Photo: Sony Pictures
Julia Child
Julia Child
Julia Child was America’s celebrity chef. Although not the host of the first kitchen show on pre-cable television, Child caught attention with her fluty patrician voice, offering her meat-and-potatoes countrymen a taste of foreign parts. She was cordon bleu in the land of TV dinners.
Despite her death in 2004, her cookbooks continue to circulate and she remains an enduring presence. Dramatized by Meryl Streep in Nora Ephron’s 2009 film Julie & Julia, Child is now the subject of a lovingly prepared documentary, Julia.
The documentary is an appreciation of a life well lived and its influence on the way we eat today. Child grew up in the conservative WASP upper middle class, whose diet in prewar America was hearty and unimaginative. She stubbornly resisted the marriage proposals conceived by her parent—and then, World War II gave her the escape and adventure she sought. Joining the OSS (forerunner to the CIA), she met Paul Child in the Far East. He was an artist and intellectual; her journey into food began with him in China. He became her soulmate and eventually her helpmate once her career was launched, but that was unforeseeable at the time they married.
She finally discovered her calling once Paul was posted to France with the Foreign Service after the war. A filet of sole provided her epiphany. “One taste of that food and I never turned back,” she declared.
In France, she discovered that tasty food was integral to life and provided the context for socializing and community. The chefs were all men and were unhappy when she enrolled in their top cooking academy, Le Cordon Bleu. By this time, Child was already a force of nature, cheerfully undaunted by resistance.
By 1961 Paul and Julia were living in Cambridge, Mass., after he was forced out of the Foreign Service on suspicion of being a Communist homosexual (he was neither). She was shopping a manuscript coauthored with French collaborators that sought to demystify that country’s cuisine for an American audience. Houghton Mifflin turned her down, fearing the cookbook would “frighten housewives.” Alfred Knopf reluctantly accepted the manuscript. Mastering the Art of French Cooking became a bestseller, the seminal text that led to Child’s long tenure at PBS and later, “Good Morning America.”
Child brought the helpful enthusiasm of a favorite schoolteacher to her show. She could be theatrical, wielding ladles and spatulas like swords in a Shakespeare play. When an omelette slid off her pan and onto the counter on live TV, she picked it up and tossed it back in. “Who is going to see?” she quipped. Watching her was fun.
Julia makes it clear that Child was an apostle of eating well at a time when America was becoming a food desert. Postwar, the emphasis was on frozen, packaged, processed food marketed for its convenience. Spam garnished with pineapple slices was considered a classy hors d’oeuvre. Child’s mission was to show that good cooking need not be complicated and could be done with ingredients found at any supermarket. She wasn’t the only fighter against the fast-food revolution (an impression the film inadvertently gives) but became the most prominent.
Directors Julie Cohen and Betsy West (RBG) interviewed several of today’s top chefs, including Ina Garten and Marcus Samuelsson, along with family members. They had scads of archival footage to work with and, coached by food author Susan Spungen, recreate several of Child’s visually delicious recipes including poached pear tart and boeuf bourguignon.
During her years on television, Child awakened curiosity about food and cooking and inspired younger generations of chefs. She applauded the growing interest in fresh and seasonal but disagreed with the fussiness of too much “healthy” eating. What fun is food if stripped of the sensuous pleasure of taste?
Julia is screening at the Downer Theater.
