Bon Appétit!

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I noticed a lot of the foodie folks have recently been reading and commenting on Julia Child's new book, My Life in France. I had to wait a month for the book to arrive by slow boat before I could read my copy. The food aspect of Julia's life never really interested me as I've always regarded French food as too heavy, too rich, too gamey, too full of itself and drowning in sauces. Instead, I wanted to read her story as an expat since I was always intrigued by her obvious presence and character from the first time I saw her cooking show on PBS so many decades ago. It seems doubtful that people tuned in to make French food in the 1970s, a time when velveeta cheese balls and bundt cakes were all the rage, but who could resist a woman who cooked with such flair and drank from the sherry bottle as she cooked? And the light, high voice from a 6'2" amazonian woman bidding her audience "Bon Appétit" at the end of every show was also strangely endearing.

Julia was 36 when she left the US to live in France, just as I was 36 when I came to live in Finland. Although Julia had the advantage of being part of the US consular machine which provides quite a network of advantages for the expat when compared to the spouse who expatriates without an organization to support them, I found her experiences familiar. I was particularly jealous of her claim to becoming fluent in French within a year of arrival, something I attribute to French being a romance language, and I wondered how she might have fared with Finnish. But, like her, learning all the food words first for reading menus and grocery shopping was a priority for me.

She, too, was a liberal living outside the US in a time of political discontent back home; McCarthyism. It is interesting that she mentions that McCarthy was largely supported by "Texas oil millionaires." So much, yet so little, has changed over the decades. And, too, she became somewhat alienated from her family because she held such radically different political views. Her father was a staunch Republican who supported McCarthy and thought that the leftist college professors and socialists in Europe had brainwashed his daughter. She wrote a letter in defense of several accused professors at Smith (her alma mater) who had fallen into the path of the McCarthy witch hunt that is remarkably current and patriotic:

In Russia today, as a method for getting rid of opposition, an unsubstantiated implication of treason, such as yours, is often used. But it should never be used in the United States... I respectfully suggest that you are doing both your college and your country a disservice... In the blood-heat of pursuing the enemy, many people are forgetting what we are fighting for. We are fighting for our hard-won liberty and freedom; for our Constitution and the due process of our laws; and for the right to differ in ideas, religion and politics. I am convinced that in your zeal to fight against our enemies, you, too, have forgotten what you are fighting for.

Aside from her going from mere consumer to gourmet in four years, her decision to take on the cookbook project and the attention to every detail she lavished upon it from verifying authenticity to American kitchen equivalents to fool-proofing the recipes was a surprise. So few cookbooks these days bother to test their recipes much less give a damn whether the ingredients are readily available to their target audience. I completely understood her desire to make French cooking as authentic and as easy as possible using what would be reasonably available in the local American grocery. Few cooks who have never left the borders of their own country can appreciate how frustrating it is to cook elsewhere when many of the ingredients simply aren't available. Try making Kraft mac&cheese with franks (often mocked by those who have never eaten it :) or green bean casserole with cream of mushroom soup or anything with velveeta or marshmallows or Helmann's mayo, etc. in Finland and you'll be left with an empty plate. Even basic things like sour cream and buttermilk have to be substituted for which is only done by trial and error. Her diligence saved a lot of cooks the frustration that only the expat can truly understand.

One particular story in the book went into great detail about her determination to perfect the recipe for crusty French bread. At first I read the recommendation about using an asbestos tile as a baking stone and gasped given that asbestos was public health enemy number one in the 1970s, but later she mentions the panic she and Knopf had when the news about asbestos first came out and how they switched to ceramic tiles just before she was to do the baguette show on TV complete with footage of her baking with an artisanal baker in France.

The only part of the book that left me wanting was how little of her she really allowed the reader to see. We get a few glimpses here and there of how her collaboration with Simone "Simca" Beck was turbulent at times, but these are rather breezy and don't really tell us what was really going on. Clearly she was a very bright, colourful, vivacious, driven perfectionist, but that's all we really get to know of her in this book. There was one particular quote that made me smile amidst all of her effusive comments about French food and how much she loved France that confirmed that she was still real, still American.

In the meantime, we'd be going back the the US for a couple of months of home leave... I couldn't wait to see them and get my feet on US soil. But what I really looked forward to was eating an honest-to-goodness American steak!

So, I may reconsider my years of avoiding her cookbooks now that I know she put so much effort into perfecting each recipe for the average American cook. I had always admired her as an entertaining TV chef, but I have a new respect for her cookbooks.