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by Suzanne Buchert
From “My Life in France” by Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme “At five-forty-five in the morning, Paul and I rousted ourselves from our warm bunk and peered out of the small porthole in our cabin aboard the SS America……….It was Wednesday, November 3, 1948, and we had finally arrived at Le Havre, France” From “Last Days of Summer” by Steve Kluger “It’s funny how the years have changed everything about Brooklyn geography”.
I began lusting over “My Life in France” as soon as I saw the first article about its publication. I haven’t read anything by Julia Child, but had begun a light relationship with culinary writing in the last year or so beginning with “The Art of Eating”, the huge collection of M.F.K. Fisher’s work reviewed in October of 2006, and moving along through the serious and not so serious works chronicling love of food. I also never watched the any of the numerous PBS series starring Child. I do have a vivid picture of Dan Aykroyd playing Child on Saturday Night Live, cutting him/herself and spewing blood all over the place while maintaining that dead-on high pitched voice. As usual, I waited for a while, hoping for a soft cover version, but couldn’t hold out long enough and got the hard cover at one of those dastardly “4 books for the price of 3” promotions at Borders. I convinced myself it wasn’t at all self-indulgent since it was a smallish book and I knew someone I could give it to when I finished it. Unfortunately, she picked up the recently released soft cover before I got around to writing my review and giving it to her. “My Life in France” is a sweet book, filled with information about Child’s life with her husband, Paul, focusing largely on the years from their move to France to the end of Paul’s life and a bit beyond. The book is written in a very conversational style, a bit like a diary interspersed with photos and containing the most amazingly detailed memories of wonderful meals consumed during those years. Julia and Paul didn’t just eat oysters in a small establishment in France upon arriving there for the first time; they ate portugaises oysters on the half-shell, served with pain de seigle and Beurre de Charentes. Well, you get the idea. Child recited not only the items included in each course, but a description of how they were prepared and how they tasted and the names of the wines served along with the meals! It would be fair to say that she learned to eat in France which led to her wanting to be able to cook the things she was eating, and finally to wanting to share her knowledge of food, in particular, French food, with others, in particular with others living in the United States. The meticulous testing of preparations for each recipe that went into her first book, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”, written with her two collaborators, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, was staggering, especially given the underlying knowledge that they may not ever find a publisher willing to take the book on and that there may not be a market for their book once they did secure a publisher. “My Life in France” is a love story of Child’s life with Paul, her love of France and her love of food. It is a delicious book. As a willing victim of the infamous Borders 4 for 3 scams, I can usually convince myself it’s ok to buy the most iffy books just because I need that fourth book So, I wander the tables, picking up likely candidates, and even some unlikely ones, reading the blurbs on the front and back covers, and eventually filling out the quota. “The Last Days of Summer” had a selection on the front cover that made it impossible for me not to buy it. “April 9, 1940. I have decided to turn to a life of crime. My Dad was supposed to take me to Coney Island but he never called back, my left eye is black-and-blue again, and Hitler is beginning to scare the holy heck out of me…” Then to seal the deal, I turned to the first page of the Prologue where I read a facsimile of a letter from The White House dated November 26, 1936. The letter thanked the author of the previous sentences, Joseph, for his $1 donation to the campaign, refusing to lower the voting age to nine so that said Joseph could vote and signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Couldn’t resist! Tucked it into my stack and went for a latte before checking out. This is a laugh out loud funny book interspersed with letters, report cards, baseball game score cards and Top Secret schoolboy notes written by, to and/or about Joey, a young Jewish boy living in Brooklyn at the beginning of WW II. He writes not only to FDR, but has a running correspondence with a baseball player for the New York Giants named Charley Banks. The letters begin with Joey asking Banks to name a home run for him right before it is hit, because as Joey puts it, “I am dying of malaria”. How Joey’s correspondence and his real life progress is written in an engaging style that breezes along through the years. The only obvious tie in of these two books, beyond the 4 for 3 deals, involves life in the middle of the last century. The time frame of Child’s book begins a bit after Kluger’s book ends, but they seemed to me to go together as stories of a couple of great American characters, one all too real and one fictional. In looking back on my archives, I see that I have been writing reviews for Tristatewoman.com since 2001! It has been a great joy and only a minor curse (on those occasions when I let my deadline get too close). I tender big, sincere thanks to Rita for having the idea for the website, for recruiting the writers of the articles, and for sticking to the job of editing, organizing and getting the site up and running each month. It is no small task. I hope she will persevere for at least another seven years! See you next year…..
Suzanne Buchert and her husband, Keith, own several restaurants.
sbuchert@hotmail.com
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