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Title:My Life in France
Author: Julia Child, with Alex Prud'Homme
Genre: Memoir
Thingummies: 4
Synopsis: A memoir of how Julia Child learned to cook and went on to become a cooking superstar.
Thingummies: There are some people whose lives I envy, but whose paths to success were so unlikely there's just no way to duplicate them. And that's if I could match the courage involved.
Julia Child was an incredibly lively, forceful woman who does not appear to have done anything by half-measures. She spent World War II working for the OSS in Asia, married a diplomat/artist, and moved to France without speaking the language or knowing a soul. When she decided she wanted to learn to cook, really cook--not an approved hobby for an upper middle class housewife in the 1950s--she argued her way out of the housewife class at Cordon Bleu and into the basement with a bunch of GIs looking to open restaurants. When she got invited to participate in writing a small cookbook for American amateurs, she ended up spending a decade or so exhaustively researching every facet of French cooking and churning out a two-volume behemoth that still makes experienced home cooks blanch. She jumps from the land of Wonderbread into happily pressing ducks to make sauce from their bloody mangled carcasses.
Working with her could clearly be a bit of a trial, and I think occasionally she lacks sympathy for some of her friends. But overall, this is a delightfully charming book about an incredibly charismatic woman. She was raised to be a docile housewife and turned herself into an international celebrity, entirely on her own merits, not from an interest in fame itself but through her passion for cooking.
And of course, the descriptions of the food are amazing.
Author: Julia Child, with Alex Prud'Homme
Genre: Memoir
Thingummies: 4
Synopsis: A memoir of how Julia Child learned to cook and went on to become a cooking superstar.
Thingummies: There are some people whose lives I envy, but whose paths to success were so unlikely there's just no way to duplicate them. And that's if I could match the courage involved.
Julia Child was an incredibly lively, forceful woman who does not appear to have done anything by half-measures. She spent World War II working for the OSS in Asia, married a diplomat/artist, and moved to France without speaking the language or knowing a soul. When she decided she wanted to learn to cook, really cook--not an approved hobby for an upper middle class housewife in the 1950s--she argued her way out of the housewife class at Cordon Bleu and into the basement with a bunch of GIs looking to open restaurants. When she got invited to participate in writing a small cookbook for American amateurs, she ended up spending a decade or so exhaustively researching every facet of French cooking and churning out a two-volume behemoth that still makes experienced home cooks blanch. She jumps from the land of Wonderbread into happily pressing ducks to make sauce from their bloody mangled carcasses.
Working with her could clearly be a bit of a trial, and I think occasionally she lacks sympathy for some of her friends. But overall, this is a delightfully charming book about an incredibly charismatic woman. She was raised to be a docile housewife and turned herself into an international celebrity, entirely on her own merits, not from an interest in fame itself but through her passion for cooking.
And of course, the descriptions of the food are amazing.
