My Life in France
By Julia Child and Alex Prud’homme
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Reviews Rocky Mountain News © Alfred A Knopf Julia Child could not speak a word of French when her husband's job landed them in Paris, where she eventually enrolled at the French Cordon Bleu cooking school. One cook's slice of life Inimitable gourmet flavors life story with dash of social studies By Cathie Beck, Special to the News April 21, 2006 Julia Child enjoyed one of those intellectual, traveled and interesting lives that would-be connoisseurs of every flavor long for: no children, money that comes mostly from others' efforts, few responsibilities, and tedium kept to a minimum. She married relatively late, at 36, to a man ten years her senior, then followed him and his government job to Paris, where she poked around, ate and went sightseeing, etc., (jealous yet?) until, in hobbyist's fashion, she stumbled upon the French Cordon Bleu cooking school. Lucky for her, she had a knack and plenty of time - she had nearly six decades of life in front of her - ingredients, if you will, that fed her eventual culinary success. Add to that her likeable, self-deprecating personality and, voila!, say hello to the 6'2" ex-Californian who revolutionized cuisine. Child worked on My Life In France with her grand-nephew Alex Prud'homme up until shortly before her death in August 2004, just shy of her 92nd birthday. In Prud'homme's foreword, in which he relates details about the book's gestation, an interesting tale in and of itself is told. "The idea for My Life in France," writes Prud'homme, "had been gestating since 1969, when her husband, Paul, sifted through hundreds of letters that he and Julia had written his twin brother, Charlie Child, . . . from France in 1948-1954." Paul suggested creating a book from the letters about his and Child's formative years together. "But for one reason or another, the book never got written. Paul died in 1994, aged ninety-two. Yet Julie never gave up on the idea, and would often talk about her intention to write 'the France book.' She saw it, in part, as a tribute to her husband, the man who had swept her off to Paris in the first place." My Life in France accomplishes what it sets out to do: Intimately tell the tale of her launch into culinary worlds and global success - a trajectory that may never be duplicated again, due in large part to the times, which included television's birth and America's burgeoning curiosity with the far-away but deliciously mysterious country called France. Child could not speak a word of French when her husband's job landed them in Paris, so she studied the language, found the French friendly and the food luscious. After enrolling at the Cordon Bleu and studying with colorful and commanding Chef Bugnard, Child got the cooking bug in a big way, collecting, buying, and assembling what any cook would consider the coveted gamut of tools and honing recipes in her ramshackle kitchen in their Paris flat. Eventually, Child and fellow gourmands, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, launched a cooking school and, together, the three worked on a French cookbook for Americans (almost ten years in the publishing process), Mastering the Art of French Cooking, published in 1961. But a great deal of the story comes in between those accomplishments and is told in Julia's inimitable, friendly style. Despite all of her la-di-da French cuisine expertise, Child was, at her roots, a California girl. She was an all-American woman, not formally educated, who found herself in the company of French and ex-pat American intellectuals - and wasn't at all sure she could keep up. Her charm rested - as does this book's - on her willingness to lay bare her weaknesses and insecurities. When she and her friends got into a discussion about the global economy, "I got my foot in my backside and ended up feeling confused and defensive." Under pressure, she notes, "my 'positions' on important questions - Is the Marshall Plan effectively reviving France? Should there be a European Union? . . . - were revealed to be emotions masquerading as ideas. . . . I had a lack of confidence." But don't be fooled. Self-deprecating or not, Child was at heart an artist and a rebel. She abandoned a very right-wing Republican-thinking father for the unknown in France, against that father's wishes. She embraced a foreign culture and language, and she morphed French-American cooking beyond the artful, transcending any previous interpretations and setting the bar for cuisine around the world. Child eventually launched The French Chef television series, becoming a national celebrity, and wound up winning the Peabody Award in 1965 and an Emmy in 1966, with dozens of cookbooks and television programs afterward. Still, her humanness, so prevalent in My Life in France, may have been her biggest asset of all. On the surface, My Life in France may seem a personal story. But Child has made this much more: It offers an important, historical back-story, a social studies addendum into French and American culture and cuisine. Cathie Beck is a Denver writer. She recently completed a memoir, "Cheap Cabernet: A Friendship." Copyright 2006, Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved.
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