A "French chef" whose appeal doesn't translate well in France

       Julia Child may have been the US's best-known "French chef", but here in Paris, few know her fabled cookbooks, let alone her name.
       Posters for the movie Julie & Julia were plastered across the city before its release here on Wednesday. But the movie was being anticipated more for Meryl Streep's performance as Child than for any particular interest in Child, the principal author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking , who died in 2004.Child's book - beloved by US cooks for almost 50 years and now a bestseller because of the film - has never been translated into French, said Anne Perrier, a manager at Galignani, an English-language bookshop here."It's the vision of a revisited France, adapted to the American taste, at a time when tastes were lifeless," she said.
       In an interview in the French daily newspaper Le Figaro last week, Streep said:"What surprises me is that the French don't know her at all. While for Americans, she was one of the best ambassadors of France ... since Lafayette!"
       French food experts are divided about Child and her cooking. Some say she caricatured French cuisine in her book and cooking show, making it seem too heavy and formal. Others believe she demystified it and see her as a role model in France, where cooking shows are rare and cuisine is not necessarily viewed as something anyone can interpret.
       "Julia Child's cuisine is academic and bourgeois," said Julie Andrieu, a television personality and cookery book author."It shows that in America, the cliche of beef, baguette and canard farci remains."
       For Jean-Claude Ribaut, the food critic at Le Monde , Child was more like "a mediator who promoted the French lifestyle in the United States, but had no influence on restaurateurs".
       But some chefs say they hope that the film will rehabilitate French cooking in the US. Gilles Epie, a chef who met Child in Los Angeles at a birthday party for her in the early 1990s, thinks French cooking has been tarnished as stodgy.
       "Americans have really slammed French cuisine," Epie said."They think we only eat boeuf bourguignon and rabbit stew, which is wrong."
       Before taking over the Citrus Etoile,in the 8th Arrondissement, Epie ran the Los Angeles restaurant L'Orangerie for more than three years. He remembered with distaste the strictness of US health rules about food.
       "My fish shop in Santa Monica smelled like a pharmacy" instead of like fresh fish, he said."And when I asked for a three-month-old baby lamb, like you can find here, they thought I was crazy and nearly called the police."
       But some French chefs say they believe that Child, through the film, could have an impact on contemporary French cooking, or at least make boeuf bourguignon,a traditional dish currently absent from most French menus, fashionable again.
       "She explains her recipes like a housewife, but she knows how to do it and she does it genuinely," said Guy Savoy, owner of the restaurant that bears his name in Paris. He met Child in 1981 in Massachusetts and remembered her as "a real character, gentle and affable".
       Andrieu, the cookbook author, said that despite Child's cliched recipes, her style could be defined as a "combination of scientific and empirical virtues" that helped explain why US authors wrote better cookbooks than the French.
       "The French think that they are natural-born cooks; they prepare a dish off the top of their heads, without testing it," she said."In France, we rush over explanations."
       After watching Julie & Julia , Andrieu said, she felt compelled to go home and make boeuf bourguignon according to Child's recipe."I cut the flour in half,and it turned out to be the best I had ever made," she said.
       Epie even thinks that Child's story should encourage the French to discuss their cuisine in a more democratic way.
       He is one of the few respected chefs in Paris to offer US food on his menu,including his signature dish: a crab cake a la francaise, prepared with shellfish oil instead of mayonnaise.
       "I want to do Julia Child, but Julia Child with real fish, real lobster, with eels to shuck and rabbit to bone," he said."That's my dream."