Tucked up in the hills between Cannes and Grasse, a small stucco villa once owned by America’s most beloved culinary icon is bustling with the clatter of copper pans at chef Makenna Held’s Cook Camp.

It’s been more than half a century since Julia Child and her husband Paul built the Provençal holiday home known affectionately as La Pitchoune — or La Peetch. The house has since grown into a cooking school, and is now the setting of and inspiration for Held’s first cookbook “Mostly French.”

In 2012, the Colorado-born former consultant and educator became the steward of the culinary landmark after she saw the “for sale” listing for La Peetch in The New York Times. She was burned out on consulting and had an instant reaction.

“I fell in love with the heart-shaped shutters. It felt like a ‘download’ — this could be a really cool project. Like, why not figure out how to buy it and move to France? So, I just made it happen,” Held recalls.

She bought it sight unseen.

Built in the 1960s, the decades had made their mark on the property. “It wasn’t neglect,” Held says. “It was just erosion over a long period of time.”

She began the revamp in small steps. “Scrubbing every corner, bringing the garden back to life, repainting the interiors, redoing the mosaic at the bottom of the pool,” she says. Projects such as the pool became much more intricate than originally imagined, with multiple incarnations of tiles and tests.

“That was much harder than I thought it would be, because how the light reflects from the sky changes the color of the tiles,” she says. “It was a slow, deliberate process.”

A crumbling 18-ton turret — attached at some unknown point to a 15th-century shepherd’s cabin — had to be dismantled for safety. Held repurposed all that stone into a new garden wall.

La Peetch is now home to Cook Camp, a weeklong culinary immersion held in both Child’s home and Bramafam, the neighboring house once owned by Simone Beck, coauthor of Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” The course can take up to 19 students at a time, with spaces starting at $4,500 a week.

But the experience isn’t about recreating Julia’s recipes — instead, it’s about channeling her spirit.

Held teaches classic techniques but always emphasizes ways to use what’s available locally. “We start with what’s fresh at the market,” Held says. “Then we reverse engineer the meal. We don’t teach cuisine in the kitchen, we teach extemporaneity. It’s about using what you have, what must go and making something beautiful.”

That spirit has now been translated into Held’s debut cookbook, “Mostly French.” The photos for the book were shot entirely on the La Peetch property by British photographer Emma Lee on a Hasselblad camera using nothing but natural light.

“That was really important for me. I wanted to capture Provence’s unique light across seasons,” Held says. “Not just one golden hue, but the rhythm of the year.”

The book is much more than a manual. Held’s recipes are rooted in French cooking but meant to be guidebooks more than encyclopedias.

Held’s cooking honors heritage without being beholden to it. Her updated coq au vin, for example, adapts the traditional rooster stew, skipping the long wine bath, which would result in a soggy dish, with today’s more tender, farmed chickens.

“It was peasant cuisine, and peasant cuisine is delicious, but we have access to much better ingredients now, and we don’t have access to the original peasant-driven ingredients,” she says. “So it was really important to me as I was developing recipes to make sure to take the best of some of these French traditions.”

Held emphasizes fresh garnish can make or break a dish and cites Child’s mastery of beef bourguignon as an inspiration.

“That’s one of my hat tips to Julia,” she says. Child did not use garnish as an afterthought but made it an integral part of the recipe. They include parsley, butter browned mushrooms, sautéed pearl onions and a starch — Child recommended potatoes instead of pasta. “She has four garnishes in the final recipe, and that takes it from just a stew to exceptional.”

It’s that kind of all-encompassing experience that inspires her approach to cooking. Held likes to experiment with what is on hand. She missed pear-flavored margaritas from San Antonio, Texas, and without pre-packaged flavoring decided to use the prickly pears from a tree growing on the Provençal property. It’s that blend of transatlantic inspirations that make up her unique blends.

Like the cookbook’s title, Held’s relationship with France is one of balance. “I’m not quite American anymore, but I’m not really French either,” she says. “I’m mostly French, and it shows up in my cooking.”

Held explains that the move to France has completely changed her approach to food. “Just living in France does that immediately, because typically your refrigerator is so small you have to shop more. It seems you’re really dealing with a smaller amount of choice, but the choices change all the time, right?” she says, describing the intricacies of seasonal produce. Peak season peas can be gone from the shelves a week later, for example, so cooks need to adapt and learn to work with what is available.

And that’s what she means by “Mostly French” — the book is about the spirit of French cooking, which is hunting at the market and then adapting. Americans who love to follow recipes to the tee can be “a bit nervous” about her method.

It makes sense when you can have perfect fresh peppers all year round, for example.

“There’s a uniformity in a lot of American produce that makes exclusively recipe-based cooking very much what makes sense,” she says. “That difference creates less off-the-top-of-your-head style cooking. So much about American cooking and about the American food system comes back to the reverence of the recipe, a borderline obsession.”

Held encourages instinctive, “extemporaneous” cooking, and hopes to spark curiosity in the kitchen.

Held host multiple types of retreats including Cook Camp. It’s held not only at La Peetch and Bramafam, but she’s taken it on the road to follow the seasons including Veneto in Italy, and Mexico in February just when “the produce is popping off.”

She also hosts in-depth retreats in other locations in France and Italy, as well as Morocco, among others. 

Back in Provence, she’s beginning the conversion of 2.5 acres into an edible garden, deepening the farm-to-table connection.

At the heart of it all, La Peetch is home to Held’s culinary universe, and reminders of Julia, like her pegboard and some old copper pots and pans that hang in the kitchen.

“Julia is here, in a way, and the spirit of what she brought to the world,” Held says. “There’s a joie de vivre that really exists on the property. But I’m not really sure if that’s her or the collective energetics of all the people who have been here. It’s a collective, convivial space where there’s a lot of positive movement that has a distinctive stamp of Julia’s.”