If, like me until recently, you had never knowingly heard of Julia Child, it will help to understand that she was, so to speak, America’s answer to Elizabeth David. It was she who, after the second world war, introduced the dishes and techniques of French cooking to, principally, her countrywomen. I had been aware of, but never read, her encyclopaedic work Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but could not have told you who had written it (or even that it was an American book). In fact, Julia Child later parted company from Elizabeth David: while David went on to explore the cuisines of Italy and other Mediterranean countries, Child stuck to that of France but developed her teaching skills into pioneering television cookery programmes decades before they came to clog up our TV channels on a daily basis.
This is not a cookery book, although it contains plenty of useful information on individual dishes and techniques for those who care to extract it. Rather it is a memoir, written when she was in her nineties, though not completed until 2006, two years after her death. The word ‘with’ in the authorial attribution is a misleading giveaway: in countless celebrity ‘autobiographies’ it denotes the principal contribution being that of a ghost writer. Not quite so in this case, as Alex Prud’homme, Child’s grand-nephew, had started out to make recordings of her recollections, passing on to taking notes when she found his tape-recorder distracting, and finally relying more than he probably planned on her notebooks and the countless letters that she and her husband had written to friends and relations – of which so many, remarkably, had been preserved.
The result is a curious amalgam: a scissors-and-paste job where what appears to be the recollections of a woman of 91 are voiced in large part by her younger self. The effect is not helped by her writing style, of which more anon. Alex Prud’homme tells us that, in writing the linking passages he has ‘tried to emulate Julia’s idiosyncratic word choices – “Plop!”, “Yuck!”, “Woe!” and “Hooray!”.’ Thus the narrative is peppered with schoolgirl exclamations that come oddly from the middle-aged woman who wrote them at the time and odder still from a nonagenarian.
Julia Child admits that the title of her masterwork was supplied by somebody else as her own suggestions was too dull. This suggests that the prosaic title of this book was her own choice. It is also rather misleading: the Childs (it is hard to avoid calling them the Children) lived in France continuously for only six years, from November 1948 to October 1954. Although they had their own house in Provence from 1965 to 1972 and visited it often, the trips were spasmodic and not always for long periods. Unfortunately the clunky title is followed by an equally clunky writing style. There is no reason why writers of cookery books should be good writers as such: their books are read for their content, rather their style. Indeed, cookbook writers who write really well are rare enough to be memorable. However, this is not a cookery book and the interesting story it has to tell is constantly undermined by the infelicities of its expression.
This is a pity, because Julia Child’s pioneering work as a researcher into and teacher of French cuisine, her problems as an amateur in getting accepted in the milieus of French professional cooking, American publishing and later broadcasting, make a fascinating account, not least because the worlds she describes have changed so much since. Those worlds include, alongside Julia’s own story, that of her husband Paul, a talented painter and photographer, who worked in a PR role for various US embassies in France and elsewhere. The depiction of the US diplomatic service of the time – mistrusted by the politicians back home, reacting with defensive fears about taking initiatives and subject to petty bureaucratic intrigues – makes one fervently hope that things have changed there too.
What comes over most strongly is the enthusiasm of Julia Child for the task she set herself and of the many friends she made in the world of cooks and catering along the way. Such enthusiasm is infectious and it is easy to see how welcome her approach to explaining how to prepare meals must have been to those who watched her TV shows.
This is a book which should have broad general interest, but it would obviously appeal most to those interested in cookery and the ways in which it has developed, as well as in its picture of life in Paris and Marseille half a century or so ago.
The book is illustrated with a great many black-and-white photographs, mostly by Paul Child himself, and somewhat murkily reproduced on the soft text-paper. The cover photograph is one of a series the Childs sent to friends each St Valentine’s Day. If you find it a little embarrassing in its gaucheness, you’ll probably wince even harder at the one inside, showing them sharing a bath.
Published in paperback by Anchor Books 353pp
ISBN: 978-0-307-27769-5 $14.95
