My Life in France
By Julia Child and Alex Prud’homme
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Reviews www.suntimes.com April 9, 2006 BY BEN GOLDBERGER On Nov. 3, 1948, "a six-foot-two-inch, thirty-six-year-old, rather loud and unserious Californian" sat down for lunch with her husband at a restaurant in the scarred Norman countryside still fresh with the bomb-holes and barbed wire of World War II. The couple began with a half-dozen oysters, then moved on to a butter-drenched whole sole meuniere, which the waiter placed on their table before saying "Bon appetit!" They washed it all down with a bottle of a crisp French white. "I experienced fish, and a dining experience, of a higher order than any I'd ever had before," she remembered. "It was the most exciting meal of my life." Before becoming Julia Child, the towering, grandmotherly television chef whose sing-song voice and pitch-perfect recipes taught generations of Duncan Hines Americans how to make souffle Grand Marnier, she was Julia McWilliams, the gawky, free-spirited daughter of a staunchly conservative Pasadena businessman and a kind mother whose culinary repertoire was limited to little more than baking powder biscuits. MEMOIR MY LIFE IN FRANCE "[S]he was not a cook," Child recalled. "Nor was I." My Life in France is her last book. There are no recipes in this posthumous memoir of her formative years in Europe during the mid-20th century. But there are rich stories about how she discovered the recipes she made famous, all told in her lively, infectious style. While working as a file clerk for the clandestine Office of Strategic Services in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and China during World War II, Julia McWilliams met an OSS officer ten years her senior. Paul Child was cosmopolitan, with an extensive knowledge of food, wine and the arts. He courted Julia over "delicious Chinese food," and the pair married in 1946. Two years later, Paul Child was transferred to a diplomatic position in Paris, and Julia Child "tagged along as his extra baggage." Julia tried moving beyond baking powder biscuits after her marriage, but her efforts never hinted at what was to come. From her first bite of sole meuniere, Child's senses awoke to the pleasures of shopping for, cooking, and eating "food that tastes of what it is." She nurtured this budding passion by enrolling at Paris' famed Cordon Bleu. Under the exacting tutelage of her mentor, Chef Bugnard, Child practiced the rigorous techniques of la cuisine bourgeoise. She not only learned how "to glaze carrots and onions at the same time as roasting a pigeon, and how to use he concentrated vegetable juices to fortify the pigeon flavor, and vice versa," but also at 37, discovered her life's purpose. "I fell in love with French food -- the tastes, the processes, the history, the endless variations, the rigorous discipline, the creativity, the wonderful people, the equipment, the rituals. ... How magnificent to find my life's calling, at long last!" Throughout their time in Paris, Julia and Paul flitted between local gastronomic societies, drawing-room intellectual groups, and the rowdy expatriate scene that flourished in the bonhomie of post-War Paris. (Alice B. Toklas, "an odd little bird dressed in a muslin dress and a big floppy hat," pops up now and again.) Child writes engagingly about the joys and frustrations of the years-long process of developing an accurate and exhaustive French cookbook for the untrained American home cook and the difficulty of finding someone to publish it. She includes backstage morsels about the endless testing and re-testing of traditional recipes that ultimately became her breakthrough work, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and some alternate titles that never made the cut (The Witchcraft of French Cooking, anyone?). Few memoirs are as lively as this one, partly because of the trove of observant letters Julia and Paul wrote to his brother Charlie during their years abroad. They tell of the suffocating confusion of a fog storm in Paris, the claustrophobia inside a dank wine cave there and the twinkling beauty of a clear night along the Seine. But the letters also reveal a complicated, sometimes insecure woman whose interests extended far beyond making a proper bouillabaisse a la marseillaise. The morning she turned 41, Child inspected her body "for signs of decrepitude" and fretted about her "lack of worldliness." This provincialism is misplaced: Child had lived in Asia, traveled throughout Europe and immersed herself in the guts of France, and it's a stark contrast to the sure-handed behind-the-stove Julia, who reminded cooks that they should never apologize for a bad meal. The political side of Child, an intensely liberal Democrat, is also on display. Reading about the rise of Sen. Joseph McCarthy from the safe distance of Marseilles, Child mused, "It was beyond me how anybody with any sense of what our country was supposed to stand for could have anything to do with him, no matter how many votes he brought in." My Life in France moves in mad swoops and dashes. One paragraph ends with Paul losing the use of one eye as a youngster only to have the next one begin, "Off to England for Christmas!" Yet it is hard to get lost. In the same way Child's this-way-and-that television delivery never lost its viewers' attention, her elegant but unfussy prose pulls the reader into her stories. Child's a sucker for idiosyncratic exclamations and evocative words: stomachs "gurgle," bones are "plopped" into stocks, and a dish of sole and oysters is a "poem." Some of these may have been inserted by her great-nephew and co-writer Alex Prud'homme; he never distinguishes between her words and his own. But it is not a scholarly work, and Prud'homme does an admirable job of making whatever he did go unnoticed. It's a fine time for My Life in France to be published. Thanks largely to Child's influence, haute cuisine is as popular as it has ever been in America. Yet the labor-intensive, butter-swollen cooking of her beloved France has fallen out of favor. Chicago, arguably the capital of new American cuisine, is considering a ban on the classic French delicacy foie gras, primarily because of the cruelty of force-feeding geese to fatten their livers. Well, as Julia might say, tant pis! (Roughly, "tough cheese" in American.) Ben Goldberger is a Sun-Times staff member. Copyright © The Sun-Times Company All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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