My Life in France by Julia Child

So after reading Julie and Julia a few months ago, I had to read the other book that inspired the movie I loved, so I read Julia's account of how she got into cooking while living in France with her husband, Paul.

I love food and cooking and I think for some reason the idea of French food has always turned me off. Not in the snails and frog legs kind of turn off, but the idea that hoity toity people like French food and it's considered "classic" and so I didn't want to jump on that snooty bandwagon. But reading Julia's book, while French is a technical cuisine to prepare, it is really just another nationality of rustic, local tradition.

I enjoyed reading the tales of Julia and Paul finding their way in life as Americans stationed abroad in France and later Norway and Germany. It was the late 40s, early 50s, a time when Europe was rebuilding and the Marshall Plan was in place to boost Europe back after the war. Paul was in the diplomatic corps, but (IMO) a more fluffy job area helping with art, culture and basically propoganda projects. He was an artist and it suited him. Julia was bored so she went to culinary school at Le Cordon Bleu. After she started a cooking school with 2 friends and then they tackled the multi-year task of writing Julia's famous cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cuisine.

The parts about living in foreign countries and finding apartments and trying to make friends and the trips they took were great. So were the parts about cooking school. But writing about writing a cookbook got a touch boring after a point. I understand *why* writing the book took so long but argh, it was just pages and pages about how she had to test lots of recipes many times to figure out how American products would translate in the French cooking.

The book pretty much told the rest of Julia's life, even after she became well known and moved back to America and settled in Boston. There are short parts about the making of her TV show, but even though a TV show creation is more active than writing a cookbook, she goes into far less detail about that production. I wouldn't have minded hearing some of that minutae, since I'm sure the primitive TV production was quite a challenge at times for someone cooking live on camera.

This book is far superior to Julie Powell's, and I enjoyed it quite a lot. It makes me want to learn how to make a buerre blanc and crepes.