BOOK REVIEW: France is a Feast

OPINION:

FRANCE IS A FEAST: THE PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNEY OF PAUL AND JULIA CHILD

By Alex Prud’homme and Katie Platt

Thames & Hudson, $35, 208 pages

Sometime in the 1960s my father, my grandmother, myself, and Baron Munchausen, the family hound, were taking in a beautiful river view of the Potomac at Hains Point when a very tall lady with a beaming countenance walked up to me and exclaimed, “What a delightful dog! What breed is he?” The voice was somehow familiar and a second glance at her face was all it took for me to recognize Julia Child, already famous as the French Chef.

Munchausen, despite his immaculately symmetrical black-and-white markings and composed, dignified bearing was, truth be told, a mutt. I tried to break the news to Ms. Child as gently as possible: “Several breeds, actually the canine equivalent of fusion cuisine, only with better results.”

Julia Child laughed, patted Munchausen on the muzzle and ambled away. We never met again, but whenever I see her on television, immortalized in endless re-runs and bringing delicious order out of culinary chaos, I feel like I’m catching a glimpse of an old family friend. She was someone you took an instant liking to and, if you were lucky, someone who seemed to take an instant liking to you.

I subsequently recognized her husband Paul — from several of the photographs in “France Is a Feast” — as the dapper, bald gentleman with a clipped mustache who formed part of the group Julia Child had stepped away from to inquire after Munchausen’s ancestry.

A talented photographer, artist and career programs officer with the United States Information Agency, Paul Child is the focal point of this engaging, lovingly assembled volume of photos and reminiscences by Katie Pratt, a photography curator who was a close friend of both Paul and Julia from her childhood onward, and Alex Prud’homme, a nephew who co-authored Julia’s best-selling memoir, “My Life in France.” The text is easy and affectionate as well as knowledgeable, but the photos really do most of the talking.

And well they might. As Paul once confided to Katie Pratt, “Your world is full of beautiful visual, physical, visceral experiences. It all comes down to understanding how to recognize the beauty in everything around you.” This could well serve as the motto for both husband and wife. Paul, through the lens of his camera, and Julia through the alchemy of her kitchen, had a gift for capturing and sharing the beauty that hides from most of us — usually in plain sight — amidst the annoyances and distractions of everyday life.

Not that it wasn’t a close-run thing. A few pages into “France Is a Feast” I found myself wondering what would have happened if Paul and Julia Child, instead of being stationed in France (mostly Paris, but with a side-stay in Marseille, the birthplace of bouillabaisse) between 1948 and 1954, had been posted to London. Would Julia have fallen in love with grim, rationed postwar British cuisine and decided to learn how to cook it — much less write a best-seller about it and then become TV’s first gastronomic super star as “The English Chef”? Not bloody likely, blood sausage or no blood sausage.

Fortunately, fate put them in the right place at the right time, and “France Is a Feast” allows us to share in the results. Paul’s camera captures the cluttered charm of the antediluvian kitchen in their Paris flat where Julia first learned how to cook her beloved French cuisine. It also serves as a timely reminder to today’s yuppy “foodies” that great meals can come out of humble kitchens without overpriced, state-of-the-art appliances and gadgets.

Several of Paul’s shots of the Eiffel Tower, taken from imaginative angles or honing in on curious little details are also a reminder of how the artistic eye can extract fresh inspiration from even the most familiar of subjects.

Another picture, a mundane setting perfectly captured and brought to life, features a small, shabby shop in Montmartre with an unflappable little boy of about 6 staring through the window, sizing up the photographer with the calculating look of the shopkeeper he will probably grow up to be. Rather more unexpected is a nude — yes, nude — shot of Julia captured in (perhaps mercifully) shadowy silhouette against the backdrop of a sunlit window. Not bad, actually.

If it hadn’t been for France, we probably never would have heard of Julia Child. If it hadn’t been for Julia Child we probably never would have heard of her husband Paul. But if it hadn’t been for Paul’s talent as a photographer, we wouldn’t know them half so well in the Parisian setting they both delighted in. Three cheers for serendipity.

• Aram Bakshian Jr., an aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, writes widely on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts.