I just loved this book. My Life in France by Julia Child and her adorable nephew Alex Prud'Homme is a veritable feast for the senses. This is the kind of "travel" book I love to read; full of character sketches, atmosphere, local color and mood.
Julia Child began her career in "cookery" and "cookbookery" with very little cooking experience. She and her husband Paul Child moved to France in the late 40s when Paul, a career foreign service diplomat was stationed in Paris. Julia found herself in a foreign culture replete with a language she didn't understand, strange customs she could hardly fathom, and food like she had never tasted before. She was smitten immediately.
What you find out about Julia Child is that she was a woman who could not stand to be bored. She was proactive in almost every part of her life. If she didn't know the language of the country she and her husband were stationed in -- she learned it. If she wanted to learn to cook, she went to "cookery" school. If the school proved to be less than adequate, she started her own. And when she couldn't find adequate recipes for cooking the foods she loved, she studied them, cajoled better cooks to reveal their secrets, tested them and then wrote her own. And that's how she (and her co-authors Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck) finally succeeded in writing their seminal book on French cookery, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume One.
My Life in France is hard to put down. Every chapter holds little surprises about Julia and Paul's lives in France (as well as other countries) and just enough juicy tidbits of gossip that you find yourself relishing the tiny little details. Like the recipes in her cookbooks it's the details that make the final product a success.
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