“The chicken was perfect, and so was the gratin, and so were the beans. They passed plates and dishes, and poured more wine, toasting each other, good fortune, and France.” So Luke Barr, in his new book, “Provence, 1970,” describes a dinner that Julia Child cooked for her friends and fellow food writers M. F. K. Fisher and James Beard. As you’d imagine, the menu was exemplary: pâté de campagne picked out from a local charcuterie; a chard-and-tomato soup made by Beard, which Julia amusingly called soupe barbue (bearded soup); roast chicken; gratin dauphinois; green beans; sorbet. All perfect.

Beard, Fisher, and, above all, Child continue to shape ideals of food in America, which is striking, considering how long it’s been since their prime. Beard, the big-bellied king of American gastronomy, died nearly thirty years ago, in 1985. Fisher, the author of “Serve It Forth” and many other glorious works of food memoir and scholarship, followed, in 1992. Child, that most unflappable of TV cooks, was the last to go, in 2004 (though it feels more recent because Meryl Streep revived her so convincingly in the movie “Julie & Julia,” in 2009).

And still their vision of what it means to eat well endures. We wish we had Beard’s appetite, Fisher’s savoir faire, Child’s joyous ability to whip up a soufflé without getting stressed out. There are scores of gifted food writers, chefs, and broadcasters now working in America—many of them recipients of a James Beard award—but none have has ever assumed the mantle of this tiny group.

Beard, Child, and Fisher were indeed great. No one has ever written like Fisher or explained how to cook as charmingly as Child. But our need to revere them as models of impeccable French taste after all these years is a little odd, considering that they themselves sought to puncture the spirit of snobbish reverence which infected the food writing of previous generations. (Child mocked the kind of gastronomy that alluded to “cobwebbed bottles” and “anecdotes about charming little restaurants.”) It sometimes feels as if nothing we eat will ever feel as fresh, as authentic, or as purely delicious as it did to them in France, forty or fifty years ago. And yet it’s not always obvious what we are yearning for when we aspire to eat like them.

“Provence 1970” is the latest book to mythologize these “iconic culinary figures.” Luke Barr is M. F. K. Fisher’s great nephew (he called her “Dote”) and a magazine editor. An enjoyable and perceptive group biography that reads as fluently as a novel, it was written with the help of a “pale green spiral notebook”—Fisher’s diary in 1970, a year when, as Barr puts it, “everyone who was anyone in the American food world” showed up in southern France. This included not just Fisher, Beard, and Child but also Richard Olney (the author of “The French Menu Cookbook”), Simone Beck, and Judith Jones. “Together they had cooked and eaten, talked and gossiped.” Barr sees 1970 as a “seismic shift” when the “culture of food was changing” and moving in a modern American direction. But to tell his story, he has to return, longingly, to the old French world: “They raised their glasses, filled with a sweet and delicate Sauterne.”

Good food began for all of them in France (even if Beard later wrote “American Cookery”). They drew on near-mythical recollections of their first great French meals: oysters and sole for Child; wonderful bread, petit-suisse cheese, rough wine, and green salad for Fisher; champagne and caviar for Beard. Their writing was largely an act of translating these French memories to an American public who had not experienced them firsthand. They wrote for those who had never tasted croissants, never mind jambon persillé.

In the second volume of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” which came out in 1970, Child felt driven to give a recipe for baguette, something that Richard Olney—who comes across as the best cook and the worst snob of the group—thought absurd. Didn’t she know, Olney wondered, that in France everyone bought baguette from the boulangerie? No French cook would dream of making bread from scratch at home. But this wasn’t the point. Child felt that the baguette recipe was necessary because, in 1970, good bread was so difficult to come by in America, even in New York.

Now there’s no shortage of French artisanal bread for those with the cash to buy it. And yet we still feel a powerful nostalgia when we think of Julia Child buying her French bread in her France. Returning to these writers keeps alive the thought that France is a magical place where the butter is sweeter and the bread crackles more loudly; where stews are more tender and friendships are more ardent. Barr describes many dreamy meals that could only be French. His grandmother Norah—M.F.’s younger sister—travelled with M.F. in 1970. “Norah had the oysters, M.F. had the clams, and they shared the scallops, which they agreed were beautiful. The Pomerol was superb and so was the cheese.” Again, perfect.

Except, when you stop to think of it, three kinds of seafood followed by cheese is not exactly how most people want to eat these days. The idea of a mythic France (“where the sole meunière was always impeccably fresh,” as Barr writes) appeals more than real French food. We don’t really want to cook like Julia Child. We only think we do. Even Julia Child didn’t want to cook like Julia Child toward the end, abandoning her once-fierce preference for homemade mayonnaise in favor of Hellman’s.

What makes “Provence 1970” so insightful is the picture that it gives of these food writers moving on from the France that they once loved so passionately. Child and Fisher became impatient with Francophile snobbery and dinner party bores who would talk of nothing but the food. Julia Child “strongly disagreed” with Craig Claiborne, of the New York Times, who said that no restaurant in America was as a good as the greatest in France. The last time she and her husband, Paul, went to Le Grand Véfour, in Paris, Paul got food poisoning.

James Beard was having an even worse time. His years of high living had left him with heart trouble and swollen legs, and walking was a struggle. Paul and Julia privately worried that their “dear fat friend” was on the way out. The French doctors put him on a highly restrictive diet: