“Under here, you can really judge a person’s character.”
– Julia to chef Kathie Alex about her favourite tree.

This is what Julia would say of the mulberry tree under which I am sitting, eating bright orange zucchini blossoms that have been dipped in batter and fried to a crisp in olive oil. They are one of the single greatest things I have ever eaten. A long-time fan of French cuisine and of Julia’s, I have come to Châteauneuf de Grasse on the eastern edge of Provence to attend Cooking with Friends in France, a six-day course that takes place in a warm stucco cottage called La Pitchoune (the little one). This is where Julia tested the recipes for her second volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, using the unexpected windfall from sales of the first to finance the place.

The sun-dappled La Pitchoune, all shutters and breezes, is set in a former potato patch, now a gorgeous landscape of lavender, cypress trees and roses. For a cooking school, the kitchen is surprisingly small, but that’s the way Julia had it. The retro pegboard, where Paul traced outlines indicating where his wife should hook her kitchen tools, is still here, looming like a living monument. “They’re her spice drawers, her counters,” says cooking school owner and instructor, chef Kathie Alex. “It’s still all Julia.”

When chef Alex first started running the cooking school in 1993, Julia wrote to her saying, “I hear that classes are going well, and I’m very pleased. But I want you to know that I’m counting on you to teach Americans that butter and cream are not all bad.” “That was her mantra,” says Alex.

But Julia’s magic also lay in her method, and this too is something that chef Alex demonstrates. One afternoon, we make a purée de pommes de-terres à l’ail that somehow warrants 11 distinct steps. There’s the boiling, draining and cooling of eight large garlic cloves (a process that is repeated three times over) while, in a separate pot, the cream is reduced by half. Then there’s the ricing of the potatoes through a fine sieve, plus the extra step of drying out the potatoes in a hot pan, enraging their starch content with the swift stirring of a wooden spoon. Just as I begin to wonder, “All of this for mashed potatoes?” a heavenly stream of the garlic cream is added to the mix, along with a sprinkling of fleur de sel. When I finally taste them, it’s abundantly clear that these potatoes encapsulate everything that is right with French cooking, while flipping the bird at the bland North American version.