Julia Child

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Julia Child
Born 15 August 1912 (1912-08-15)
Pasadena, California,
United States
Died 13 August 2004 (2004-08-14) (aged 91)
Santa Barbara, California,
United States
Cooking style French

Julia Child (born Julia Carolyn McWilliams August 15, 1912 – August 13, 2004) was an American chef, author and television personality, who introduced French cuisine and cooking techniques to the American mainstream, through her many cookbooks and television programs. Her most famous works are the 1961 cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and, showcasing her sui generis television persona, the series The French Chef, which premiered in 1963.

Contents

[edit] Youth and World War II

Born Julia Carolyn McWilliams to John and Julia Carolyn ("Caro") McWilliams in Pasadena, California. She grew up eating traditional New England food prepared by the family maid. She attended Polytechnic School from fourth grade to ninth grade and then The Branson School in Ross, California. After graduating in 1934 from Smith College—where at six feet, two inches (1.88 m) tall she played basketball—with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history, she moved to New York City and worked as a copywriter for the advertising department of upscale home-furnishing firm W. & J. Sloane. After returning to California in 1937, shortly before her mother died, she spent four years at home, writing for local publications and briefly working in advertising again.

She volunteered with the American Red Cross and, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) after being turned down by the United States Navy because she was too tall. She began her OSS career at its headquarters in Washington, working directly for General William J. Donovan, the leader of OSS. Working as a research assistant in the Secret Intelligence division, she typed thousands of names on white note cards used to keep track of officers.

For a year, she worked at the OSS Emergency Sea Rescue Equipment Section in Washington, D.C., where she was a file clerk and also helped in the development of a shark repellent to ensure that sharks would not explode ordnance targeting German U-boats. In 1944 she was posted to Kandy, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where her responsibilities included "registering, cataloguing and channeling a great volume of highly classified communications" for the OSS's clandestine stations in Asia,[1] and where she met her future husband, a high-ranking OSS cartographer. She was later posted to China, where she received the Emblem of Meritorious Civilian Service as head of the Registry of the OSS Secretariat.[2]

Following the war, she lived in Washington, D.C., where she was married on September 1, 1946 to Paul Cushing Child. Child, a Boston native who had lived in Paris as an artist and poet, was known for his sophisticated palate[3] He joined the United States Foreign Service and introduced his wife to fine cuisine. In 1948, they moved to Paris after the US State Department assigned Paul there as an exhibits officer with the United States Information Agency. The couple had no children.[2]

[edit] Post-war France

Child repeatedly recalled her first meal in Rouen of oysters, sole meunière and fine wine as a culinary revelation. She described the experience once in The New York Times as "an opening up of the soul and spirit for me". In Paris, she attended the famous Le Cordon Bleu cooking school and later studied privately with Max Bugnard and other master chefs. She joined the women's cooking club Cercle des Gourmettes where she met Simone Beck who, with her friend Louisette Bertholle, was writing a French cookbook for Americans and proposed that Mrs. Child work with them to make it appeal to Americans.

In 1951, they began to teach cooking to American women in the Childs' kitchen, calling their informal school L'Ecole des Trois Gourmandes (The School of the Three Gourmands). For the next decade, as the Childs moved around Europe and finally to Cambridge, Massachusetts, the three researched and repeatedly tested recipes. Child translated the French into English, making the recipes detailed, interesting, and practical.

[edit] Books and television

Julia Child gives a cooking demonstration, 1961

The three would-be authors initially signed a contract with publisher Houghton Mifflin, which later rejected the manuscript for being too much like an encyclopedia. Finally, when it was first published in 1961 by Alfred A. Knopf, the 734-page Mastering the Art of French Cooking was a best-seller and received critical acclaim that derived in part from the American interest in French culture in the early 1960s. Lauded for its helpful illustrations, precise attention to detail and for making fine cuisine accessible, the book is still in print and is considered a seminal culinary work. Following this success, Child wrote magazine articles and a regular column for The Boston Globe newspaper.

A 1962 appearance on a book review show on the National Educational Television (NET) station of Boston, WGBH led to the inception of her television cooking show after viewers enjoyed her demonstration of how to cook an omelette. The French Chef debuted February 11, 1963 on WGBH and was immediately successful. The show ran nationally for ten years and won Peabody and Emmy Awards, including the first Emmy award for an Educational program. Though she was not the first television cook, Child was the most widely seen. She attracted the broadest audience with her cheery enthusiasm, distinctively charming warbly voice, and unpatronising and unaffected manner.

Child's second book, The French Chef Cookbook, was a collection of the recipes she had demonstrated on the show. It was soon followed in 1971 by Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume Two, again in collaboration with Simone Beck, but not with Louisette Bertholle, with whom they had ended their partnership. Child's fourth book, From Julia Child's Kitchen, was illustrated with her husband's photographs and documented the color series of The French Chef, as well as providing an extensive library of kitchen notes compiled by Child during the course of the show. The French Chef had the distinction of being first television program to be captioned for the deaf in 1973. It was to demonstrate the feasibility of captioned technology.

Julia Child at the Miami Book Fair International of 1989

In the 1970s and 1980s, she was the star of numerous television programs, including Julia Child & Company and Dinner at Julia's; at the same time she also produced what she considered her magnum opus, a book and instructional video series collectively entitled The Way To Cook, which was published in 1989.

She starred in four more series in the 1990s that featured guest chefs: Cooking with Master Chefs, In Julia's Kitchen with Master Chefs, Baking With Julia, and Julia Child & Jacques Pépin Cooking at Home. She collaborated with Jacques Pépin many times for television programs and cookbooks. All of Child's books during this time stemmed from the television series of the same names.

Beginning with In Julia's Kitchen with Master Chefs, the Childs' home kitchen in Cambridge was fully transformed into a functional set, with TV-quality lighting, three cameras positioned to catch all angles in the room, a massive center island with a gas stovetop on one side and an electric stovetop on the other, but leaving the rest of the Childs' appliances alone, including "my wall oven with its squeaking door."[4] This kitchen backdrop hosted nearly all of Mrs. Child's 1990s television series.

Child was a favorite of audiences from the moment of her television debut on public television in 1963 and her personage—a striking hybrid of gravitas and camp—was a familiar part of American culture and the subject of numerous references. In 1966, she was featured on the cover of Time with the heading, "Our Lady of the Ladle". In a 1978 Saturday Night Live sketch, she was affectionately parodied by Dan Aykroyd, continuing with a cooking show despite profuse bleeding from a cut to the thumb. Jean Stapleton portrayed her in a 1989 musical, Bon Appétit!, based on one of her televised cooking lessons. The title derived from her famous TV sign-off: "This is Julia Child. Bon appétit!". She was also the inspiration for the character "Julia Grownup" on the Children's Television Workshop program, The Electric Company (1971–1977), and was portrayed or parodied in many other television and radio programs and skits, including The Cosby Show (1984–1992) by character Heathcliff Huxtable (Bill Cosby) and Garrison Keillor's radio series A Prairie Home Companion by voice actor Tim Russell.

Much of Child's shopping took place at Savenor's Market, located on Kirkland Street just inside the Cambridge line. Jack Savenor (1922-2000) expanded his business to include imported pates, exotic game, fresh seafood and specialty foods, and Savenor's Market was the source for meats during the run of Child's PBS series. With continual on-air mentions, the location gained an international fame, and Jack Savenor made more than a few guest appearances on her television shows.[5]

In 1981, she founded the educational American Institute of Wine and Food in Napa, California with vintners Robert Mondavi and Richard Graff to "advance the understanding, appreciation and quality of wine and food", a pursuit she had already begun with her books and television appearances.

[edit] Retirement

Julia Child's kitchen as seen on display at the National Museum of American History.

Her husband, Paul, who was ten years older, died in 1994 after living in a nursing home for five years following a series of strokes in 1989. In 2001, she moved to a retirement community in Santa Barbara, California, donating her house and office to Smith College. She donated her kitchen, which her husband designed with high counters to accommodate her diminished but still formidable height, and which served as the set for three of her television series, to the National Museum of American History, where it is now on display.[6]

She received the French Legion of Honor in 2000[7][8] and the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2003. Child also received honorary doctorates from Harvard University, her alma mater Smith College, and several other universities. She was also credited as an inspiration to Alice Waters and Emeril Lagasse

On August 13, 2004, Child died of kidney failure at her assisted-living home in Montecito, two days shy of her 92nd birthday.[9] Her final meal was French onion soup.[10]

[edit] Films

In August 2002, Julie Powell started documenting online her daily experiences cooking each of the 524 recipes in Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and she later began reworking that blog, The Julie/Julia Project, into a book.[11] In March 2008, director-screenwriter Nora Ephron began filming Julie & Julia, adapted from Powell's memoir, Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen (Little, Brown, 2005). The paperback was retitled Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously (Back Bay Books, 2006). Ephron's film, the first major motion picture based on a blog, is scheduled for August 7, 2009 release. Meryl Streep stars as Julia Child and Amy Adams portrays Julie Powell.

On August 18, 2004, a documentary filmed during her lifetime premiered. Produced by WGBH, the one-hour feature, Julia Child! America's Favorite Chef, was aired as the first episode of the 18th season of the PBS series American Masters. The film combined archive footage of Child with current footage from those who influenced and were influenced by her life and work.[12]

[edit] Public works

[edit] Television series

[edit] Books

[edit] References

  1. ^ Miller, Greg (August 15, 2008). "Files from WWII Office of Strategic Services are secret no more". Los Angeles Times. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-archives15-2008aug15,0,1415513.story. 
  2. ^ a b CIA A Look Back ... Julia Child: Life Before French Cuisine Retrieved February 1, 2008 from [1].
  3. ^ Lindman, Sylvia. MSNBC: "Julia Child: bon appétit". Retrieved September 30, 2006 from [2].
  4. ^ "Acknowledgments, In Julia's Kitchen with Master Chefs, published 1995 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
  5. ^ Savenor's
  6. ^ Julia Child's Kitchen at the Smithsonian
  7. ^ Goldberg, Carey. "For a Cooking Legend, the Ultimate Dinner Was Served". The New York Times, November 25, 2000. Retrieved November 12, 2006 from [3].
  8. ^ Encyclopædia Britannica Profile: "Julia Child". Retrieved November 13, 2006 from [4]
  9. ^ Saekel, Karola (August 14, 2004). "TV's French chef taught us how to cook with panache". San Francisco Chronicle. 
  10. ^ Sietsema, Tom. "The Special Spice of Julia's Kitchen". Washington Post August 14, 2004, C01. Retrieved November 6, 2006 from [5].
  11. ^ The Julie/Julia Project
  12. ^ American Masters website: Julia Child
    Julia Child! America's Favorite Chef IMDB listing

[edit] External links

Sister project Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Julia Child


Persondata
NAME Child, Julia
ALTERNATIVE NAMES McWilliams, Julia Carolyn
SHORT DESCRIPTION Chef, author, television personality
DATE OF BIRTH August 15, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Pasadena, California, United States
DATE OF DEATH August 13, 2004
PLACE OF DEATH Santa Barbara, California, United States
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Child"
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