The joys of Julia and her mastering of French cuisine

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MY LIFE IN FRANCE

By Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme

Knopf, $25.95, 320 pages

REVIEWED BY LORNA WILLIAMS

The first meal Julia Child cooked after her marriage in 1946 -- brains simmered in red wine -- was ambitious but a disaster. When she sailed to France two years later with her foreign-service husband, she did not understand or speak French. Thirty-six years old, she knew little about the country, even less about its famed cuisine, and fancied that "France was a nation of icky-picky people where the women were all dainty, exquisitely coiffed, nasty little creatures, the men all ... dandies who twirled their mustaches, pinched girls and schemed against American rubes."

Yet in 15 years this self-described "rather loud and unserious Californian" emerged as America's high priestess of French cuisine: the principal author of the encyclopedic "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," and the plummy-voiced star of a ground-breaking TV cooking show, "The French Chef." Not bad for someone who was neither French nor a chef, and who did not find her metier until her late 30s.

"My Life in France," the memoir Child wrote with her grand-nephew Alex Prud'homme, is her account of this sea change, "a book about some of the things I have loved most in life: my husband, Paul Child; La Belle France; and the many pleasures of cooking and eating." Paul, who knew the country and its language well, introduced Julia to French culture and French attitudes to wine and food. He encouraged her to take courses at the Cordon Bleu cooking school, to teach and to take on the cookbook that would make her a household name. "I would never have had my career without Paul Child," she acknowledges.

The idea for this memoir first emerged back in 1969, when Paul was sifting through hundreds of letters he had written to his twin brother, describing his and Julia's life in France from 1948 to 1954. Somehow "the France book" never got written, however. Paul died in 1994 at age 92, but Julia never gave up on the idea. In 2003, about a year before her death, Mr. Prud'homme suggested a collaboration and, by weaving taped interviews together with the letters, has produced a narrative in which the large-as-life presence of Julia Child looms on every page.

The plentiful black-and-white photos, many taken by Paul, are the icing on the gateau: 6-foot-2-inch Julia towering over students at her cooking school, lighting a cigarette on a Marseille street corner, posing in a bubble bath with Paul for the Valentine's Day card the couple sent every year (because they were always too late to send out Christmas cards).