First things first. Julia Child was not America’s original television cook. (That would be Dione Lucas.) She never dropped a duck on the floor, never had asthma (she was just a heavy breather), and never over-imbibed on those early shows. (All that “wine” was Château Gravy Master.) Those are the myths.
Now for the reality.
In 1962, the United States was in its food infancy. You couldn’t find a garlic press this side of Paris; asparagus were mushy, stringy things that came in cans; and as far as most people were concerned, a leek was a problem with the roof. Americans thought of food the way they thought of gasoline: You bought it cheap and put it in to keep the machine moving.
Television was also relatively young. There would probably never be another time when a gangly (as in six feet two inches tall) 50-year-old with a warbly voice (once described as capable of “making an aspic shimmy”)—a woman who called herself the French Chef though she was neither French nor a chef—could occupy the same coveted prime-time slot as people like Edward R. Murrow and Milton Berle. But Julia Child captured the hearts of American TV viewers from the start, primarily because her accomplishment extended well beyond her medium. She taught America how to enjoy food.
Julia Carolyn McWilliams was born in Pasadena, California. Her mother’s family came from old New England money and her father was a successful entrepreneur. A fun-loving tomboy with a wry sense of humor, Child graduated from Smith College in 1934 with plans to become a writer. Unfortunately, The New Yorker didn’t want her. Never one to sit around and mope, she joined the Office of Strategic Services, where, two years later, she met her husband, Paul Child, a photographer, artist, and bon vivant ten years her senior. En route to the couple’s first posting in Paris, they stopped in Rouen, where Child tasted sole meunière in browned Normandy butter for the first time. Thus began her lifelong love affair with food.
After the war, Child enrolled at the Cordon Bleu, where her infatuation with cooking only deepened. Beginning in 1951, she worked with friends and fellow cooks Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle on a ten-year research and writing project that resulted in Mastering the Art of French Cooking. When an editor at Houghton Mifflin saw the mountainous manuscript and promptly deemed it too long and complicated, Judith Jones, an editor at rival Knopf, snapped it up for a mere $1,500. Child had never thought about a career in television, but at the time of the book’s publication, in 1961, promotional duties generally entailed an appearance or two. So she went on air armed with a hot plate, a lipped pan, and the desire to tell people everything she knew. She made a perfect omelet and became an instant hit.
“Julia thinks of herself as a missionary instructing a noble but savage race in a civilized art,” Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham wrote in 1964 to explain Child’s connection with audiences. It’s a nice quote, but the assessment was way off. Julia was never condescending. Her fervor came from a different place.
“She was a gifted scholar, she knew her stuff, and she was confident at a time when women generally weren’t,” says producer Russell Morash, who collaborated with Child for some 30 years. “Moreover—and this was important in those days of television—she could hold a conversation with herself.”
The managers at WGBH, Boston’s public television station, spotted Child’s potential and commissioned an entire series. She named it The French Chef not to be highfalutin but because the three short words fit neatly into the newspaper TV listings. Ever the practical one.
At the time, WGBH had no studio and barely any budget. Morash found a demo kitchen of sorts in a creaky old Cambridge building that had been built by the Boston Gas Company to promote stoves to housewives. Unfortunately for Child, it was only a part-time arrangement, so for every taping, the star, her husband, and a devoted gaggle of friends bundled pots, pans, spoons, and ingredients (raw and cooked to various degrees) into the car, then lugged them up to the studio in a freight elevator. They’d tape one episode in the morning, break for lunch—anything from stuffed goose with prunes to corned beef hash from a can—and tape another in the afternoon. At day’s end, they’d wash the dishes in the toilet and drag all the equipment back down to the car. This went on for years, with Child earning $50 per episode, food not included.
Because film was expensive, there was little room for error. At first, Child’s biggest battle was with the clock. In an early episode featuring onion soup, she was so anxious to cram every step into her precious half hour that she ended eight minutes early and had to sit at the table chatting to the camera with only her Gravy Master for company. No one can converse with herself for that long, so the episode was scrapped.
Child eventually learned to use idiot cards and, more importantly, to turn her mistakes to her advantage. When someone rang the elevator bell during filming one afternoon, she just looked up at the camera and said, “That must be the plumber; about time he got here,” and pushed on.
That good-natured Yankee determination is still in evidence today. Child, 91, lives in a condominium complex in the pretty coastal village of Montecito, California. Her body has let her down, as bodies tend to do: She has just had a second knee replacement, and she complains that her once fabulous legs no longer work. But though her memory is patchy and her feistiness subdued, her blue eyes are clear and her critical faculties as sharp as her tongue. And judging from her newly permed hair and bright lipstick, she is still a bit of a ham.
We’re sitting on her small back patio, soaking up the warm spring sun and munching on the multicolored Goldfish she’s put out, when a very loud machine begins to rumble and then spews water over the roof and onto the awning directly above us. Her perm is covered in a halo of mist, but she carries on just as she did that time decades ago when the potato pancake she was flipping legendarily missed the pan and flopped onto the stove. “You can always pick it up,” she told viewers as she put it back into the pan. “Who is going to see?”
Those who know Child say they’ve never seen her lose her cool. She can be curt when displeased, and she does nurse a few grudges just to keep up her game, but she’s not mean and she isn’t known to yell. Incompetence annoys her, as do vertical food, nouvelle cuisine, overly reduced sauces, crunchy vegetables, and anything no-fat. (“It’s not food,” she says of the last. “It’s a process.”)
Culinarily, she’s a stickler but not a snob. She loves Chinese cooking, especially that of Martin Yan, and prefers In-N-Out Burgers to McDonald’s. (Mickey D’s french fries, she says, were admirable “until the nutritionists took the animal fat out of the oil.”) She approves of genetic modification (“We have an ever-growing population and we have to feed them some way”); opposes humanely raised veal (“It hasn’t any of the tenderness or the real milk-fed flavor”); and is an unashamed evangelist for butter and cream. French cooking is still her pleasure, she says, “mainly because it’s carefully done by people who know what they’re doing.”
Of all the virtues, Child favors perfectionism, and she expects the same of others. “Remember Jeff Smith, the Frugal Gourmet, who could never find anything on the counter?” asks Morash. “Julia is the opposite of that. She always knows where everything is and how much of it she’s using. And if something doesn’t work, she spends a lot of time getting it right.”
Child devoted no less than two years to unearthing the secret of good, crusty, slightly sour French bread. At first she thought the problem lay in the differences between American and French flours, yeasts, and water. Finally, in 1967, she went to France to study with that country’s leading baker, Raymond Calvel. “It’s the folding,” she exclaimed in a letter to Judith Jones. “It’s all in the forming of the loaf!”
When Jones asked her to include a recipe for cassoulet in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Child responded with something that filled six pages in the published volume and included a procedure for making homemade garlic sausage. “She had studied five tomes, going back a hundred years, on the perfect proportions,” says Jones. “And all her notes were pinned on a wall. That’s how she worked. She never guessed. She put it to the test.”
In Child’s living room, where we have relocated for lunch, there’s a library stocked with a few hundred titles and an old wood-paneled TV that suggests how little she actually watches. She was never a couch potato, even in her heyday. Still, she’s curious about the food stars who have followed in her footsteps, so together we view a few tapes.
Nigella Lawson she finds “very appealing.” Tyler Florence “seems like a real person, very attractive.” (Though she takes issue with the 425-degree temperature at which he roasts a chicken. “You can start at 425, but you must go down to 325.”) Barefoot Contessa Ina Garten? She “hasn’t any charm,” she says, “though I’d probably eat her food.” Child says she didn’t warm to Martha Stewart when the two did a show together, though she does admire her efficiency. As for Jamie Oliver, she is baffled. “The show moves so quickly, and I just can’t see what he has to offer.” I explain that he’s all about making cooking doable. “Well,” she replies, “I tried to make things doable, too. Maybe I should have called my show The Naked French Chef.”
But Child never had to resort to such tactics. The wealth she inherited enabled her to remain devoted to public television throughout her career. (For years, she returned 10 percent of her income to the station that gave her a start). In doing so, she maintained the freedom to prepare whatever food she liked, be it tripe or kidneys, and to endorse only those products she adored. She donated her house in Cambridge to Smith College, and her original kitchen is preserved in the Smithsonian Institution. The museum took everything, including the paper clips in her drawers, exactly as she had left them. When I ask if that included recipes, she looks at me as if I am insane. “Recipes don’t go in kitchen drawers! They go in files, upstairs in the office.”
It appears that Julia Child is one of those rare creatures who have remained true to their craft with little regard for celebrity and the money and fame that attend it. Her motivation was solely to learn about food and then teach people about it. Says Morash: “We were once doing deals on home videos and posters, and Julia said, ‘Do whatever you think is right. We’re not in it for the money.’ At which point Paul turned to her. ‘Julia,’ he said, ‘we do not eschew money.’ It was the only time I heard him get stern with her.”
The night Child won her first of six Emmys, in 1965, Bill Cosby presented her with the award. She leaned over and whispered, “I’m sorry, would you mind telling me what your name is?” “Certainly,” he replied. “Sidney Poitier.”
When I pull out Appetite for Life, Noël Riley Fitch’s 1997 biography of her, Child scoffs and shoos it away. “I’ve never read it. Why would I? I gave the writer all my files and told her to write it as long as I didn’t have to have anything to do with it.”
“You didn’t talk to her?”
“I did a little bit, but I was busy.”
“Doing what?”
“It didn’t interest me. Besides, a biography makes you sound dead. Would you like some water?”
At which point Child politely makes it clear that she’s just a little bored of trawling through the past and would rather discuss the future, in particular the memoir she’s planning to write about her husband, who died in 1994. She also wants it known that if anyone’s interested in a ninety-something cook, she’s ready for a comeback.
“Julia has always had the idea that once she went off the air, everyone would forget her,” her friend and colleague Pat Pratt told me.
I want to assure her that it isn’t true, but I’m afraid it won’t sound sincere.
“So, would you consider doing another show?” I ask instead.
“I wouldn’t object.”
“Nor would your fans,” I say.
To her great credit, she looks genuinely surprised.