Category Archives: France

Julia and Joann Revisited

Posted on by

This post was originally published on Journeys with Jennie on January 9, 2010. I revisit it today because I so wish Joann were here to share my excitement about going to France. I’ve fear I’ve read too much about the Parisians, however, — my usually stalwart soul has been a little intimidated by all the negative comments about the rudeness of Paris citizens in the memoirs I have read. I figured I needed some positive vibes about Paris,  so I watched Julie and Julia again to buoy up my spirits. Despite all of the times I have watched the movie, I never listened to the commentary by Nora Ephron. If you have not done so, DO IT NOW! It is illuminating and gives a fresh perspective on a lovely movie. And thank you to Suzanne, Terri, Michele, Lisa, Tim, Martha, and Dorothy, who all said that I was crazy to worry about being in Paris. I love you and I will eat multiple pastries in your honor.

January 9, 2010: Julia and Joann

On Monday it will be eleven years since my beloved mother-in-law passed away. Joann was a child of the Depression, raised on a farm in Ohio, and was a part of a close-knit Mennonite family. Her trajectory from a stunningly beautiful young woman at Goshen College, through her years as a respected and beloved teacher in Rye, New York, and finally to her retirement in Arizona as the “hostess with the mostest” is one to be admired. She was kind, generous, and although she was not without her mistakes, she welcomed me and my son into her family with open arms. I miss her every day. Since we inherited some of Joann’s prized possessions, including her cookbook collection, I am surrounded by memories of her. This is how I came to have a 1961 copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking on my bookshelf.

At some point in her mature adult years Joann became enamored of all things “Country French.” Although she and my father-in-law traveled extensively in the United States when their sons were young, they turned their sights farther afield when the boys left the nest. They traveled all over Europe and went to Russia, Egypt, and India. They were on one of the first tourist groups into China and regaled us with the stories of the “luxurious” dormitory-style accommodations those early groups encountered. She tracked down her Mennonite relatives in France and visited the ancestral farm. Joann and Art hoped to instill their love of travel in their grandchildren and took each of them on a trip of his or her choosing for a graduation present. But, Joann wasn’t just cruising through these countries. Among her books are photo essays on the culture, furniture, ceramics, glassware, and art of the places she visited and wanted to visit. Joann’s amazing intellectual curiosity and love of beautiful things kept her vibrant right up until her last days.

It was always France that drew her back, though. She collected French pottery and furniture, and redecorated her houses around her collections. She scoured antique stores looking for just the right piece and it seemed like she bought every piece of Quimper that she ever encountered. As I have studied Quimper faience pottery, however, I find that she did actually specialize, and it is interesting that Joann mostly bought pieces from the Henriot factory that were made in the early 1900s during war times in France. Maybe it was the relatively inexpensive price, but I’d like to think that the earthy Breton peasant people who inhabit these plates reminded Joann of her farm roots, even though she moved far away from them as an adult.

The other thing that Joann collected and educated herself about was cookbooks and cooking. She found that when she moved to suburban New York she needed to upgrade her expertise and staple recipes in order to participate appropriately in her new social circles. In her cookbook, she would write the date and a list of the guests next to the recipe that she served them so that she would not repeat it the next time, and this is something my husband and I still do today. Joann’s cookbooks are a treasure trove of information about the life she and Art lived and how they entertained, and they bring back memories of meals that she cooked for us. I can remember being picked up at the airport after a trip through O’Hare and La Guardia airports with two small children at Christmas time, and arriving in Rye to find an amazing meal almost ready for us. She purchased jumbo shrimp through a seafood buyer — they really were jumbo, that’s not an oxymoron! — and we always looked forward to her cooking.

So, that brings us back to Mastering the Art of French Cooking. There are parallels to be found between Joann and Julia. Both were women who reinvented themselves as their lives demanded. Although Julia was not blessed with children, her life-long love affair with her husband is similar to the more than fifty happy years of marriage Joann and Art enjoyed. One of the reasons that Julia learned to cook was that she needed to entertain Paul Child’s business associates, and by the time Mastering the Art of French Cooking was published in 1961, Joann was also trying to be an executive wife to her upwardly mobile husband.

It is disappointing to me to find out that apparently she did not use this cookbook because it is almost pristinely clean. You can see from my photo that it still has its original dust jacket with just a small tear in it. I wonder where she got it; did she buy the cookbook herself or did someone give it to her? It is a Book Club edition; did she get it because it was the most popular cookbook of its day and it just came automatically? I wish I could ask her, but both she and Art are now gone and the minutiae of their daily lives is gone with them. Since, thanks to Joann and Art, I live with beautiful antiques all of the time, I refuse to feel guilty about using my 49 year old copy of Julia. I intend to read it, to cook from it, and that will probably include getting it dirty. We will write in it just as Joann taught us, and I can’t help but think that both she and Julia would be proud. Je t’aime, Joann.

Food for Thought

Posted on by

The closer we get to our trip to Paris, the more real it gets. I am beginning to collect names of restaurants along with my “don’t miss” tourist destinations. Given that I love history, it would be really fun to eat in a restaurant like Ledoyen, which was built in 1848 and is considered one of the best restaurants in Paris.

I follow many bloggers who write about France, but I continue to go back to David Lebovitz: Living the Sweet Life in Paris for information and inspiration. This week he wrote a post about how to get a fabulous French meal for under 100 Euros. In U.S. dollars, that’s about $135 per person. It seems like a lot of money, but if you are going to France, aren’t you going to treat yourself at least once to a life-changing meal? And, since that $135 includes tax and service, you’re getting a lot closer to what you might spend in a fine dining restaurant in any town in America. We don’t do it every day, but it’s Paris, for goodness sake.

I doubt very much that I’ll ever get another chance to eat at Le Jules Verne, the fancy restaurant in the Eiffel Tower, but I just might on this trip. And maybe I’ll eat this. (I’m sorry; I just couldn’t resist.)

Or this, at Restaurant Taillevant.

Image via alifewortheating.com

For more beautiful pictures of the food and interesting commentary, I encourage you to read David’s Lebovitz’s blog, Living the Sweet Life in Paris.  I’m going to go crank up the DVD player and watch Julie and Julia again to watch the divine Ms. C cook and eat her way through France. Bon appetit!

The Irony of the Lady at the Piano

Posted on by

Readers, beware! This post is one of those where I can’t help but teach some art and architecture history. If you really hate that stuff, just look at the pictures. I’ll understand and won’t fault you for it.

My conversation with my mother and my niece about the Impressionist copies that I grew up with prompted me to find out if the original of Lady at the Piano (1875) by Pierre Auguste Renoir was  in the Musée d’Orsay where I could visit it this summer.

I have been wanting to visit the Musée d’Orsay for at least twelve years, ever since my daughter came back from her Grandtravel trip to Paris and couldn’t stop talking about the museum’s glories.

It’s such a romantic old-world story. The museum sits in the center of Paris on the banks of the Seine, opposite the Tuileries Gardens, and was the site of royal promenades, a boat dock, cavalry barracks and the Palais d’Orsay, a government building that was burned down during the Paris Commune in 1871, along with the entire neighborhood. For thirty years, the ruins of the Palais d’Orsay served as reminders of the horrors of civil war.

The French government gave the land to the railroad company, and the Gare d’Orsay train station and a hotel were built on the site for the Universal Exposition of 1900. Designed in the Art Nouveau style, the Exposition celebrated the achievements of the past century and encouraged new development for the future. The Second Olympic Games were part of the Exposition, and both the Exposition and the Olympics were revolutionary in their inclusion of African American (Exposé nègre) contributions as well as being the first time female athletes participated in the Olympics.

Following the Exposition, the train station became unusable because its platforms were too short and it served a number of other functions. By 1975, the building was threatened with demolition, but it was given landmark designation and a new museum was to be installed in the train station, in which all of the arts from the second half of the 19th century would be represented. As a prime example of Art Nouveau architecture, the building itself could be seen as the first “work of art” in the Musee d’Orsay, which now displays collections of art from the period 1848 to 1914, including an impressive group of Impressionists. Ironically, it took many years for the now iconic Impressionists and Realists to be exhibited in state-sponsored museums. When the museum opened to the public in 1986, a carefully organized acquisitional plan had allowed the museum to gather art from other museums where it had been housed and to also buy and display art from private collectors. In its short history, the museum has been visited by well over 65 million art lovers.

And it doesn’t house the painting I was looking for.

So where is my lady at the piano? She’s right here in Chicago, at the Art Institute, and I don’t have to fly across the Atlantic Ocean to visit her. Isn’t it ironic?

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...