For Paris in July, 2024: Provence, 1970 by Luke Barr

Just before Christmas in 1970, the American writer Mary Frances Fisher arrived in Avignon, where she stayed at the luxurious Hotel d'Europe. She was alone. It was freezing,

'That night, MF listened to the little fountain  underneath her window, and at some point she realised the music had changed. ....There was a soft occasional dripping sound now, not the lively fall from basin to basin of the previous nights . She looked out of her window through the bare branches of the plane trees and saw that the basins were hung with long, beautiful icicles....Tonight, she thought....she would listen to a fountain freeze.'

Yet just a few days previously Fisher had been in Provence, surrounded by fellow writers and cooks; Julia Child, James Beard, Julia's co-writer Simone Beck, and Richard Olney were all there, together with Julia's husband Paul, Beck's husband Jean Fischbacher, Child and Beard's editor Judith Jones and her husband Evan. Also resident in the area were Sybille Bedford and Eda Lord. 

Why had Fisher decided to leave the party to spend the holiday season alone? In Provence, 1970, her great nephew Luke Barr set out to find the answer to this question. Discovering Fisher's own notebook diary for 1970 in a storage unit in California where Fisher's daughter Kennedy preserves the family archive he wrote,

'As I read it, I knew: I had found the key to my story, and so to this book.'

Fisher, the child of wealthy parents, had visited France many times; she had lived for a while in Dijon, where her first husband was working on his doctorate. Since then she had become a successful writer, had had children, divorced, remarried, divorced again, and was living alone in California.  Now she and her sister Norah had planned a trip to revisit their old haunts, to see if the country they loved so much had changed. And of course it had. 

Olney had lived alone in Sollies-Toucas, a tiny village outside Toulon, for many years. He had, by choice, no telephone, nor any heating apart from the stove and open fire. What he did have was a wine cellar; he had dug it himself. He lived simply and cooked simply too. He had just had success with his The French Menu Cookbook,

'"I can think of only two Americans who have absorbed the essence of France and its cooking thoroughly" Beard wrote (in his review of Olney's book) "One is Julia Child, The other is Richard Olney....(his book) has recipes ranging from the simplest kind of Provencale luncheon of fresh sardines cooked in vine leaves, lamb tripe a la marsellaise, salad, cheese, and strawberries in orange juice to a fairly formal dinner of sole fillets with fine herbs and stewed cucumbers followed by a spit-roasted leg of lamb with buttered green beans, cheese, and peach melba."'

(Unfortunately Olney was later to be considerably less generous about Beard.) 

Julia Child: image PBS

The Childs had built their house, La Pitchoune, on Beck and Fischbacher's estate five years earlier. They visited often; since Julia's career (of which Paul was an integral part) had taken off they appreciated the ability to escape Julia's celebrity life at their home in Cambridge, Massachussetts. The nearest village to La Pitchoune was Plascassier - just half an hour from Cannes, but in those days still a world away from the crowds and glamour of the Riviera.

Of Beard, Barr says,

'(he was) the original modern American food icon...a public figure since the 1940s - a relentless populariser, author and columnist...a man about town and dinner party host extraordinaire. The beloved and lovable Jim was always at the centre of things.....he also unapologetically called himself the "biggest whore" in the food business (he was a consultant for major companies such as Pilsbury and Green Giant), but it didn't matter to his friends...'

Beard had first visited Paris in 1923, lodging at a pension not far from the hotel where Ernest and Hadley Hemingway were staying at the time - but he hadn't encountered Provence and its culinary offerings until the war, during which he was stationed in Marseille. 

In December 1970 he was in France as an in-patient at the Grasse clinic of celebrity diet doctor Georges Pathe. Beard was vastly overweight and ill; he needed to lose 60 pounds. But he wasn't going to miss out on the company (and the food) of his friends in the Provencal hills.

Each one of these iconic writers had a very different approach to writing. The Americans had all learned about food in France, and saw French cuisine as by far the best in the Western world - but times and ideas were changing. Beard was already writing a book about American cooking, and both Child and Fisher were beginning to turn more to their home country, to realise that America had its own outstanding produce, and that its many different cultures had all brought their particular culinary heritages to their new homeland. 

Child was moving away from her long time collaborator Simone Beck, who, as a French woman, understandably continued to see the French way as the only way. Child and Beck had co-written Mastering the Art of French Cookery to educate American housewives and show them how good food could be, but now Child was a star with her own immensely popular TV series, and she wanted to tell her audience how to cook great dishes based on American ingredients, and to encourage them to try recipes from all over the world.

Beck did not approve.

Meanwhile Fisher was starting to realise that France too was changing, and that, despite her ideas of living permanently in Provence, her real roots lay in California, and the house ('Last House') she was having built in the Sonoma Valley.

One of the several things that drove Fisher to leave Provence was the authoritarian, snobbish behaviour of Sybille Bedford and of the much younger Olney; both Fisher and Child had had enough of clinging to the old order,

'Olney was a snob. And he was provocative because he was a new kind of snob - perfectly conversant in the authoritative snobbery of Old Europe, the unspoken but rigorous assertion of "good taste" above all else, as represented by "mad old Sybille", but just as likely to find fault with an overelaborate CVF dinner at Lucas Carton.'

Olney and Bedford liked nothing better than a good bitching session,

'They brought out the worst in each other: cutting, cruel superiority and a sneaking and rather pleasurable misanthropy, all expressed in the form of bitter complaint and vindictive character assessment.'

 They routinely laid into Fisher. Olney called her books 'trash',

'...her writing is silly, pretentious, sentimental and unreadable drivel'

and said of Child,

'"The fact that she's a television star doesn't mean she knows how to cook."'

James Beard, meanwhile, was labelled 'a pompous buffon.'

As a result, the others questioned their previous obsession with France and French cuisine even more,

'MF...had not simply been celebrating French food and hedonism all these years; she'd been writing about something more essential, about how to live, to find pleasure in the moment. But was she herself living too much in the past? She was determined to find out.'

'In some ways, this day marked an inevitable break, the moment of American disillusionment with the sentimental glories of France...It was a beautiful world, preserved in the amber of fiction and memory. A world of faded aristocrats and remembered vintages, of boat trains and small family-run hotels that never changed, of excursions to Switzerland and meals in French restaurants where the sole meuniere was always impeccably fresh and perfectly cooked. The ethos and aesthetic of the period had survived all the way through the 1960s, a worldview held together with wit and irony, tone and inflection, unimpeachable taste, and finally, at bottom, enforced by the logic of money and privilege...But the mood had changed.'

'Olney and Bedford's curdled snobbery was a sign of the end of an era.'

Before long, Fisher had returned to California, where the Childs visited her in December 1971, bringing as a gift a wreath of herbs and fruits. Fisher served bread, cheese and vermouth cocktails. They had a trip out to Sonoma town. Julia's next book From Julia Child's Kitchen, was an immediate success

'"The great lesson embedded in the book," she said, "is that no one is born a great cook, one learns by doing...try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless, and above all have fun!".....For Child, the book represented what she called her "great liberation" - from France, from Beck....Beck hated it, and so did Olney.'

 Beard went back to New York, and his American Cookery was finally published (but was not hugely successful.) He died in 1985. Beck wrote her own cookbook Simca's Cuisine - which also failed to do well. Olney remained in Sollies-Toucas and worked on his next book Simple French Food.  He died in 1999. Meanwhile Child made her last visit to La Pitchoune in 1992; by then Paul was in a nursing home. She never returned to Provence, although she lived until 2004. 

While writing this book, Barr visited Provence with his own family, including his grandmother, Fisher's sister Norah. They rented La Pitchoune for a summer, shopped in local markets and dined on gazpacho, leek vinaigrette, rabbit, a gratin of potatoes, celery root and Gruyere, and lemon sorbet. A friend invented a new cocktail of raspberries, mint, lemon juice and vodka: 'The Plascassier.'

'It was all transcendentally wonderful....I thought of Child and how she'd left Provence behind sans regret, and yet how the legacy of the place - her Provence - lived on. The intimate intertwining of food, life, love, and friendship, the simple pleasure of cooking that seemed so natural and rooted here, had been joined to the democratizing, culture-changing force of her personality and her TV show,'

Provence, 1970 is a book about change, but it's also very much about people, their friendships, disagreements, bickering, and of course their shared love of wonderful food and drink. And Barr writes about those last two beautifully; you will want to eat and drink almost everything he describes (although you may also wonder at the prodigious amounts of food his grandmother's generation eat, and the vast amounts of alcohol they drink.)

Barr opens a window onto a world now long gone, and on people who persuaded a nation to enjoy good home cooked food and appreciate the bountiful resources on their doorsteps. Provence, 1970 is a fascinating piece of social history.

Provence, 1970 by Luke Barr was originally published by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of Random House.  Second hand copies are widely available.