Intrepid food reporter Julia Mosking rented La Pitchoune, Julia and Paul Child’s Provencal perch, for a week of inspired shopping, cooking, and eating. She writes:
“La Pitchoune is in the hills that rise above the Côte d’Azur, 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 …
I 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 Provençal foods she loved — 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.
I found the raw ingredients of Julia Child’s 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.
Outside the house, the traces of her life are hard to find.
She was never a celebrity here, according to her great-nephew, Alex Prud’homme, who has just published “The French Chef in America,” his account of her life after the Childs moved back from France to the United States. “Southern France is famously laid-back,” he wrote, recalling a visit in 1976, “and the people who lived nearby didn’t know, or care, who Julia-Child-the-American-TV-star was.”
… As 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.
Tired but satisfied, probably with shrimp guts in their hair and flour in the creases of their crow’s feet, they would have toasted the hard work that has given such pleasure to so many.”
For the whole story, see:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/21/dining/julia-child-provence-kitchen-la-pitchoune.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share&_r=0