By JULIA MOSKIN SEPT. 20, 2016
\nPLASCASSIER, France \u2014 When I hefted the rolling pin in my hand, I finally felt it: a thread of energy, a thrill of recognition. I knew I was standing in Julia Child\u2019s kitchen, and I was about to put it to work.
\nIn August, having rented it from the current owners through Airbnb, I spent a week living and cooking in La Pitchoune, the house in Provence that Mrs. Child and her husband, Paul, built in 1965 and lived in on and off until 1992.
\nIn advance, I worried that the house would have been remodeled and glossed over in the intervening years until nothing of her was left; but as her namesake, I hoped that the kitchen would be a place where her spirit, if not her spatulas, would remain. I planned my cooking around the second volume of \u201cMastering the Art of French Cooking,\u201d most of which was produced here between 1965 and 1970.
\nLa Pitchoune is in the hills that rise above the C\u00f4te d\u2019Azur, 10 miles north of Cannes, though it feels far from the yachts, crowds and burkini battles of the Riviera. The Childs were drawn to Provence for more elemental reasons: sun, olives, figs, wine.
\nThere was a benefit particular to this out-of-the-way spot: Mrs. Child and her co-author, Simone Beck, could keep up their work on that long-delayed second volume. Ms. Beck and her husband, who owned the land that La Pitchoune is built on, lived in the big farmhouse that still stands a few meters up the sunny, scrubby hillside.
\nSince the house was run as a cooking school for many years, there is no way to know exactly which utensils, if any, were used by Mrs. Child. This did not prevent me from feeling her presence there. The kitchen still looks essentially as it appears in photographs from the 1960s and \u201970s, down to the whisks, the tart rings and that big boxwood rolling pin, all hanging in their assigned places on the pegboard.
\nMany original artifacts remain: My garlic and shallots went into the small plastic bin she had labeled \u201cail echalotes\u201d with a Dymo-style label maker. I pulled old and spotted but wickedly sharp carbon-steel knives from the knife block that Paul Child built into the butcher-block counter.
\nI ate lunch on the terrace where she fed legends like James Beard and M. F. K. Fisher. And on trips afield, I followed the trail of some Proven\u00e7al foods she loved \u2014 snacks like fried zucchini blossoms and socca at the market in Cannes; salted anchovies and local caillette olives in Nice; whole candied clementines and bright crystallized violets at Confiserie Florian near Grasse.
\nI found the raw ingredients of Julia Child\u2019s Provence intact: eggplants and peach leaves, lemons and goat cheese, along with the markets where they are sold, the producers who make them and the vendors who hawk them with cooking advice thrown in.
\nOutside the house, the traces of her life are hard to find. She was never a celebrity here, according to her great-nephew, Alex Prud\u2019homme, who has just published \u201cThe French Chef in America,\u201d his account of her life after the Childs moved back from France to the United States. \u201cSouthern
\nFrance is famously laid-back,\u201d he wrote, recalling a visit in 1976, \u201cand the people who lived nearby didn\u2019t know, or care, who Julia-Child-the-American-TV-star was.\u201d At Boucherie Fabre, a butcher shop that has stood outside the March\u00e9 Forville in Cannes since 1899 (and where I was advised to buy beef shin for my Proven\u00e7al daube), I worked up the nerve to ask the serious, bloodstained men behind the counter if anyone remembered her.
\nTo my surprise, a stooped employee broke into a credible, fluty Julia Child impersonation, holding his hand high to indicate the 6-foot-2-inch stature that made her even more conspicuous in France than she was in the States.
\nAnd at one of her favorite restaurants, Les Arcades in Biot, the restaurant\u2019s chef, Mimi Brothier, has been making many of the same dishes since the restaurant opened in the 1960s as a canteen for local artists. I ate her pan-crisped sardines, perfect roasted peppers and traditional soupe au pistou.
\n\u201cMadame Child loved our cuisine,\u201d said Ms. Brothier, born here in 1934. \u201cAnd as long as I am here, nothing will change.\u201d
\n
![\"0921-din-webjuliamap-300\"](\"https:\/\/alexprudhomme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/0921-din-webJULIAmap-300-300x261.png\")
By The New York Times<\/p><\/div>
\nBut change is rampant in this part of Provence, the Alpes-Maritimes department that includes Cannes, Antibes and Nice. Since the Childs moved in,
\nfarms and vineyards have been converted to golf courses and villas to accommodate the international elites who want to live on the C\u00f4te d\u2019Azur. Big-box stores have pulled customers away from town centers. Nice, now the fifth-largest city in France, has sprawled outward and swallowed towns, valleys and fields.
\nBut inside the kitchen of La Pitchoune, it felt as if little had changed. On the long, scarred counter, I opened the book to the section on puff pastry, with its sketch of three butter sticks and a fat rolling pin hovering above them \u2014 just like the one I was holding, more than two feet long and as thick as a baseball bat. \u201cBeat the butter with a rolling pin to soften it,\u201d the recipe instructed.
\nThis had never occurred to me. I have painstakingly cut frozen butter into pieces to soften it, and tried to speed it along by tossing the pieces into a running mixer. (This is a good way to get grease marks on the ceiling.) But I had never thought of just whacking it into submission.
\nThis is partly because my modern kitchen doesn\u2019t have a collection of powerful hand tools like mallets, ice picks and broomsticks: the last, according to her editor, Judith Jones, was kept on hand for breaking the ankle bones of ducks and geese.
\nNeedless to say, the rolling-pin trick worked, producing smooth and supple butter that was still cold: ideal for pastry.
\n(Whether these utensils were indeed Mrs. Child\u2019s is unclear. In a lawsuit filed against Airbnb in June, the Julia Child Foundation objects to Airbnb\u2019s use of Mrs. Child\u2019s name in a promotional campaign for the house, and says its claim that her kitchen implements remain \u201cexactly as she left them\u201d is false.)
\nUsing her kitchen and following her recipes for a week reminded me how physically demanding traditional cooking can be. \u201cIt takes strong hands to be a good cook,\u201d she told Vogue in 1968, during a photo shoot here. \u201cYou have to be rough and tough.\u201d Forcing fibrous vegetables through food mills, kneading bread dough and cranking a solid-steel meat grinder require real effort. All of those were basic skills when Mrs. Child was teaching Americans to cook through her books and television shows, long before baby carrots, ground beef, par-baked bread and dozens of other
\nshortcuts were available at every supermarket.
\nThe Childs built La Pitchoune (they nicknamed it \u201cLa Peetch\u201d) after the successful publication of \u201cMastering the Art of French Cooking\u201d in 1961; they had moved back to the United States and were shooting \u201cThe French Chef\u201d for WGBH. But Julia Child still was far from a household name, and the Childs were not rich. So the kitchen at La Pitchoune isn\u2019t luxurious or spacious; it wouldn\u2019t fill even a corner of Ina Garten\u2019s famous \u201centertaining barn.\u201d With its pegboard walls and industrial lighting, it looks nothing like a set for a celebrity chef and entirely like
\nwhat it was built to be: a practical workshop for a home cook with a hell of a lot of work to do. As Mrs. Child and Ms. Beck worked on the second volume here, they tested recipes endlessly, going back and forth between their kitchens with experiments, notes, cocktails, galleys and grievances.
\nCertain keystones of French cuisine, like bread, charcuterie and pastry, had been left out of the first volume, and the authors were resolved to fill in the gaps. But they strongly disagreed about what was a gap, what was a keystone and even what was French.
\nFamously, Mrs. Child was a rigorous professional who believed that the science and exactitude of recipes were their most important assets. Ms. Beck was an excellent home cook who maintained that her instincts as a native Frenchwoman superseded all other culinary knowledge.
\nFor example, Ms. Beck was utterly opposed to developing recipes for bread and croissants, since no Frenchwoman would make them at home. At that time, there was still a family-run bakery in every French town, and every few blocks in a French city. (This, sadly, is no longer the case: The towns near Plascassier are filled with national chains.)
\nMrs. Child, knowing that American cooks of the time couldn\u2019t find such things anywhere, was even more determined in favor.
\nSince she had by then learned to trust her own instincts as much as those of her co-author (and became saucy enough to call her \u201cLa Super-Fran\u00e7aise\u201d behind her back), those recipes were painstakingly developed here, with field trips around France to consult bakers, professors and chemists. The final recipes for puff pastry, brioche and basic French bread alone occupy nearly 100 pages of the book.
\nAnd although I picked up that rolling pin on Day 2, I didn\u2019t make any of them. The August tomatoes at the Cours Saleya market in Nice were too gorgeous, with their multicolored stripes; the farmer from Var who told me that his new potatoes tasted like almonds was too persuasive; the anchovies were too plump and briny to be ignored.
\nI made a summery potato gratin layered with onions, tomatoes and a paste of garlic, anchovies and basil, pounded in a marble mortar as big as a chamber pot. I made a beef daube from Patricia Wells, a friend of Mrs. Child who has also found her voice as a cook in Provence, reasoning that Ms. Wells\u2019s two bottles of white wine would make a much more summery daube than Mrs. Child\u2019s Proven\u00e7al classic, with two bottles of red.
\nAnd I made a short, half-hidden recipe I had never noticed before that suddenly leapt off page 353. It is jokey in its name and very Julia, with her famous love of cocktail-hour snacks.
\nLa Tentation de Bramafam is a fluffy eggplant-walnut dip with a clear connection to dishes like baba ghanouj. (Bramafam is the name of the estate that encompasses La Pitchoune.) It is tasty, absurdly easy and must have been somehow slipped past La Super-Fran\u00e7aise, as it contains raw ginger and hot sauce, two of the least-French ingredients imaginable.
\nAs I brought my bowl of it out to the terrace each evening, it was easy to imagine the two women waiting there under the mulberry tree, recovering from a long day of recipe testing with an aperitif and a bite to eat before dinner.
\nTired but satisfied, probably with shrimp guts in their hair and flour in the creases of their crow\u2019s feet, they would have toasted the hard work that has given such pleasure to so many.
\nA version of this article appears in print on September 21, 2016, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: In Julia Child\u2019s Proven\u00e7al Kitchen.
\n\u00a9 2016 The New York Times Company
\nOriginally Posted at nytimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By JULIA MOSKIN SEPT. 20, 2016 PLASCASSIER, France \u2014 When I hefted the rolling pin in my hand, I finally felt it: a thread of energy, a thrill of recognition. I knew I was standing in Julia Child\u2019s kitchen, and I was about to put it to work. In August, having rented it from the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":12816,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,14],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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