Julia Child -- My Life in France

This was a hard book to write about. Logistically, I read it before the Apprentice, so the facts were a little hazy, but also Julia is a bit of an odd bird; it feels a little sacrilegious to critique her. I mean, she was very much on the forefront of changing how americans eat, but she also comes across as being petty and carrying grudges. Anyway, on with the show.

The book is a love story. She was clearly madly in love with her husband, Paul Child. They were madly in love with la belle France, and french food.

She married in 1946 at the age of 34. Prior to the marriage she took a cooking class in LA with two british ladies in preperation for living with a new husband on a limited government income.

Paul was in the diplomatic service, which involved putting on exhibitions about America (often about american artists). In 1948 they were sent to Paris, France via Le Havre: I was a six-foot-two-inch thirty-six-year-old rather loud and unserious californian. He was an accomplished photographer, and his great images are scattered throughout the book.

They stopped in a restaurant pretty much right off of the boat: our first lunch together in France had been absolute perfection. It was the most exciting meal of my life. Frankly, this type of comment becomes a running theme through out the book and that got a little old... Conflict makes for more interesting reading than love.

Learning to cook, cooking, and teaching cooking are the tenets of her life. How this happened is what makes the book a darn good read. I like how she combines the beginning of that journey with a snarky comment: To my great surprise I'd discovered that many Frenchwomen didn't know how to cook any better than I did; quite alot of them had no interest in the subject at all, though most were experts at eating in restaurants. Tons of snark in the book. But she's really endearing and sentimental at times, too: I had never taken anything so seriously in my life - husband and cat excepted - and I could hardly bear to be away from the kitchen. That she is a cat person makes me happy. Cats are all over the book.

Two great lines: I knew I didn't want to be a standard housewife, but I didn't know what I did want to be. & I had become a knife freak, a frying-pan freak, a gadget freak-and, especially, a copper freak.

She met Simca and Louisette (the future co-authors of MtAoFC) in November 1951. They had been working on a french cookbook for americans, by August 1952 they agreed that Julia would be part of that project. I thought it was funny that she noted that she and Simca tended to have a scientific approach to cooking whereas Louisette had a more romantic approach. Later on she would bemoan that she and Simca were so different.

On Curnonsky, the legendary author of a 28 volume encyclopedia of french regional foods: his ego was enormous, but so were his charm and the depth of his knowledge.

Pulia (Paul & Julia) were transferred to Marseille, France on 2 March 1953. She had lots of colorful things to say about the people in Marseille.

She has lots of colorful things to say about the McCarthy witchhunt, too.

In October of 1954 they were transferred to Bonn, Germany. There's a pretty darn un-PC thing about how she was so surprised the german people were so nice considering not too many years ago they were running concentration camps. She loved the meats in Germany, the veggies not so much.

Love was a big part of their lives, and Paul was very artistically inclined, so they made Valentine's Day cards for their friends. Quite a few are pictured in the book. She notes, Valentine cards had become a tradition of ours, born of the fact that we could never get ourselves organized in time to send out Christmas cards.

She also mentioned that she really liked rubber stamps...

A typical comment about a restaurant meal: we began with trout stuffed with minnows...

She grew up in California, can you tell? Germany was a frigid, wet 52 degrees when I returned... it was hard to avoid the conclusion that Plittersdorf was a miserable dump.

They returned to Washington DC in November 1956. We felt the tingle of excited apprehension about returning to our native soil - now the land of "Elvis the Pelvis," Nixon-lovers, and other strange phenomena. and, more importantly Would there be a place in the USA for a book like ours? and, even more importantly (on trying to shoe horn ingredients available in america into french recipes) WHY DID WE EVER DECIDE TO DO THIS ANYWAY? I wailed to Simca, after discovering that my beloved creme fraiche was nearly impossible to find in America. Creme fraiche is the bomb. I still have to do a post on it...

They moved to Oslo, Norway in May 1959, and by 1 September 1959 the 1st draft of what would be MtAoFC was done.

A continuing theme is her talking smack about her associates, it really galled her that Louisette didn't do much on the project once Julia joined. She wanted to demote her to an associate rather than a co-author on the title page. This was really important to her for some reason. Simca and I agreed on the importance of keeping Louisette "on the team," both in deference to the work she'd done, and because of a more practical matter that she was better socially connected than either of us, both in France and the USA. This kind of comment was quite surprising to me.

The original publishing house rejected the book on 6 November 1959 because it was too detailed and would be too expensive to publish (too many pages). Her friend Avis then sent the manuscript to Knopf, where Judith Jones, the woman who published the Diary of Anne Frank, became a champion of it, and agreed to publish it mid-May 1960.

The period working on the final touches and the galleys of the book was very trying, on Simca: she was a dear friend, but horribly disorganized and rather full of herself.

The book was published 16 October 1961 and got a ton of good press and TV appearances soon followed. Americans were introduced to the Julia Child that we came to know and love. Her first appearance was cooking an omelette on the Today Show with Simca. In January 1962 she appeared on the 'egghead' show "I've Been Reading" on WGBH in Boston. It was a tremendous success and she taped 3 pilots for The French Chef on 18 & 25 June 1962. WGBH then ordered 26 shows.

In November 1963 they visited Simca in Provence, she and her husband had a farmhouse named (somewhat unimaginatively) Le Mas Vieux, Julia and Paul had a small cottage built on the property: it would be a house built on friendship - named La Pitchoune (the little one).

On Mastering I & II: in retrospect we had taken a rather holy and Victorian approach to the virtues of elbow grease in Mastering I - implying that "only paths of thorns lead to glory," etc.

On the bread chapter in Mastering II: It would eventually takes us 2 years and something like 284 pounds of flour...

15 March 1970, Julia and Simca turned in the manuscript of Mastering II, it was published 22 October 1970. One hiccup in the book, she advocated an Asbestos cement tile for bread baking, in order to make a home oven more closely mimic a professional oven. Around the time the book was published is when asbestos was found to be a carcinogen....

This is an interesting book. Learning the history surrounding MtAoFC was fun. Learning the gossip/snarkiness perhaps moreso... I didn't love this as much as the Apprentice, but it's a fine read.