April 10, 2006
Julia Child Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:30 PM EST More than any single person, in my opinion, Julia Child sparked the revolution in the American attitude towards food that has so characterized the last 40 years and so greatly improved and enlarged American cuisine. Partly, I suppose, it was a case of a tide taken at the flood, the country was ready for it. But Julia’s cheerful, you-can-do-it attitude toward serious cooking (“if you can read, you can cook” was her motto) and her willingness to allow the occasional, sometimes hilarious misstep to remain in her TV shows, humanized her and the art of which she was the master. If Julia (she is one of those people who are always called by their first name, even by those who never met her) could drop the lettuce on the floor or have the omelet slide off the plate, and take it in stride, so could the rest of us. She gave people both the courage to try and, with her meticulous instructions, the means to succeed. Her latest and, alas, last book has just been published, completed by her grandnephew, Alex Prud’homme. Called My Life in France, it is not a cookbook but a memoir of her early days in France after the Second World War. When she first arrived, the wife of a diplomat, she could barely butter toast unassisted and knew no French beyond bonjour and merci. She fell in love instantly with French cooking (a simple, perfect sautéed sole did it) and soon resolved to master the art herself and later to lead her fellow Americans to the gastronomic promised land. Her success was enormous. Mastering the Art of French Cooking, published in 1961, has sold more copies than any book Alfred A. Knopf has ever published, with the exception of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, which, published originally in 1923, had a 38-year head start.
Julia’s new book reminds me of a favorite from my long-ago childhood, long before the American food revolution got under way, and when those who, like my mother, were lovers and practitioners of la cuisine française were few and far between. Clementine in the Kitchen is by Phineas Beck, a pseudonym for Samuel Chamberlain. The Chamberlain family spent 12 years in France before World War II and they, too, fell in love with French cooking and with their cheerful peasant cook, Clementine. When the war seemed imminent they returned to America with Clementine in tow. There she tackled the vagaries of the American marketplace and kitchen with Gallic good humor and occasional incomprehension. I loved it as a child when I was just beginning my career of making frightful messes in the kitchen, and I still have my mother’s stained and even mouse-nibbled copy. It is a classic of food writing, right up there on the shelf with M. F. K. Fisher and Elizabeth David, and I commend it. It is nearly as comforting as butterscotch pudding and a lot less fattening, at least until you start testing the recipes.
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