fail-safe graduation or wedding present besides. It told beginning or uncertain cooks how to, among everything else, set a table, fillet a fish and turn a squirrel carcass into something edible. The 1975 Joy, the edition that the new book will supplant, has still been selling about 100,00 copies a year.

So why mess with success? Maria Guarnaschelli, the editor who carried out the herculean labor of assembling the new Joy, provides a candid answer: "The company would like the book to sell more than 100,000 copies a year. They would like to sell at least a million or two the first year and anywhere from 200,000 to 500,000 annually [after that]."

That money, and the desire for more of it, figured in the decision should startle few people. But the profit motive does not fully explain the reasoning behind the new Joy. A number of experts feel that the 1975 version, published when Gerald Ford was in the White House, has been overtaken and outdated by contemporary events. "That was the era of Linus Pauling and vitamin C and the common cold," says Marion Nestle, chairman of the department of nutrition at New York University and a Joy contributor. "Frances Moore Lappe's book Diet for a Small Planet had just come out, emphasizing the importance of balanced protein. So the nutrition content of the book in 1975 really emphasized protein, beyond all other nutritional information. Today, issues of calories and fat and caloric balance and exercise and moderation are much more important."

Among other things that are not, or only dimly, reflected in the 1975 Joy: the mounting ubiquity of microwave ovens and such once obscure utensils as the Cuisinart and the wok; the explosion of ethnic restaurants and cuisines; and the widespread disappearance of housewives into workplaces, making more and more weekday suppers a matter of heating up whatever someone in the family had the foresight to bring home from the take-out.

Updating Joy may prove monstrously profitable, as well as an idea whose time has come. Actually doing so proved monstrously tricky. For aside from its encyclopedic thoroughness, much of the cookbook's perennial appeal has stemmed from the distinctive, comforting, we're-all-in-this-together voices of two women: Irma Rombauer, who wrote and self-published the original Joy in 1931, and her daughter Marion Rombauer Becker, who first served as her mother's helper and later assumed full custodianship of the ongoing endeavor. Dying of cancer, Marion concluded her acknowledgments to the 1975 edition in a valedictory manner: "But Joy, we hope, will always remain essentially a family affair, as well as an enterprise in which its authors owe no obligation to anyone but themselves and you."

This was not self-puffery but a simple statement of fact. A Joy of Cooking without a Rombauer or Becker at the helm seemed inconceivable, like Johnson's Dictionary without Dr. Samuel Johnson. For what mother and daughter remarkably accomplished was to filter a vast array of information through a personal style. Irma Rombauer's subtitle for the original 1931 Joy was A Compilation of Reliable Recipes with a Casual Culinary Chat. Her text justified this advertisement. Here was the author on serving alcohol to guests: "Most cocktails containing liquor are made today with gin and ingenuity. In brief, take an ample supply of the former and use your imagination." This advice, offered two years before the repeal of Prohibition, was not only helpful but positively racy.

No rewritten Joy could realistically hope to capture the characteristic Rombauer-Becker tone. But neither could it be published at all without the permission and involvement of a family member, namely Ethan Becker, 52, Irma's grandson and Marion's son. As an owner of the copyright, he could authenticate a sequel with his imprimatur.

So the first question facing Scribner and its parent Simon & Schuster--the big fish that had swallowed an earlier, smaller-fry publisher of Joy--was how to get Ethan Becker on board for the new project. An advance payment of more than a million dollars provided a satisfactory answer for all the parties involved. Ethan is hence listed on the cover and title page along with Irma and Marion as the author of the Joy of Cooking. But how many verses, people in publishing and in the intensely competitive world of chefs and cookbook writers wondered, often loudly, did Ethan really sing for his supper?

"It's bits and pieces throughout," Becker says of his contributions to the new Joy. Bearded and amiable, he lives with his third wife Susan in the house his parents built just outside Cincinnati, Ohio, in the late 1930s. The kitchen is spacious--he used some of his advance to enlarge it--but not professionally formidable. "We've always tried to keep regular cooking appliances," he explains about the Joy family tradition. "If you could make it here, you could make it anywhere."

Outside of a six-month Cordon Bleu training period in France some years ago ("Paris was cold," he remembers), Becker's knowledge of cooking stems mostly from what he picked up in the presence of his mother and his father John, an excellent if unsung cook, Becker says. A college dropout at 20, Ethan drifted through a number of potential careers--selling burglar and fire alarms, manufacturing mountain-climbing and other outdoor equipment--before being grabbed by the gravitational pull of the family Joy and putting in a lot of hours on the 1975 edition. Is he worried that he was paid for his name rather than his expertise? "It was a concern," Becker admits. "But everybody I ever talked to about my editor said she might kill the author, she might kill the publisher, but she was going to produce a great book."

Becker thus tacitly acknowledges what everyone in publishing has known for the past three years: no matter whose name has been added to the cover, the impelling force behind the new Joy is its editor, Maria Guarnaschelli. An operatically exuberant woman, half Italian and half Wasp ("Peabodys of Boston," she confides), she speaks Russian and French as well as very animated English. During a 17-year editorial stint at William Morrow, Guarnaschelli developed a reputation for womanhandling cookbook writers into cookbook superstars: Julie Sahni (Classic Indian Cooking), Rick Bayless (Authentic Mexican), Rose Levy Beranbaum (The Cake Bible), among others. Recruited by Scribner in 1994, Guarnaschelli edited such noteworthy culinary guides as Patricia Wells at Home in Provence and Rick Bayless' Mexican Kitchen, all the while gearing up for the challenge of a thoroughly revised Joy.

From the first, Guarnaschelli decided that the new book could not be compiled by a single kitchen expert. American cooking has diversified and specialized beyond the abilities of any one person to learn or impart. Becker, for one, defends this committee approach to the new book as historically valid. "When Grandmother put the first book together, she went to everybody she knew who was a good cook and said, 'Hey, I'm putting a cookbook together; give me a recipe.'" What Guarnaschelli did, Becker suggests, was simply call upon a wider network of contributors.

In theory, it makes sense to ask an egg expert to write the chapter on eggs, a poultry expert on poultry, and so on through the food chain. In practice, this approach provided a good recipe for bruised egos. The so-called foodies who weren't asked to help were resentful; some of those who were began to suspect that their servings of advance money approximated lean cuisine. "I came in late in the project," says Dana Jacobi, author of The Natural Kitchen: SOY! "It's my impression that people who came in later were often paid much less. She [Guarnaschelli] handed out enormous amounts of money at the beginning. I've heard that some people might have got as much as six figures for what they contributed, whereas people I know were given not even low five figures." Jacobi says she was among the latter group and that it hurt "to find out that you got one-tenth of what somebody else got for the same amount of work."

Even less thrilled with her Joy experience is Elaine Corn, the author of, among other works, 365 Ways to Cook Eggs. She received a phone call from Guarnaschelli, she recalls, saying "she wanted me to do the Joy of Cooking chapter on eggs." Corn agreed to the six-week deadline ("Eggs were fresh on my mind") and shelved other projects. "I worked my butt off on this thing," she says, only to find her work rejected by Guarnaschelli. A few weeks ago, Corn learned that she is listed as a contributor in the new Joy, even though she was paid only a kill fee. "The only thing I have now is just a small sense of revenge, that the American public will simply reject the new book. If the American public rejects it, all of us will cook easier."

Sour grapes? Spilt milk? Some observation about what you have to do to make an omelet? Lunching at Restaurant Daniel, a four-star establishment in Manhattan ("I never cook anymore"), Guarnaschelli dismisses Corn's complaint: "I thought maybe she could deliver a great chapter. It wasn't what I could use. That's all there is to it." What about all the turmoil surrounding the preparation of the new Joy, most of which has been blamed on her? "I'm emotional, but I'm not difficult," she counters. "I'm dramatic, I'm intense, but people like to work with me." Over a table laden with desserts, including le vacherin minute et meringue reglisse and le kouglof glace au caramel, Guarnaschelli confides that she gained 25 lbs. while working on the new Joy.

The cookbook, in short, has come a long way from St. Louis, Mo., where the newly widowed Irma Rombauer, in the teeth of the Great Depression, assembled her recipes and those of her largely German-American friends. Whether the new Joy will win minds and hearts the way the old ones did remains a matter of intense interest to those involved. A lot is riding on this project, and as Irma's friends might have said, the proof is in the pudding. --Reported by Andrea Sachs/Cincinnati

With reporting by ANDREA SACHS/CINCINNATI