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Summary
Summary
One of the most beloved figures in 20th century American culture was Julia Child, the buoyant French Chef who taught millions of Americans to cook with confidence and eat with pleasure. With an irrepressible sense of humour and a passion for good food, Child ushered in the nation's culinary renaissance and became its chief icon. Unlike the great cooking teachers who preceded her, she won her audience through the revolutionary medium of television. Millions watched as she spun threads of caramel, befriended a giant monkfish, wielded live lobsters, flipped omelettes and unmoulded spectacular desserts. Her occasional disasters, and brilliant recoveries, were legendary. Yet every step of the way she was teaching carefully crafted lessons about ingredients, culinary technique, and why good home cooking still matters.
Author Notes
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Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Shapiro's biography of Julia Child-one of America's most beloved personalities-is a short but comprehensive book, and the newest in the Penguin Lives series. Born Julia McWilliams in Pasadena, Calif., in 1912, Child attended college and worked for the OSS in Asia during WWII, where she met her future husband. After marrying, they moved to Paris, which led her to cooking classes at the Cordon Bleu. Child had an appetite for learning as well as eating, one that soon developed into a desire to pass on the knowledge and skills-the love-she was acquiring. And in her late 30s, she found her calling. With two women who later coauthored her first book, she started her own cooking school; her class notes led to the cookbook, which eventually led to the television show. Her husband provided steady support, and Child learned of the value of trial and error and an ability to laugh at her mistakes. She was also patient: the cookbook was nearly a decade from conception to publication and the television show started equally shakily. In this wonderful short bio, Shapiro doesn't skimp on less-flattering aspects of her subject's life and personality (Child found homosexuality to be "a rude disruption in the natural order of things"). (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
New York Review of Books Review
EVERYTHING from the television-immortalized kitchen in Julia Child's Cambridge house has been disassembled and reverently reinstalled at the Smithsonian Institution. Everything, that is, except the original iconic pegboard wall Paul Child designed to hang her prized copper pots, with hand-drawn outlines showing where each one goes. That wall and those pots are now enshrined 3,000 miles away in the Napa Valley, at Copia, the American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts. All Julia Child's papers - manuscripts, lectures, fan mail - are back East, in the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe. Except, of course, for those memories lodged in the minds and files of still very living Julia-ists, like her legendary editor, Judith Jones. Child's biographical legacy is similarly scattered. Noel Riley Fitch's "Appetite for Life" (1997) is a workmanlike effort whose virtue is in sorting out the details. In 2006, two years after Julia's death, a memoir appeared with her byline - "My Life in France," a collaboration with her husband's great-nephew, Alex Prud'homme (who admits to conflating Julia's and Paul's voices). That book thrills us with Julia's jolly discovery of "cookbookery" and Paul's exquisite photographs. But both books left some of us hungry for more. Now, we have two new volumes, Laura Shapiro's "Julia Child" and "Backstage With Julia: My Years With Julia Child," by Nancy Verde Barr. The length of Laura Shapiro's text is constrained by the elegantly slim format of the Penguin Lives series, yet this writer shows enormous grace and food savvy. Shapiro thinks hard about why Julia matters. Calling her husband "the man who would make her Julia Child," Shapiro deftly distills the mentorship, intelligence, humor and devotion Paul brought to the big, happy, unfocused California girl that was Julia McWilliams and skillfully reduces the sauce of Julia's cooking ethic into a rich demiglace: "Use all your senses, all the time. ... Take pains with the work; do it carefully. Relish the details. Enjoy your hunger. And remember why you're there." That could be a recipe for life. We love discovering that Child was not a natural: "She simply wasn't one of those mysteriously gifted creatures who could wander into the kitchen and wander out again bearing a wonderful meal, never having glanced at a recipe." The author is fine on the making of a cook - Julia's 12-year run-up to "Mastering the Art of French Cooking"(1961), her rigorous, restless quest to find "the very flavor of Frenchness" and "press it like a butterfly onto every page." "Mastering" still lives on our bookshelves. Perhaps it is used less frequently, but reopening those pages, we're stunned by the evidence of how little we once knew, and how much the confident tone of those recipes, set in that beloved typeface, shaped our food sense. When she began her television career on WGBH-TV in Boston at 50, "Julia had no gift for artifice: she could perform but she couldn't pretend." Shapiro astutely observes that on the show, "even the food seemed to be a live, spontaneous participant. Julia welcomed it warmly ... letting it surprise and delight her, very nearly bantering with it." But Julia never did drop that chicken she was said to have dropped, Shapiro reports, and her first meal in France may well not have been the sole meunière of legend. Reading Shapiro reminds us how Julia Child taught us not just how to cook but how to think about food, a quality sorely missing from the work of the glib TV chefs who've followed her. Shapiro is alert to today's overhyped, foodie America, where cooking is fetishized but seldom understood. When she says of Julia, "One of her lasting gifts to the food world was to help make it a place where good minds could settle in for life," you can just picture her own good mind making itself at home. Julia Child was 68 when she first met Nancy Verde Barr, and among the ways she influenced the young cooking school owner who was to become her assistant on "Good Morning America" and traveling companion for the next 24 years was to insist that she embrace her Italian heritage, inserting her birth name into the byline of the cookbooks she'd eventually write. "Backstage With Julia" is packed with endearing anecdotes, like the time Julia got herself and friends into La Grenouille not by dropping her own name but by calling her hairdresser, whose brother was a dishwasher there; how Julia would serve Pepperidge Farm Goldfish for hors d'oeuvres; and Julia on low-fat food: "The only time to eat diet food is while you're waiting for the steak to cook." Barr's voice is breathless. Her one true revelation? Julia didn't love pasta. But we'd trade a chirpy tale or two for just some good plain writing. Dorothy Kalins is the founding editor of Saveur magazine and a contributing editor at Newsweek.
Kirkus Review
Shapiro (Something from the Oven, 2004) offers a vivid biography of the 20th century's leading gourmand. Food wasn't very important to Julia Child when she was young. She grew up in California, eating the bland New England cuisine that her Massachusetts-born mother instructed the future chef to prepare. After attending Smith College, she meandered through the next decade, single, without a real career. In 1946, in part because she was trying to make herself more attractive to the man she would eventually marry, she took a cooking class. Child was not, Shapiro makes clear, a born chef: In the early days, chickens were blackened to a crisp; a duck exploded; barnaise sauce congealed; brains dissolved into mush. As a new bride in France, floundering around for something meaningful to do, Child enrolled in more classes, this time at the Cordon Bleu. There, she learned to cook "with all her senses engaged . . . with a visceral understanding of raw ingredients." A career--teaching Americans how to cook--was born. Why was she so successful on TV, in an era when cooking shows weren't very popular? Because, says Shapiro, Child had no artifice. She was herself on television. She was also fabulously composed in the face of on-air kitchen disasters--as when a tarte tartin collapsed in a heap. Her informal charm and humor helped her accomplish one of her central goals--to demystify French cuisine, and convince Americans that they could, to borrow the title of her most famous book, master the art of French cooking. In Shapiro's hands, Child emerges as a steadfast, vigorous, analytical person. Shapiro has, in a brief book, made her subject truly come alive. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The celebrated cook gets a nod from "Penguin Lives." (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Read an Excerpt Soon after Julia and Paul settled in Paris, an old woman told Julia that France was "just one big family." As far as Julia was concerned, that family was hers. At their favorite restaurant, Michaud, she couldn't stop glancing over at a dozen people celebrating around a table spread with "innumerable courses of everything" --champagne, chickens, salads, cheeses, nuts--and everyone relaxed and goodhearted as they talked and ate and drank. "We keep being reminded of the Orient," she wrote home. "Possibly because both are cultivated old civilizations, who enjoy and have integrated the physical and the cultural things in living." Julia was at home here. The French struck her as wonderfully natural and earthy, and at the same time immensely civilized. They seemed to believe that the great pleasures of life--food, drink, sex, civility and conversation, pets, children, the splendor of Paris--were simply part of the fabric of being human, and that to enjoy them was as fundamental as breathing. Yet it was also taken for granted that stewardship of these gifts meant relishing them openly, discussing them, arguing about them, and keeping them meaningful through the very power of appreciation. Here was a whole country dedicated to being "worldly." Right away she started French lessons at Berlitz: nothing was more important to her at this stage than becoming comfortable in the language. She was ecstatically absorbing the city, all her senses wide open and craving more; and she wanted the sounds as well, that constant chatter in the shops and streets; she wanted to "talk and talk and talk" and make a place for herself in the life flowing around her. "Oh, La Vie! I love it more every day." They found an apartment at 81, rue de l'Université, on the Left Bank of the Seine across from the place de la Concorde, in an old private house. Their rooms on the third floor were as French as the view of rooftops outside the windows. Sagging leather wallpaper, gilt chairs, moldings, and mirrors everywhere--Julia called it "late 19th century Versailles." Up a narrow flight of stairs there was a roomy kitchen with appliances so small in relation to her height that she might have been standing over a toy stove. She decided she could live right there in that apartment forever, in perfect happiness. Already she regretted missing Paris in the twenties, an era Paul had seen in person; and she pounced happily on the occasional sighting of such figures as Colette, Chanel, André Gide, and Sylvia Beach. Once, when the Childs gave a Bastille Day party, Paul invited Alice B. Toklas, whom he had met back in the twenties. She arrived, drank a glass of wine, and left. Toklas was so tiny, and wore such a wide-brimmed hat, that the only way Julia could see her face was to be sitting down while Toklas stood directly above her. Julia spent her first months studying French, walking through the streets with a map and a dictionary, and tasting, tasting, tasting. Everything she bit into was full of exhilarating flavors: the sausages, the tarts and petits fours, the snails, the Brie, "great big juicy pears," and grapes so sweet she nearly swooned. Like most of their French and American friends in Paris, she and Paul had a maid who cooked and cleaned; but after living that way for a few months, they let her go. They hated having to show up on time for meals, and her cooking disappointed them. Julia was embarrassed to serve guests such inadequate dinners--her own could be alarming at times, but when they came off well, she took a great deal of pride in them. "Besides," she wrote home, "it is heart-rending not to go to the markets, those lovely, intimate, delicious, mouth-watering, friendly, fascinating places. How can one know the guts of the city if one doesn't do one's marketing?" So they hired a cleaning woman to come in twice a week, and Julia gladly took charge of the food. At the market, she examined pigs' heads and scrutinized fruits and vegetables, breathed in the smells of the boulangerie , carefully chose a terrine or pâté from the charcuterie, and chatted away with the shopkeepers. In France, food was a sociable enterprise: everyone had something to say about the turnips or the kidneys, and to be able to join that nationwide conversation--in French! --was Julia's bliss. Excerpted from Julia Child by Laura Shapiro All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
