Paris — WHEN Julia Child first came to France in 1948, she couldn't cook an omelet. She was a tall, gawky Pasadena girl married to a cultural liaison officer posted at the U.S. Embassy in Paris. She had heard the French were touchy. She couldn't speak their language and had no expectations for her stay.
At Le Havre, the couple's Buick station wagon was unloaded from the ocean liner America, and they set off toward Paris. Julia's husband, Paul, wanted to stop for lunch at La Couronne, a restaurant he knew in Rouen. She felt nervous and shy but was happy to discover that the waiters were friendly, chiefly because Paul spoke French and loved to talk about cuisine.
Then came her first taste of proper French food: briny \o7portugaises \f7oysters with rye bread, followed by Dover sole in butter sauce and a simple green salad. Julia felt guilty about drinking wine at lunch -- a crisp, white, Loire Valley Pouilly Fum. They had \o7fromage blanc\f7 for dessert and espresso.
"It was the most exciting meal of my life," she wrote in "My Life in France," the book she was working on with her grand-nephew Alex Prud'homme when she died in 2004.
Reading it recently, I realized I had in my hands not just a tender memoir of Child's young married days, with photos taken by her husband, but also a guidebook to her adopted country, La Belle France.
For instance, the venerable Couronne restaurant, founded in 1345, is still open for business in a half-timbered building on Rouen's old market square. Over the years, many noteworthy people have supped there, including Salvador Dali, who especially loved the duck. To my mind, La Couronne deserves its name, which means "the crown," for serving Julia Child the meal that changed her life -- and eventually Americans' perspectives.
I met Child shortly before she died and wrote a column about her Cambridge, Mass., kitchen, installed in 2002 at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. Before that, I put grease stains on my copy of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" and laughed myself silly at Dan Aykroyd's impersonation of Child boning a chicken on "Saturday Night Live."
When I moved here about three years ago, I felt as intimidated as she did at La Couronne. But I kept something she told me tucked in the back of my mind: "Being tall, like I am, I never felt inferior."
