A new take on an old relationship: Rethinking Simone Beck’s relationship to her co-author Julia Child

This was certainly the experience of Simone Beck, Child’s collaborator. Beck not only co-wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but she contributed the majority of the recipes—many of them family heirlooms—to early versions of the book. The relationship between the two women has been the subject of a great deal of writing, much of it focused on the way Child’s fame skyrocketed while Beck remained largely obscure. Often, the framing veers into the misogynistic, writes Mayukh Sen for Hazlitt, pitting the two women against each other and painting Beck as “a bitter shrew resentful of Child’s high profile.” Even Child found Beck’s lack of fame unjust. “I felt that she was such a colourful personality, and so knowledgeable about cooking, that had she been American rather than French she would be immensely well known,” Child wrote in My Life in France. Sen has a brand new take on the subject: What if “resolutely French” Beck, who was “bound to tradition in both culinary and cultural terms,” simply didn’t want stardom at all? —Tina Vasquez