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I read this book to satisfy the food memoir requirement for this year’s Read Harder Challenge, not realizing I was about to get my hands on Relish, which was a much faster read.
I had not known much about Julia Childs before reading this book. I had heard of her, I had seen Dan Akroyd’s SNL skit, and I had both read Julie & Julia and seen the movie, which meant that, while reading this book, I kept picturing Meryl Streep as Julia and Stanley Tucci as her husband, Paul.
Julia came from a wealthy family in California with a hired cook, so she never learned to cook and didn’t know much about food. Paul was the foodie and had spent most of the 1920s in Paris, so he mostly got to sit back and watch while Julia had what she called a “revelation” during their first meal in France: lunch at an inn that had been around for centuries. Julia wasn’t much of a drinker either, so she was shocked to find out Paul and the waiter treated a glass of wine with lunch as perfectly normal.
This set Julia on her path. She started teaching herself to cook, but she wasn’t satisfied with learning just the basics. She studied and experimented and tried all sorts of new things. She was determined to learn to cook the French way, and when she was ready for the next level, she started taking classes at Le Cordon Bleu. She describes the fights with the administrator she had to get in order to get into the right class and the fact that, once she made it, she was the only woman there, but that didn’t deter her in the least.
This book so made me want to go back to Paris. Julia and Paul loved the French because they understood them. You can’t barge in like a stupid American and expect them to treat you like an American would. Nor can you operate based on your assumptions of what they’ll do, because that will likewise lead you into trouble. I found the stereotype of the snooty French people to be completely unfounded during my own trip to Paris and I loved watching Julia and Paul discover a similar love of the French people and discuss where this stereotype came from (personally, I chalk it up to culture clash).
From what I got out of this book, Julia Child was the type of person it was difficult not to love. She loved life, she loved food, and she loved people. Her ebullience jumps right off the page to the point where it’s hard to imagine anyone giving her much attitude. She worked hard to develop personal relationships with the French people and it paid off.
After a discussion with a couple of her French girlfriends, the three of them decide they want to write a cookbook with French recipes aimed at an American audience. I was astounded at the amount of work Julia put in to get the book just right. She tested recipes again and again to make sure they were foolproof. She sent test recipes to friends in America to make sure other people could follow their instructions They converted everything to American measurements. They even discovered some daily French ingredients couldn’t even be found in America and vice versa, so she worked her butt off to create a cook book that would actually be of some use to American housewives.
It turned out getting published was a problem because Julia was writing at a time when cooking in America was becoming as industrialized as everything else. No one wanted to spend much time in the kitchen, so they had mixes out of boxes and TV dinners (the Childs didn’t even own a TV until after Julia had gotten her own show).
This was a problem because French cooking is an art, and as such, takes time and care and precision. They therefore struggled to find a publisher who would understand where the audience for their book was, but even I knew going in that this was a success story, although Julia hardly mentions how well the book sold and how iconic it became, much less her TV show and her celebrity in general.
It’s interesting to read this book at a time when there’s a movement back to the “old” way of doing things. Personally, I buy organic produce and pastured meat and eggs whenever I can and I have definitely noticed a difference in taste. I know a lot people still take advantage of boxed foods and take out, but every day there are more books and blogs advertising quick and easy meals so busy people can still get good, homemade food.
What did you guys read this week? Any other classics you knew little about?