My Life in France
When Julia Child arrived in Paris in 1948, ‘a six-foot-two-inch, thirty-six-year-old, rather loud and unserious Californian’, she barely spoke a word of French and didn’t know the first thing about cooking.
As she fell in love with French culture - buying food at local markets, sampling the local bistros, and taking classes at the Cordon Bleu - her life began to change forever. We follow her extraordinary transformation from kitchen ingénue to internationally renowned (and internationally loved) expert in French cuisine.
Bursting with Child’s adventurous and humorous spirit, My Life in France captures post-war Paris with wonderful vividness and charm.
Julia Child (1912-2004) was born in California and worked for American intelligence during World War II. Afterwards she lived in Paris, studied at the Cordon Bleu and taught cooking with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, with whom she wrote the first volume of the bestselling classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961) that has sold over 1.5 million copies worldwide.
Olivia Potts is an award-winning food writer and chef. In 2017, she graduated from Le Cordon Bleu and was awarded the Young British Foodies Fresh Voices in Food Writing Award. Her first book, A Half Baked Idea, won the Fortnum and Mason's Debut Food Book Award 2020. Now Olivia is the cookery columnist for the Spectator, and also writes for the New Statesman, Guardian and Telegraph, among others.