Julia Child’s memoir, My Life in France begins with a description of the “most exciting meal of [her] life.” (19) Child recounts the restaurant La Couronne in the Norman countryside where she enjoys her first meal on French soil. Although she is already determined to become a good cook for her husband, this meal redefines her ambition as she discovers the pleasures food can impart. Her husband, Paul, is a fluent French speaker and fervent gourmand. She places her trust in him as he orders them a “sensationally briny” platter of portugaises oysters that she eats on small rounds of buttered rye bread. The meal continues with a whole “flat Dover sole that was perfectly browned in a sputtering butter sauce.” (18) The flavors are balanced by a green salad “laced with a lightly acidic vinaigrette” and her first real baguette. They end with a delicate cheese plate and French pressed coffee. The reader is nearly as satiated as Child upon finishing this passage as she is upon finishing her meal. Child’s fascination with the flavors and textures (re)ignite the novice in the reader regardless of her culinary backgrounds, and she lives the pleasurable discovery of French cuisine through Child’s words.
This meal is what prompts Child’s love affair with the “rich and layered and endlessly fascinating subject” of French food. She pours over famous French cookbooks, enrolls in a restaurateurs’ program at the L’École du Cordon Bleu, and ultimately opens her own cooking school with two fellow female cooks called L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes. Together, these three ambitious women write the cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, that is the first of Child’s string of books to follow. The cookbook is not merely a breakdown of recipes; rather it is an introduction to the cultural tradition of French cuisine. What does this mean, to know French cuisine? It is more than knowing how to make the perfect burre blanc, béchamel, or hollandaise, though that is part of it. To know the French culinary tradition is to understand the way they shop for foods, the way they set their table, and the way they taste, and experience pleasure. The element of pleasure is inherently part of French food, as any will know after tasting a perfectly prepared sole meuniére as Child does on her first day in France. This is what she hopes to convey to her reader of the memoir and of the cookbook: the ultimate prize of the French tradition is more about pleasure than anything else.
