Julia Child

Julia Child: The Spy Who Taught America to Cook

Before she was a chef she was a government researcher trying to invent a shark repellent, testing concoctions in a wartime laboratory. She was thirty-six before she ate the meal that changed her life — sole meunière at a restaurant in Rouen — and thirty-nine before she enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu. Everything Julia Child is remembered for happened in the second half of her life, which is precisely why the whole thing is so unlikely.

A Pasadena Childhood Without a Kitchen

Julia Carolyn McWilliams was born on 15 August 1912 in Pasadena, California, the eldest of three. Her father, a Princeton graduate, worked in land management; her mother was a paper-company heiress descended from a Massachusetts lieutenant governor. The household had money and domestic staff, which meant the future author of the most influential American cookbook of the twentieth century learned nothing at all about cooking as a child.

She attended the Polytechnic and Westridge schools in Pasadena, boarded at the Katherine Branson School in Ross, and graduated from Smith College in 1934 with a degree in history.

The OSS Years

In 1942 she tried to enlist and was turned away: at six feet two inches she was too tall. She joined the Office of Strategic Services instead, working first as a typist at Washington headquarters, then as a top-secret researcher for General William J. Donovan, then in the Emergency Sea Rescue Equipment Section, where she helped develop a shark repellent — experimenting with cooking various concoctions, in what amounted to her first foray into the kitchen. She was posted to Kandy in Ceylon in 1944 and 1945 and afterwards to Kunming in China, and received the Emblem of Meritorious Civilian Service.

In Kandy she met Paul Cushing Child, a fellow OSS employee, artist and poet who had lived in Paris. They married on 1 September 1946 and had no children. In 1948 Paul joined the Foreign Service and the couple moved to Paris.

Rouen, and the Opening of the Soul

At La Couronne in Rouen, Child ate oysters and sole meunière. She later told The New York Times the meal was "an opening up of the soul and spirit for me." She enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu and graduated with a Diplôme de Cuisine in 1951, then studied privately with master chefs and co-founded an informal school, L'école des trois gourmandes, with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle.

Ten Years, 726 Pages

The three women spent a decade researching and testing recipes while moving around Europe and finally to Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1961. Houghton Mifflin rejected the manuscript as "too much like an encyclopedia." Alfred A. Knopf published it in 1961. *Mastering the Art of French Cooking* ran to 726 pages, became a bestseller, and was praised for its helpful illustrations, precise attention to detail, and for making fine cuisine accessible. It has never gone out of print.

The method was the argument. Where earlier cookbooks assumed knowledge, Child assumed none, and specified everything — which is why an American home cook with no training could produce a boœuf bourguignon that worked.

The French Chef

A 1961 book-review appearance, during which she demonstrated an omelette, produced such enthusiastic viewer mail that WGBH-TV in Boston commissioned a series. A summer pilot ran from 26 July 1962; the regular series began on 11 February 1963 and continued nationally for a decade. It won a Peabody in 1965 and, in 1966, the first Emmy awarded to an educational programme; in 1972 it became the first American television programme captioned for the deaf.

Her appeal lay in cheery enthusiasm, a distinctively warbly voice, and an unpatronising, unaffected manner. Because the broadcasts were unedited, her mistakes went out on air, which lent the whole enterprise an authenticity and approachability television had not previously managed. Her Cambridge kitchen — designed by Paul with counters raised to suit her height — served as the set for three series and now sits in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

More series followed: *Julia Child & Company* (1978–79), *Cooking with Master Chefs* (1993–94), *Baking with Julia* (1996–97) and *Julia & Jacques Cooking at Home* (1999–2000). She began regular appearances on ABC's *Good Morning America* in 1980, co-founded the American Institute of Wine & Food with Robert Mondavi and Richard Graff in 1981, published *The Way to Cook* — her magnum opus — in 1989, and established the Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and Culinary Arts in 1995.

Butter, and Other Arguments

She spent decades fending off nutritionists. "Everybody is overreacting," she said in 1990. "If fear of food continues, it will be the death of gastronomy in the United States." She was less charitable about Julie Powell's 2002 blog project cooking every recipe in *Mastering the Art*; her editor Judith Jones explained the objection bluntly: "Flinging around four-letter words when cooking isn't attractive, to me or Julia. She didn't want to endorse it." More creditably, during the 1980s she moved from holding homophobic views to becoming an active AIDS campaigner after a close associate died of the disease.

Why Julia Is Called a Genius

Child's genius was pedagogical, not culinary. She did not invent dishes; she reverse-engineered an entire national cuisine into instructions a stranger could follow without supervision, which is a harder and rarer intellectual act than creating a recipe. The decade she and her collaborators spent testing recipes was research in the strict sense: isolating variables, eliminating the assumed knowledge that made French cookbooks useless to Americans, and writing down the steps a trained chef performs without noticing. That is why a publisher's complaint — "too much like an encyclopedia" — was actually a description of the book's value.

The second component was performative and equally deliberate: she worked out that the fastest way to remove fear from an audience was to let them watch her fail. Unedited television made her errors public, and the errors were the lesson.

The counter-case deserves stating. She was not a professional chef, never ran a restaurant kitchen, and her formal training amounted to a year at Le Cordon Bleu and private tuition. Her Francophilia arguably delayed American interest in its own regional cooking, and the butter-and-cream orthodoxy she defended looks less defensible now than it did in 1961. But the charge that she was "only" a teacher misses the point. Millions of people cook competently because one woman decided that competence could be written down.

Legacy

Child died of kidney failure in Montecito, California on 13 August 2004, two days before her ninety-second birthday. The honours had accumulated — Peabody and multiple Emmys, the National Book Award in 1980, France's Legion of Honour and a fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2003, the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2007 — alongside honorary doctorates from Harvard, Smith and Brown. Meryl Streep played her in *Julie & Julia* (2009); Sarah Lancashire played her in HBO Max's *Julia* (2022). Smith College named its campus centre after her in 2022, funded by the sale of her Cambridge house. Her posthumous memoir *My Life in France* closes on the sentence that summarises the project: "the pleasures of the table, and of life, are infinite — toujours bon appétit!"