Julia Child's "My Life in France"

She liked finely ground salt, white pepper and turnips. She didn't look down on garlic presses. And for a Valentine photo, she posed nude in a tubful of bubbles with husband Paul.

This is the  Julia Child we get to know in  "My Life in France," her  final book. Published this spring, it is a charming memoir, sensitively written and honest enough to include spiky remarks about her collaborators on the landmark book, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" (Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle).

Child no doubt felt comfortable in relating her most personal thoughts because co-author Prud'homme is the grandson of her husband's brother, Charles. Almost all of the photographs in the book are by Paul Child, to whom the book is dedicated.  Child died in 1994.

Julia  Child died 10 years later,  just before her 92nd birthday.

In these pages the beloved French Chef recalls her early years in France, when she fell passionately in love with the country and its cuisine.  We witness her first meal there--oysters on the half shell, sole meunière, salade verte, fromage blanc and dark filter coffee at La Couronne in Rouen, accompanied by a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé.  "It was the most exciting meal of my life," she said.

Child  threw herself into mastering every nuance of  the  cuisine, repeating each dish until perfected.  She had no inkling of fame, but cooked for the love of it. Hard work and inconveniences such as attending class in the hot cramped basement kitchen at L'école (the e should be uppercase, but I can't get my computer to do it).  du Cordon Bleu Paris couldn't stop her.

Child took a few swipes at the Cordon Bleu too. "The school's hallways were filled with an air of petty jealousy and distrust,"she says..  This was engendered by Madame Elizabeth Brassart, "the school's short, thin, rather disagreeable owner, " who, says Child "made it quite clear that she didn't like me or any Americans."

The road to expertise hit a few rocky places. Child remembers a lunch where she served a friend "the most vile eggs Florentine one could imagine outside of England." Child ate the disaster stoically.

"I made sure not to apologize for it. This was a rule of mine," she says.

The book takes Child through the publication of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in 1961 and its sequel and her success as a television chef. By the end, she's a celebrity. But the early days, when she cooked and ate for pure pleasure, are the most interesting.

The last words of the book recall that first meal at La Couronne. "I can still almost taste it," she says. "And thinking back on it now reminds me that the pleasures of the table, and of life, are infinite—toujours bon appétit!'