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| Book | Searching... Groveland - Langley-Adams Library | BIO CHILD, J. | 32121000381109 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Lowell - Pollard Memorial Library | B CHILD, J. | 31481004217282 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
An affectionate tribute, this book reveals the adventurous, inquisitive & often mischievious nature of the celebrity cook Julia Child. Nancy Verde Barr worked with Julia for many years, as executive chef responsible for orchestrating the television shows, cookbooks & articles that made Julia famous.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Barr (We Called It Macaroni) worked with culinary icon Julia Child for 24 years, starting in 1980 as an assistant to Child's monthly live segment on Good Morning America and remaining until Child's death in 2004. This delightful and sprightly backstage look at life with Child (a "Lucille Ball-with-a-rolling-pin character in the kitchen") describes Barr's work as an integral member of "the Julia team" that supported Child's "mind-boggling" schedule of demonstrations, media appearances and book signings. Barr skillfully illustrates Child's "extraordinary drive" in business, showing how "she never took her success or her audiences' acceptance of her work for granted," and how throughout her many ventures, "she maintained the integrity of what she was doing--teaching cooking." A delightful description of a day when the pair "gobbled down Double-Double burgers at the In-N-Out drive thru" illustrates how Child was "as down-to-earth, unguarded, and unselfconsciously outspoken in the company of friends as she was with the cameras rolling." By concentrating on the "memories of the Julia who was my mentor, my colleague, my friend; my story of what made her so special," Barr provides a sweet addition to Noel Riley Fitch's biography Appetite for Life and, recently, Child's autobiography with Alex Prud'Homme, My Life in France. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
New York Review of Books Review
EVERYTHING from the television-immortalized kitchen in Julia Child's Cambridge house has been disassembled and reverently reinstalled at the Smithsonian Institution. Everything, that is, except the original iconic pegboard wall Paul Child designed to hang her prized copper pots, with hand-drawn outlines showing where each one goes. That wall and those pots are now enshrined 3,000 miles away in the Napa Valley, at Copia, the American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts. All Julia Child's papers - manuscripts, lectures, fan mail - are back East, in the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe. Except, of course, for those memories lodged in the minds and files of still very living Julia-ists, like her legendary editor, Judith Jones. Child's biographical legacy is similarly scattered. Noel Riley Fitch's "Appetite for Life" (1997) is a workmanlike effort whose virtue is in sorting out the details. In 2006, two years after Julia's death, a memoir appeared with her byline - "My Life in France," a collaboration with her husband's great-nephew, Alex Prud'homme (who admits to conflating Julia's and Paul's voices). That book thrills us with Julia's jolly discovery of "cookbookery" and Paul's exquisite photographs. But both books left some of us hungry for more. Now, we have two new volumes, Laura Shapiro's "Julia Child" and "Backstage With Julia: My Years With Julia Child," by Nancy Verde Barr. The length of Laura Shapiro's text is constrained by the elegantly slim format of the Penguin Lives series, yet this writer shows enormous grace and food savvy. Shapiro thinks hard about why Julia matters. Calling her husband "the man who would make her Julia Child," Shapiro deftly distills the mentorship, intelligence, humor and devotion Paul brought to the big, happy, unfocused California girl that was Julia McWilliams and skillfully reduces the sauce of Julia's cooking ethic into a rich demiglace: "Use all your senses, all the time. ... Take pains with the work; do it carefully. Relish the details. Enjoy your hunger. And remember why you're there." That could be a recipe for life. We love discovering that Child was not a natural: "She simply wasn't one of those mysteriously gifted creatures who could wander into the kitchen and wander out again bearing a wonderful meal, never having glanced at a recipe." The author is fine on the making of a cook - Julia's 12-year run-up to "Mastering the Art of French Cooking"(1961), her rigorous, restless quest to find "the very flavor of Frenchness" and "press it like a butterfly onto every page." "Mastering" still lives on our bookshelves. Perhaps it is used less frequently, but reopening those pages, we're stunned by the evidence of how little we once knew, and how much the confident tone of those recipes, set in that beloved typeface, shaped our food sense. When she began her television career on WGBH-TV in Boston at 50, "Julia had no gift for artifice: she could perform but she couldn't pretend." Shapiro astutely observes that on the show, "even the food seemed to be a live, spontaneous participant. Julia welcomed it warmly ... letting it surprise and delight her, very nearly bantering with it." But Julia never did drop that chicken she was said to have dropped, Shapiro reports, and her first meal in France may well not have been the sole meunière of legend. Reading Shapiro reminds us how Julia Child taught us not just how to cook but how to think about food, a quality sorely missing from the work of the glib TV chefs who've followed her. Shapiro is alert to today's overhyped, foodie America, where cooking is fetishized but seldom understood. When she says of Julia, "One of her lasting gifts to the food world was to help make it a place where good minds could settle in for life," you can just picture her own good mind making itself at home. Julia Child was 68 when she first met Nancy Verde Barr, and among the ways she influenced the young cooking school owner who was to become her assistant on "Good Morning America" and traveling companion for the next 24 years was to insist that she embrace her Italian heritage, inserting her birth name into the byline of the cookbooks she'd eventually write. "Backstage With Julia" is packed with endearing anecdotes, like the time Julia got herself and friends into La Grenouille not by dropping her own name but by calling her hairdresser, whose brother was a dishwasher there; how Julia would serve Pepperidge Farm Goldfish for hors d'oeuvres; and Julia on low-fat food: "The only time to eat diet food is while you're waiting for the steak to cook." Barr's voice is breathless. Her one true revelation? Julia didn't love pasta. But we'd trade a chirpy tale or two for just some good plain writing. Dorothy Kalins is the founding editor of Saveur magazine and a contributing editor at Newsweek.
Library Journal Review
Barr (We Called it Macaroni) here offers a lovingly written memoir of her years working with and learning from Julia Child. As Child's executive chef for almost 20 years and a producer for Good Morning America and Baking with Julia, she is able to provide a unique glimpse into the early world of culinary television. Of course, she also reveals Child, who comes off witty, warm, and dedicated-to her people and her profession. It was Child's support and encouragement that enabled Barr to form a successful career out of a passionate hobby. The book's greatest strength lies in how Barr has captured the voice and personality of her friend and mentor; her stories about the woman, whether involving a stop for a hot dog at a roadside stand or the graceful way that Child handled mistakes, will enable readers to make a new connection to this larger-than-life figure who did so much to change the perception of food and cooking in America. Recommended for most public libraries. (Photographs not seen.)-Rosemarie Lewis, Broward Cty. P.L., Fort Lauderdale, FL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgements |
| Preface |
| Chapter 1 |
| Chapter 2 |
| Chapter 3 |
| 4 Chapter |
| 5 Chapter |
| 6 Chapter |
| 7 Chapter |
| 8 Chapter |
| 9 Chapter |
| 10 Postscript |
| Resource Material |
| Index |