I recently finished
My Life in France by Julia Child. It's a three hundred thirty-three page nonfiction book mostly about the years Mrs. Child lived in France with her husband, Paul, while he worked for the United States Information Service. It was during those years that she discovered and developed her love for and skill at cooking. She graduated from the Cordon Bleu, taught in her own cooking school with a couple of gourmandes francaise, and began work on the well-known
Mastering the Art of French Cooking while living there. One of the reasons I enjoyed this book was the littering of the French language throughout it. I minored in French in college and have always loved the language. I'm very glad to have finally finished it. It took me over a month to read. I thought it dragged in the middle a bit. Mostly, it made me want to cook. Bouillabaisse, cassoulet, creme de this, and pate de that, etc, etc, etc.
My favorite quotes:
Not long after their wedding, during their move from the US to France Julia says.
"Travel, we agreed, was a litmus test: if we could make the best of the chaos and serendipity that we'd inevitably meet in transit, then we'd surely be able to sail through the rest of life together just fine."
I agree. Travel and moving are great tests of marriage. If you make it through those well, then you must be doing something right.
Julia liked to know the ins and outs of every recipe. She wanted to understand every detail of it and make it into the best recipe ever. She tested and retested every recipe in every possible way to insure she had it right.
"In working up our own instructions for bechamel, we told our readers to use two tablespoons of butter and three tablespoons of flour for the roux. This may seem rather dry stuff to some, but to me it was a process of discovering an important and overlooked step, and then devising our own rationally thought-out solution. In short, a triumph!"
I don't feel like I need to know as much about recipes as Julia did, but I do plan on testing out her roux for bechamel. I've always known it to be one tablespoon of butter to one tablespoon of flour. I'm curious to see how it turns out.
At one point in the the L.A. Times was a right-leaning newspaper. Julia and her husband were more liberal, but her parents, especially her father was conservative. This was right after her father accuses all the news in France of being slanted.
"This was hard to take, especially from the man who read only the right-leaning L.A. Times."
Her thoughts on turning 41
"I inspected myself in the mirror for signs of decrepitude: my elbows looked as if they were withering away, but at least I didn't have any gray hairs."
My elbos look fine, but I can't say the same about not having any gray hairs and I'm not turning 41 yet...that's still a several years away.
After France, the USIS moved the Childs to Germany for a couple of years.
"On weekends, Paul and I would drive into Bonn to do our shopping, each with a pocket dictionary in hand. We bought chickens, beans, apples, lightbulbs, an extension cord, olive oil, vinegar, and a rubber stamp that said "Greeting from Old Downtown Plittersdorf on the Rhine." I have always been a nut for rubber stamps and I couldn't wait to use this one on our letters. Stamp, stamp, stamp!"
Too bad she didn't have Stampin' Up something like that back then. She would have adored that.
I think it's terrible that this book has a picture of Meryl Streep
(and Amy Adams?!?) on it's front cover instead of Julia.
I know it's a movie tie-in, but really.
Now off to find some Youtube videos of her cooking show, The French Chef. Bon Appetit!
