Provence, 1970: M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, and the Reinvention of American Taste

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Provence, 1970: M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, and the Reinvention of American Taste Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Luke Barr (Author), John Rubinstein (Narrator), Random House Audio (Publisher)

4.4 676 ratings

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Provence, 1970 is about a singular historic moment. In the winter of that year, more or less coincidentally, the iconic culinary figures James Beard, M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, Richard Olney, Simone Beck, and Judith Jones found themselves together in the South of France. They cooked and ate, talked and argued, about the future of food in America, the meaning of taste, and the limits of snobbery. Without quite realizing it, they were shaping today’s tastes and culture, the way we eat now. The conversations among this group were chronicled by M.F.K. Fisher in journals and letters—some of which were later discovered by Luke Barr, her great-nephew. In Provence, 1970, he captures this seminal season, set against a stunning backdrop in cinematic scope—complete with gossip, drama, and contemporary relevance.

Listening Length

9 hours and 7 minutes
Author

Luke Barr
Narrator

John Rubinstein
Audible release date

October 22, 2013
Language

English
Publisher

Random House Audio
ASIN

B00F8MJB64
Version

Unabridged
Program Type

Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length	9 hours and 7 minutes
Author	Luke Barr
Narrator	John Rubinstein
Whispersync for Voice	Ready
Audible.com Release Date	October 22, 2013
Publisher	Random House Audio
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B00F8MJB64
Best Sellers Rank	#69,209 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #43 in Biographies of Culinary Professionals #54 in Gastronomy (Audible Books & Originals) #315 in Culinary Biographies & Memoirs

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4.4 out of 5

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Bronte22

Lovely Memories

Reviewed in the United States on November 28, 2013

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This lovely and satisfying book took me back in time to when the food culture of the United States was radically changing. I was newly married, and I vividly remember that in Chicago there was an explosion of really interesting and diverse restaurants. Those of my childhood and teen years were pretty nondescript, and the food offerings quite consistently American, unless you were in one of the restaurants in Chinatown or Little Italy along Taylor Street. It was all pretty boring. But quite suddenly, almost as if someone had turned on a light switch, everything seemed to be changing. There were now even cookbooks that thankfully moved beyond Betty Crocker in their imagination and ingredients. Provence, 1970 helped me understand why.

Of course, I was a fan of Julia Child and watched her show religiously. I owned her Mastering the Art of French Cooking and still make the leek and potato soup from it ... by far the easiest recipe in the book. But I wasn't really aware of the fascinating people (beyond Julia) that were behind this movement that was enriching my life and opening up so many possibilities.

Luke Barr's book is well-written and provides both a realistic view of these people as human beings and a reverence for the past and for what they contributed to our present. I especially loved the last chapter when Barr and his family went to some of the places chronicled in the rest of the book. It was described with great tenderness and awakened my own feelings of nostalgia for that time and for the past we can never fully retrieve no matter how hard we try.

Disclaimer. I am also a certified Francophile and a lover of Provence in particular. I happily add this to the list of books I recommend to others with that same condition. What this book has in common with many of the others on my list is the passion for life, the joie de vivre, it depicts that is emblematic of the French spirit. Food accompanied by good conversation is surely one of the greatest of life's pleasures. N'est-ce pas?

14 people found this helpful

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Kevin Killian

Too simple a sexual summary

Reviewed in the United States on November 20, 2013

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Luke Barr can write circles around most of his competitors. An expert on the construction of succulent sentences, he is equally good at the paragraph, and he's able to conjure up an entire lost city with the deft ease he expends on evoking a vintage cocktail or the exact level of asperity of each of Richard Olney's typically barbed comments. He can draw character, the doughty adventurousness of his great-aunt, or the trapped Gothic tragedy of poor little rich girl Eda Lord. Barr contrasts the California wine culture of Sonoma County, where his mother would take him to visit her aunt, food writer MFK Fisher, to the old world Provencal landscapes, enriched by three thousand years of continual cultivation. The very flowers and trees of old France seem to spring to life around him, as they do to Snow White as she moves through the groundbreaking Disney cartoon of the late 1930s.

In general, I would say, the heterosexual characters in Provence, 1970: M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard et al come off best--Julia Child and her husband, Judith Jones the top food editor, MFK Fisher herself, with her outspoken claim on female agency and sexuality so head of her time. They're all great. (Well, maybe Judith Jones is a little colorless here.) On the opposite side of the spectrum, and the Kinsey scale, lurk the polyglot European monster Sybille Bedford (posing as a Brit, but a freakish combination of two Axis cultures) and her frightened and downtrodden girlfriend, US-born novelist and trust fund baby Eda Lord, and then there's Richard Olney, who is such a cat in this book--sucking up to the US foodie market while despising all Americans beyond those in his own family. Olney seems to have made a career, in Barr's depiction of him, of biting the hand that feed him. That's plain. It's true that Barr never, that I noticed, identifies Olney positively as homosexual, but he has painted the ugliest picture of a pissy queen since Clifton Webb played Waldo Lydecker in Laura.

Somewhere in the middle we find openly gay James Beard, apparently the anti Olney in personality and a man beloved by all, but Beard is plagued by physical ailments which render him as monstrous as Olney--alcoholism and obesity--pleasure perverted into overindulgence.

Barr has researched every day of November and December 1970 and gives us menus of the most dramatic meals; not only that but he tells us the tiniest details of the conversations of the principals while they cook and eat and drink together. And after awhile I began to feel like I was being had. Barr;s notes indicate that every syllable is accurate and based on a contemporary diary entry or letter, but something inherent in Barr's stratagem of constructing a total "you are there" narrativization of the events just about sits up and lure you into doubt. "He couldn't have known this," I said aloud, time and again. Like for example how was he able to construct every hideous thing Bedford and Olney have to say about their US visitors during one particularly vicious conversation? Did one or the other of them record all the slurs afterwards? They're evil, like the European decadents Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle who make poor Isabel Archer's existence such a living hell in Henry James' 1881 masterpiece The Portrait of a Lady. Meanwhile in Barr the smart, visionary Americans all come to their senses and turn away from the nostalgia for prewar France that had threatened to moor them in shallow waters, and they return to a youthquake America, feeling the energy of something new happening on these shores.

In every paragraph Barr drills this theme, as Child or Fisher or whoever stirs restlessly in the elaborate haunted French chateaux of Lord and Bedford. Yes, a change was coming in the food world ad it was coming from America and only these women (and James Beard) were canny enough to feel it.... but do we have to hear this a good three or four hundred times? I got it somewhere in chapter two.... no, on the book jacket copy, right up front.

6 people found this helpful

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M. Maxwell

The Beginning of Modern Food Culture

Reviewed in the United States on November 2, 2013

Verified Purchase

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley, I received an e-galley of the book. Thanks to Paul Barr’s beautiful storytelling, I preordered a hardcopy 20 pages into my first read.

Lovely book! It helps if you’ve an interest in American (U. S.) culinary history, French cooking, or France. Vacationing in Provence, fall and winter 1970, were M. F. K. Fisher, Julia and Paul Child, James Beard, and cookbook editor Judith Jones and her husband. The Childs’ holiday home was on the estate of Simone Beck, Julia’s co-author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Also living in Provence, Richard Olney, an American ex-pat who out-Frenched the French when cooking.

The author, Luke Barr, is Fisher’s great-nephew and built the book around M. F.’s journal of that summer and extensive interviews with some of the players still living—Jones, Luke’s grandmother Norah, who was there for part of the summer, and the extensive letters of all the players. He frames that summer as a turning point in American culinary history—from a French and European snobbery and sensibility to a more encompassing, original, and all-embracing philosophy of food. These important foodies and their friendships and rivalries and personal styles of cooking embraced and irritated one another in turn, forming a new foundation of American cookery, enabling the modern Food Network and the celebration of local, fresh ingredients, fusion cuisine, artisanal baking, So-Be, and everything in-between.

I loved Luke Barr’s writing. The middle of the book, based upon Fisher’s diary, painstakingly researched to make the conversations come alive through the participants’ actual letters and memories, is interesting, but the personal reminiscences of Fisher’s last California home at the beginning of the book and the summer in the Childs’ home in Provence and that celebratory last dinner with family and friends—delicious!

2 people found this helpful

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