My Life in France [Hardcover]

My Life in France is the most entertaining memoir I've read in 2006! It's a winner.

I first met Julia Child under unusual circumstances. My consulting firm was located down the street from where she got her hair done. Every Friday night, she would be seen peering into the windows to look at our art collection. After a few weeks of this, I walked outside and invited her in to tour the work up close. She was immediately studying everything from about three inches away. She thanked me politely and charged out the door. There was no hint of the slightly tipsy person filled with laughter who hosted The French Chef. Ah . . . I felt like I had met the real woman beneath the persona.

From that meeting, I gathered that she was a woman moved more than most by curiosity. I found myself also being curious about how she learned enough about French cooking to help co-author that masterwork, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Most French people in those days would not choose working with an American as a way to produce a work about France. That would be like putting salty Virginia ham into Quiche Lorraine.

My Life in France nicely filled in all the blanks for me. The book was lovingly finished by her grand-nephew, Paul Prud'homme, after Julia's death and is filled with lovely photographs produced by Julia's husband, Paul Child.

Here's the short version of the book. Julia had been in Asia for World War II as part of the OSS and met her husband there. He was ten years older than she was and well traveled . . . especially in France. After World War II, he joined the USIS (predecessor to the USIA) which played a friendly sort of propaganda function promoting American values and ways of doing things. In November 1948, Paul landed a posting in Paris and Julia, the Pasadena, California bred daughter of a conservative businessman, was in for the surprises of her life. She fell in love with French food at her first meal! With no job in France, she began working on her language skills and learning how to cook (a new task for her!). Soon, she decided she wanted to go to Cordon Bleu. After some misadventures, she finally passed with some modest skills designed to help a homemaker rather than a chef. But she made friends with others who loved French food and eventually became acquainted with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle. The latter two had an informal agreement to publish a book on French cooking for Americans. But they had just lost their American collaborator. Julia stepped in.

From there, much of the book recounts the decades of painstaking work that went into creating that first book and its follow-ons in which Julia played the role of making the recipes work in American kitchens with American ingredients and utensils. It's truly mind-boggling. My respect for her work is unlimited!

The book finishes with explaining how Mastering became a best seller and Julia became a television star.

Along the way, you'll meet her favorite food vendors, tutors, chefs and guests. She'll also delight you with her mouth-watering menus and how dishes turned out under different circumstances.

The title of the book is a little misleading. The material also covers time spent in Germany, Norway and the United States. You also get a full look at her marriage and the great joy that both Childs brought to their love.

Throughout, the book is filled with little Julia-isms in that humorous self-deprecating style that we all came to love on The French Chef. She lards the text with some piquant French phrases and quotes (which are usually translated more mildly into English).

As an author, I found her process of finding a publisher and working with publishers to be quite fascinating.

In her last decades, the book is a picture of grace as she devoted herself to her husband, her old friends and to French cooking.

Bon appetit!

I could not put this book down. I have personally never owned any Julia Child cookbooks but had purchased the book as I knew she had gone to Le Cordon Bleu and I wanted to know how she had evolved into such a culinary powerhouse. What struck me most about the book was the matter of fact language, it wasn't romanticized at all, but showed how she fell into cooking in her middle age and how that evolved into something so much bigger. It was inspirational for me, as it shows that one doesn't need to have picked up cooking very early on (although this is normally better), but is something that can be learned and developed well into your later years with much dedication and pratice =)

Read it!

Rather than a complete biography this ebulliently phrased memoir covers the years Julia and her beloved husband, Paul, spent in France (1948 - 1954). Paris was where the the woman remembered as the doyenne of French cooking got a rather late start on what was to be an enormously succesful career.

Paul and Julia met in Ceylon where both worked for the Office of Strategic Services, and married in 1946. Two years later Paul was assigned to head the exhibits office of the U.S. Information Service in Paris. A painter and photographer who had been to France earlier he was well suited for the task. On the other hand, Julia had never been to Europe, came from a middle class, conservative California family and by her own description was "six-foot-two-inch, 36-year-old, rather loud and unserious." Little did she know what a life altering experience France would be.

She well remembers their first meal in Rouen which she described as "absolute perfection. It was the most exciting meal of my life." Thus began her love of French food, in fact for all things French - the markets, the people, the restaurants, the countryside. At that time she was an average cook at best but determined to learn how the French prepared such glorious food. To that end she learned the language and then enrolled at the famed Cordon Bleu. Surely no student has ever worked harder, more doggedly or found as much joy in food preparation as Julia. She wanted to know every infinitesimal detail of each dish, including the whys and wherefores of ingredients chosen, and variants in cooking time.

Eventually this devotion to French cuisine led to a partnership with two French friends (Simone Beck and Laced Bertholle) in a cooking school and from that to dreams of a cookbook for the American market. There was a very long road ahead filled with happiness, surprises and disappointments but the book was published at last. This, of course, led to Julia's television series and more cookbooks.

My Life In France is filled with rhapsodic descriptions of dishes and accompanying wines as well as details of keeping house in a country still recovering from a devastating war. Due to Paul's career the Childs moved from Paris to Marseille to Bonn to Washington to Oslo and then Paul's retirement. Julia met every challenge with pluck, purpose and bonhomie. Hers was a life well lived, thoroughly enjoyed, and vividly remembered.

- Gail Cooke