A 'French Chef' Whose Appeal Doesn't Translate

By MAÏA de la BAUME

International Herald Tribune

PARIS - Julia Child may have been America's best-known "French chef,"
but here in Paris few know her fabled cookbooks, let alone her name.

Posters for the movie "Julie & Julia" were plastered across the city
before its release here on Wednesday. But the movie was being
anticipated more for Meryl Streep's performance as Ms. Child than for
any particular interest in Ms. Child, the principal author of "Mastering
the Art of French Cooking," who died in 2004.

Ms. Child's book - beloved by American cooks for almost 50 years and now
a best-seller because of the film - has never been translated into
French, said Anne Perrier, a manager at Galignani, an English-language
bookshop here. "It's the vision of a revisited France, adapted to the
American taste, at a time when tastes were lifeless," she said.

In an interview in the French daily newspaper Le Figaro last week, Ms.
Streep said: "What surprises me is that the French don't know her at
all. While for Americans, she was one of the best ambassadors of France
.... since Lafayette!"

French food experts are divided about Ms. Child and her cooking. Some
say she caricatured French cuisine in her book and cooking show, making
it seem too heavy and formal. Others believe she demystified it and see
her as a role model in France, where cooking shows are rare and cuisine
is not necessarily viewed as something anyone can interpret.

"Julia Child's cuisine is academic and bourgeois," said Julie Andrieu, a
television personality and cookbook author. "It shows that in America,
the cliché of beef, baguette and canard farci remains."
For Jean-Claude Ribaut, the food critic at Le Monde, Ms. Child was more
like "a mediator who promoted the French lifestyle in the United States,
but had no influence on restaurateurs."

But some chefs say they hope that the film will rehabilitate French
cooking in the United States. Gilles Epié, a chef who met Ms. Child in
Los Angeles at a birthday party for her in the early 1990s, thinks
French cooking has been tarnished as stodgy.

"Americans have really slammed French cuisine," Mr. Epié said. "They
think we only eat boeuf bourguignon and rabbit stew, which is wrong."

Before taking over the Citrus Étoile, in the Eighth Arrondissement, Mr.
Epié ran the Los Angeles restaurant L'Orangerie for more than three
years. He remembered with distaste the strictness of American health
rules about food.

"My fish shop in Santa Monica smelled like a pharmacy" instead of like
fresh fish, he said. "And when I asked for a three-month-old baby lamb,
like you can find here, they thought I was crazy and nearly called the
police."

But some French chefs say they believe that Ms. Child, through the film,
could have an impact on contemporary French cooking, or at least make
boeuf bourguignon, a traditional dish currently absent from most French
menus, fashionable again.

"She explains her recipes like a housewife, but she knows how to do it
and she does it genuinely," said Guy Savoy, owner of the restaurant that
bears his name in Paris. He met Ms. Child in 1981 in Massachusetts and
remembered her as "a real character, gentle and affable."

Ms. Andrieu, the cookbook author, said that despite Ms. Child's clichéd
recipes, her style could be defined as a "combination of scientific and
empirical virtues" that helped explain why Americans wrote better
cookbooks than the French.

"The French think that they are natural-born cooks; they prepare a dish
off the top of their heads, without testing it," she said. "In France,
we rush over explanations."

After watching "Julie & Julia," Ms. Andrieu said, she felt compelled to
go home and make boeuf bourguignon according to Ms. Child's recipe. "I
cut the flour in half, and it turned out to be the best I had ever
made," she said.

Mr. Epié even thinks that Ms. Child's story should encourage the French
to discuss their cuisine in a more democratic way.

He is one of the few respected chefs in Paris to offer American food on
his menu, including his signature dish: a crab cake à la française,
prepared with shellfish oil instead of mayonnaise.

"I want to do Julia Child, but Julia Child with real fish, real lobster,
with eels to shuck and rabbit to bone," he said. "That's my dream."