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Julia Child 1912 - 1994
 Julia Carolyn
McWilliams, was a famous American gourmet cook, 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 the television series The
French Chef, which premiered in 1963.
Youth and World War II
Julia Child was born August 15,
1912 to parents
John and Caro McWilliams in the conservative, wealthy community of
Pasadena, California and she grew up eating traditional New England
food prepared by the family maid. After graduating from Smith
College, where the 6'2" Julia played basketball, with a B.A. degree
in 1934, 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. Civic-minded,
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 for being too
tall.
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. She was posted to
Kandy, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1943, where she met her future
husband Paul Cushing Child, a high-ranking OSS cartographer, and
later to China, where she received the Emblem of Meritorious
Civilian Service as head of the Registry of the OSS Secretariat.
Following World War II, she resided in Washington, D.C., where she
was married on September 1, 1946 to Paul Child, a man of
sophisticated palate who came from a prominent Boston family and had
lived in Paris as an artist and poet. He joined the United States
Foreign Service and also introduced his wife to fine cuisine. She
learned to cook in order to please him and entertain their large
social circle. In 1948, they moved to Paris after the U.S. State
Department assigned Paul Child as an exhibits officer with the
United States Information Agency in Paris, France. The couple did
not have any children.
Post-war France
Mrs. Child repeatedly recalled her
first meal in Rouen of oysters, sole meuniθre, and fine wine as a
culinary revelation. She described the experience once in The New
York Times newspaper 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 master chefs like Max Bugnard. 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 teaching 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
and Mrs. Child translated the French into American English, making
the recipes detailed, interesting, and practical.
Fame, books, and television series
They 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 fit well with American fascination with French culture in the
early 1960s. Lauded for its helpful illustrations, precise attention
to detail, and for making fine cuisine accessible to the masses, the
book is still in print and is considered a seminal culinary work.
Upon this success, Mrs. Child wrote magazine articles and a regular
column for The Boston Globe newspaper.
A 1962 appearance on a book review show on the Public Broadcasting
Service (PBS) 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 Award and Emmy Award Awards. Though she
was not the first television cook, Mrs. Child was the most widely
seen and, with her cheery attitude and distinctively charming warbly
voice, attracted the broadest audience.
Mrs. 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. Julia's
fourth book, From Julia Child's Kitchen, was illustrated with her
husband's photographs.
In the 1970s and 1980s, she was the star of numerous television
programs, including Julia Child & Company and Dinner at Julia's. 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 Pepin Cooking at Home.
She has collaborated with Jacques Pepin many times for television
programs and cookbooks. All of Mrs. Child's books in this time grew
out of the television series of the same names.
Mrs. Child was a favorite of audiences from the moment of her
television debut on public television in 1963 and her personage was
a familiar part of American culture. In 1966, she was featured on
the cover of Time magazine 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 Appιtit!, based on one of her televised
cooking lessons. She also inspired a character on the Children's
Television Workshop program, The Electric Company (1971-1977).
In 1981, she founded the educational American Institute of Wine and
Food in California with vintner Robert Mondavi and others to
"advance the understanding, appreciation and quality of wine and
food", a pursuit she had already begun with her books and television
appearances.
Retirement
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 gave
her kitchen, which was designed by her husband 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
Smithsonian National Museum of American History, where it is now on
display in Washington, D.C.
She received the French Legion of Honor in 1991 and the U.S.
Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2003.
On August 13, 2004, Julia Child died peacefully in her sleep of
kidney failure at her home in Santa Barbara, at the age of 91. |
, with Simone Beck
and Louisette Bertholle
