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A ‘French Chef’ Whose Appeal Doesn’t Translate
By MAÏA de la BAUME
Published: September 16, 2009
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.
In Paris, Meryl Streep is the real draw in “Julie & Julia,” not Julia Child, whom she portrays.
Some in France say Ms. Child caricatured French cuisine. Others say she demystified it.
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.”
(The full article is here.)