When I hefted the rolling pin in my hand, I finally felt it: a thread of energy, a thrill of recognition. I knew I was standing in Julia Child's kitchen, and I was about to put it to work.

In August, having rented it from the current owners through Airbnb, I spent a week living and cooking in La Pitchoune, the house in Plascassier, Provence that Child and her husband, Paul, built in 1965 and lived in on and off until 1992.

In advance, I worried that the house would have been remodelled and glossed over in the intervening years until nothing of her was left; but I hoped that the kitchen would be a place where her spirit, if not her spatulas, would remain. I planned my cooking around the second volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, most of which was produced here between 1965 and 1970.

La Pitchoune is in the hills that rise above the Côte d'Azur, 16km north of Cannes, though it feels far from the yachts, crowds and burkini battles of the Riviera. The Childs were drawn to Provence for more elemental reasons: sun, olives, figs, wine.

There was a benefit particular to this out-of-the-way spot: Julia Child and her co-author, Simone Beck, could keep up their work on that long-delayed second volume. Beck and her husband, who owned the land that La Pitchoune is built on, lived in the big farmhouse that still stands a few metres up the sunny, scrubby hillside.

Since the house was run as a cooking school for many years, there is no way to know exactly which utensils, if any, were used by Child. This did not prevent me from feeling her presence there. The kitchen still looks essentially as it appears in photographs from the 1960s and '70s, down to the whisks, the tart rings and that big boxwood rolling pin, all hanging in their assigned places on the pegboard.

Many original artifacts remain: My garlic and shallots went into the small plastic bin she had labelled "ail echalotes" with a Dymo-style label maker. I pulled old and spotted but wickedly sharp carbon-steel knives from the knife block that Paul Child built into the butcher-block counter.

I ate lunch on the terrace where she fed legends such as James Beard and M.F.K. Fisher. And on trips afield, I followed the trail of some Provençal foods she loved – snacks like fried zucchini blossoms and socca [chickpea flatbread] at the market in Cannes; salted anchovies and local caillette olives in Nice; whole candied clementines and bright crystallised violets at Confiserie Florian near Grasse.

Intact raw ingredients

I found the raw ingredients of Julia Child's Provence intact: eggplants and peach leaves, lemons and goat cheese, along with the markets where they are sold, the producers who make them and the vendors who hawk them with cooking advice thrown in.

Outside the house, the traces of her life are hard to find. She was never a celebrity here, according to her great-nephew, Alex Prud'homme, who has just published The French Chef in America in the United States, his account of her life after the Childs moved back from France to the United States. "Southern France is famously laid-back," he wrote, recalling a visit in 1976, "and the people who lived nearby didn't know, or care, who Julia-Child-the-American-TV-star was".

At Boucherie Fabre, a butcher shop that has stood outside the Marché Forville in Cannes since 1899 (and where I was advised to buy beef shin for the Provençal daube I cooked), I worked up the nerve to ask the serious, bloodstained men behind the counter if anyone remembered her. To my surprise, a stooped employee broke into a credible, fluty Julia Child impersonation, holding his hand high to indicate the 6-foot-2 stature that made her even more conspicuous in France than she was in the States.

And at one of her favourite restaurants, Les Arcades in Biot, the restaurant's chef, Mimi Brothier, has been making many of the same dishes since the restaurant opened in the 1960s as a canteen for local artists. I ate her pan-crisped sardines, perfect roasted peppers and traditional soupe au pistou.

"Madame Child loved our cuisine," said Brothier, born here in 1934. "And as long as I am here, nothing will change."

But change is rampant in this part of Provence, the Alpes-Maritimes department that includes Cannes and Antibes as well as Nice. Since the Childs moved in, farms and vineyards have been converted to golf courses and villas to accommodate the international elites who want to live on the Côte d'Azur. Big-box stores have pulled customers away from town centres. Nice, now the fifth-largest city in France, has sprawled outward and swallowed towns, valleys and fields.

But inside the kitchen of La Pitchoune, it felt as if little had changed. On the long, scarred counter, I opened the book to the section on puff pastry, with its sketch of three butter sticks and a fat rolling pin hovering above them – just like the one I was holding, more than 60cm long and as thick as a baseball bat. "Beat the butter with a rolling pin to soften it," the recipe instructed.

This had never occurred to me. I have painstakingly cut frozen butter into pieces to soften it, and tried to speed it along by tossing the pieces into a running mixer (this is a good way to get grease marks on the ceiling). But I had never thought of just whacking it into submission.

This is partly because my modern kitchen doesn't have a collection of powerful hand tools like mallets, ice picks and broomsticks: the last, according to Child's editor, Judith Jones, was kept on hand for breaking the ankle bones of ducks and geese. Needless to say, the rolling-pin trick worked, producing smooth and supple butter that was still cold: ideal for pastry.

(Whether these utensils were indeed Child's is unclear. In a lawsuit filed against Airbnb in June last year, the Julia Child Foundation objects to Airbnb's use of Child's name in a promotional campaign for the house, and says its claim that her kitchen implements remain "exactly as she left them" is false.)

Traditional cooking demands

Using her kitchen and following her recipes for a week reminded me how physically demanding traditional cooking can be. "It takes strong hands to be a good cook," she told Vogue in 1968, during a photo shoot here. "You have to be rough and tough."

Forcing fibrous vegetables through food mills, kneading bread dough and cranking a solid-steel meat grinder require real effort. All of those were basic skills when Child was teaching Americans to cook through her books and television shows, long before baby carrots, ground beef, par-baked bread and dozens of other shortcuts were available at every supermarket.

The Childs built La Pitchoune (they nicknamed it "La Peetch") after the successful publication of volume one of Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 1961; they had moved back to the United States and were shooting The French Chef for the public broadcaster WGBH. But Julia Child still was far from a household name, and the Childs were not rich.

So the kitchen at La Pitchoune isn't luxurious or spacious; it wouldn't fill even a corner of Barefoot Contessa TV food host Ina Garten's famous "entertaining barn". With its pegboard walls and industrial lighting, it looks nothing like a set for a celebrity chef and entirely like what it was built to be: a practical workshop for a home cook with a hell of a lot of work to do.

As Child and Beck worked on the second volume here, they tested recipes endlessly, going back and forth between their kitchens with experiments, notes, cocktails, galleys and grievances. Certain keystones of French cuisine, like soups, charcuterie and pastry, had been left out of the first volume, and the authors were resolved to fill in the gaps. But they strongly disagreed about what was a gap, what was a keystone and even what was French.

Famously, Child was a rigorous professional who believed that the science and exactitude of recipes were their most important assets. Beck was an excellent home cook who maintained that her instincts as a native Frenchwoman superseded all other culinary knowledge.

For example, Beck was utterly opposed to developing recipes for bread and croissants, since no Frenchwoman would make them at home. At that time, there was still a family-run bakery in every French town, and every few blocks in a French city (this, sadly, is no longer the case: The towns near Plascassier are filled with national chains).

Child, knowing that American cooks of the time couldn't find such things anywhere, was even more determined in favour.

Since she had by then learned to trust her own instincts as much as those of her co-author (and became saucy enough to call her "La Super-Française" behind her back), those recipes were painstakingly developed here, with field trips around France to consult bakers, professors and chemists. The final recipes for puff pastry, brioche and basic French bread alone occupy nearly 100 pages of the book.

Down to work

And although I picked up that rolling pin on Day 2, I didn't make any of them. The August tomatoes at the Cours Saleya market in Nice were too gorgeous, with their multi-coloured stripes; the farmer from Var who told me that his new potatoes tasted like almonds was too persuasive; the anchovies were too plump and briny to be ignored.

I made her summery potato gratin layered with onions, tomatoes and a paste of garlic, anchovies and basil, pounded in a marble mortar as big as a chamber pot. I made a beef daube with two bottles of white wine (rather than Child's classic daube with two bottles of red wine).

And I made a short, half-hidden recipe I had never noticed before that suddenly leapt off page 353. It is jokey in its name and very Julia, with her famous love of cocktail-hour snacks.

La Tentation de Bramafam is a fluffy eggplant-walnut dip with a clear connection to dishes like baba ghanouj. (Bramafam is the name of the estate that encompasses La Pitchoune). It is tasty, absurdly easy and must have been somehow slipped past La Super-Française, as it contains raw ginger and hot sauce, two of the least-French ingredients imaginable.

As I brought my bowl of it out to the terrace each evening, it was easy to imagine the two women waiting there under the mulberry tree, recovering from a long day of recipe testing with an aperitif and a bite to eat before dinner.

Tired but satisfied, probably with shrimp guts in their hair and flour in the creases of their crow's feet, they would have toasted the hard work that has given such pleasure to so many.

Julia Child's Provençal Potato Gratin

Yield: 6 servings

Total time: 1 1/2 hours

2 to 3 onions, thinly sliced (2 heaping cups)

1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil, more for drizzling

Salt and freshly cracked black pepper

700 grams ripe tomatoes, seeded and cut into strips about 3/8-inch wide

1 2-ounce can anchovies packed in olive oil, drained (reserve anchovies and oil separately)

2 large cloves garlic, smashed and peeled

1 tablespoon fresh herbs, such as thyme, oregano or savory, or 1 teaspoon dried herbes de Provence

About 1 kilogram thin-skinned, waxy potatoes like Yukon Gold, sliced 3mm thick (6 to 7 cups)

1/2 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano or Gruyère

1. Heat oven to 200C and place a rack at the middle level. In a large saucepan, combine onions and 2 tablespoons olive oil and stir to coat over low heat. Sprinkle lightly with salt. At a gentle simmer, cook uncovered until onions are softened and lightly golden, 10 to 15 minutes, stirring often. Do not brown; lower the heat if necessary. When done, fold in tomatoes just until heated through. Set aside.

2. In a small food processor or a mortar, add the anchovies – anywhere from 6 to 12 fillets, depending on their size and your taste. Add garlic, herbs and a dozen grinds of pepper. Add 2 tablespoons olive oil (or use the oil from the anchovy can, if you like). Crush or pulse together into a chunky paste, thinning with oil as needed to make a loose, fluid mixture.

3. In a medium-size baking dish, spread a quarter of the onion-tomato mixture. On top, arrange half the potato slices, then half the anchovy mixture. Add half the remaining onion-tomato mixture. Build one more layer with remaining potato slices, anchovy mixture and onion-tomato mixture. Sprinkle cheese on top and drizzle with olive oil.

4. If the dish is very full, place on a baking sheet. Transfer to oven and bake, uncovered, until potatoes are tender and have absorbed all of the juices in the bottom of the dish, 40 to 50 minutes. Test by tasting a bit of potato; it should be soft all the way through, with no raw taste. If the top is browning too fast, cover very loosely with a sheet of foil. If the top is not brown enough when the potatoes are cooked, broil briefly until deliciously glazed.

5. Serve gratin hot or warm. Can be cooled and reheated later the same day, but do not refrigerate.

Julia Child's Eggplant-Walnut Dip

Yield: About 4 cups

Total time: 45 minutes

2 firm, shiny eggplants (about 1 kilogram total)

1 cup finely chopped toasted walnuts

1 to 3 garlic cloves, smashed, peeled and minced or put through a press

1 teaspoon freshly grated ginger

1/4 teaspoon ground allspice (or another warm spice or spice blend, like cinnamon, coriander or garam masala)

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Hot sauce, such as Tabasco

5 to 8 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

1. Heat oven to 220C. Cut green caps off eggplants and place them whole in a baking dish. Bake until very soft and collapsing, 30 to 35 minutes. When cool enough to handle, scrape flesh into the bowl of a mixer (or use a hand mixer).

2. Beat at high speed for about two minutes, until smooth and fluffy. Add walnuts, garlic, ginger, allspice, two big pinches of salt and one of pepper. Shake in a few dashes of hot sauce. Mix well.

3. With the mixer running, gradually drizzle in oil, as if making mayonnaise, just until mixture is emulsified and creamy. Stop, taste and adjust the seasonings with salt, pepper and hot sauce. If desired, beat in remaining olive oil.

4. Serve immediately, or cover and refrigerate for up to one week.