My Life in France
By Julia Child and Alex Prud’homme
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Reviews Julia Child in France — a delicious memoir By JOANNE WEINTRAUB Posted: April 1, 2006 My Life in France. By Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme. Knopf. 288 pages (with 78 photographs in text). $25.95. She had me at the sole meuniere. Julia Child's first French meal, as described in her posthumously published memoir, starred this classic fish dish, "perfectly browned in a sputtering butter sauce . . . , with a light but distinct taste of the ocean." With her first bite, she fell in love with France - and Julia-philes, already entranced by her piles of cookbooks and her hundreds of hours on PBS, will remember why they fell for her in the first place. Written with journalist Alex Prud'homme, the grandnephew of Child's late husband, Paul, "My Life in France" begins in 1948, when she arrives in Paris as the new wife of a mid-level diplomat, "a six-foot-two-inch, 36-year-old, rather loud and unserious Californian." The daughter of a well-off, conservative family, Julia McWilliams, upon graduating from Smith College, might easily have married someone like her father and settled into suburban conformity. "But if I'd done that," she writes candidly, "I'd probably have turned into an alcoholic, as a number of my friends had." Instead, she went to New York to become an advertising copywriter, then joined the OSS - the precursor to the CIA - where she met Paul, a fellow American posted to Asia. They fell in love over Chinese food and celebrated their first few anniversaries in Paris with Julia's ever-more-splendid French meals. The memoir begins with her first fumbling forays into the world's most celebrated cuisine (" 'What's a shallot?' I asked sheepishly") and follows her through the doors of the Cordon Bleu, where male cooking students sneer but master chef Max Bugnard knows an up-and-comer when he sees one: " 'It's always worth the effort, Ma-dame Scheeld!' he'd say. 'Taste! Taste!' " The unembarrassed zest that made "The French Chef" and her subsequent TV shows so popular bursts from every page. Every sense is engaged, whether by the smoky smell of Paris streets, the chill of an underheated apartment on the Rue de l'Universite ("quickly dubbed . . . 'Roo de Loo' "), the splendor of wildflower fields in Provence or the polyglot din of Marseille. And, of course, by the food: warm, crunchy baguettes and sweet butter; "toothsome little Roman peas" and "stunningly delicious" sauces; galantines, ballotines, charcuterie, patisserie and an almost cruelly tantalizing description of a dessert "made of ground toasted almonds, kirsch and apricots with crème anglais in a mold lined with ladyfingers toasted in butter and sugar, the whole covered by a (raspberry-strawberry) sauce." "My Life" slows down a bit when she writes about the years of admittedly obsessive research and experimentation that led to the authoritative "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," whose 1961 publication made stars of Child and French co-authors Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck. Legitimate pride and self-assurance become tinged with arrogance, even mean-spiritedness, when she writes that Beck, her dear friend and chief collaborator, was given to imperiousness and histrionics (" 'Non, non, non!' she would shout . . . .Paul began to refer to her as 'Sigh-Moan' "). But what genius doesn't have her uncharitable moments? And Child, who died in August 2004, was a genius indeed - not just in the kitchen or in front of the camera, but, as this memoir clearly shows, in mastering the art of living. Joanne Weintraub is the Journal Sentinel's TV critic. From the April 2, 2006 editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Have an opinion on this story? Write a letter to the editor or start an online forum. Subscribe today and receive 4 weeks free! Sign up now. © 2006, Journal Sentinel Inc. All rights reserved. | Produced by Journal Interactive | Privacy Policy Journal Sentinel Inc. is a subsidiary of Journal Communications.
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