MICHAEL ROSEN: We had just talked about your appearance on the show on WGBH in 1962 called I’ve Been Reading and because of that show, WGBH received a favorable response. Tell me what happened next.
JULIA CHILD: Well, there were…they really had to enlarge their audience. It was very, I think very academic, and it was talking heads most of the time and they wanted to enlarge themselves. So they thought they should do—they began having a science show, and they did some art and so forth, and they asked me if I’d like to do a cooking show segment so I said fine and fortunately they picked young Russell Morash who was then just twenty-seven years old, and he’d been doing the science show, and there was a Ruth Lockwood who had been doing the Mrs. Roosevelt shows and they were both available. And so we decided to do three shows and do things that would catch the general public that were well-known. We decided on French onion soup and coq au vin,—or beef bourguignonne, I don’t remember which.
ROSEN: But these were pilot programs?
CHILD: They were pilot programs, just to see whether there really was a response.
ROSEN: I just want to establish that, uh, Russell was the producer of that?
CHILD: Mm-hmm, he was the producer, and Ruth.
ROSEN: And Ruth Lockwood was the associate producer.
CHILD: My—my personal director, he was the overall, and she and I worked out the details together. She was very good, she really had a feeling for television, and also humor, and so we worked out these three shows; we decided, as we said, you have to go on with a bang and you can’t go out with a whimper. And they were easy shows to do and it—we did them down in Boston, which was hard to get to and hard to park, but we had to bring everything that we had and bring it down into the basement of…uh, I don’t know what kind of a place it was, I guess it was a gas company or something…um, and we just started in. I had done lots of demonstrations so that was—now that didn’t bother me, and luckily and the camera didn’t bother me. Some people get awfully conscious of it, but I was always kind of, I think, if you just pay attention to what you’re doing then you’re not conscious of anything else.
ROSEN: So it was one camera?
CHILD: We either had one or two. I don’t remember, oddly enough. I think we had an overhead mirror; I don’t even remember that.
ROSEN: The overheard mirror to show, uh, an overshot?
CHILD: Mm-hmm, I think we didn’t—no, we didn’t have an overhead mirror. I don’t know how we showed things; I just tipped them. And those were shows in mid-summer; I remember it was very hot there when we showed the first one down in our garden. We had fans going and it turned out that we did indeed—there was indeed an audience, because at that point, people were interested in cooking and that was before there were two family members working, so that women had time to cook and people really were cooking at home a lot. And it went over really very well, people were really interested, and I think I mentioned before about the Kennedys in the White House.
ROSEN: No, you haven’t actually.
CHILD: Oh, well, the Kennedys were in the White House then, and they had their wonderful French chef René Verdon. Everything they did was news! And when they did food, of course, that became news. And at that point, too, you could get over to Europe by plane in a few hours, rather than spending five or six days. Really, the time was right, so we got on at exactly the right point. If it would have been earlier, it wouldn’t have gone over, ‘cause we wouldn’t—the Americans wouldn’t have been going abroad. So we knew it was very lucky just hitting it right, and they decided that it was worthwhile so,…but it was still experimental, so the first thirteen shows were done on old tape and they were just shown locally, and then it might’ve been Pittsburgh decided they’d like to do it so they borrowed the tapes, and then San Francisco borrowed them and then—and then, finally, New York did, and we felt we had arrived. So the first thirteen shows don’t even exist anymore.
ROSEN: Really?
CHILD: The tape, I guess, the tape must have worn out.
ROSEN: What’s the name of the show?
CHILD: It was The French Chef. We decided to call it The French Chef, because it would fit in one line in the TV guide. And I had hoped also at that point that we’d get some real French chefs to come in, which of course we never did but it was about French classical,—French cooking. And it was entirely classical French cooking, which was—which I’m glad it was. And we…then those went over well, so we did thirteen more.
ROSEN: I want to stop you here and ask about the format of the show. How long was the show itself?
CHILD: They were always half-hour, so I think it was twenty-seven minutes when you took out the, you know, the beginnings and the ends and the WGBH things, so we had twenty-seven minutes and we didn’t stop at all unless something awful happened, if everything fell on the floor or whoops, whatnot, like there’d be an electricity problem, but they just went. And they really got a lot in real time and we hadn’t developed our system of having one or two ready at various stages.
ROSEN: So it, uh, there’s no editing involved?
CHILD: There was no editing at all, and you see some of the old shows now, they seem endlessly long, with all the stirring and so forth.
ROSEN: Would you, over the course of one show, just make one dish, or would you do multiple?
CHILD: It was often just one dish so that we could really go into detail with exactly how we’d make the sauce and so forth, and we always felt that less was more. And we did have some that were dinners in half an hour, which we did in three courses, but otherwise it was really just one dish and how to do it.
ROSEN: Now in my times cooking in the kitchen, I know that some dishes take longer than half an hour, how did you…how’d you get over that problem?
CHILD: Well, that was when we knew if we were doing a stew then we’d have one ready, and as we went along we’d hover on what was ready so that you could see up to a certain point then, here’s how it looks now. By the magic of television, we just said you let it cook until it looks like this. So then we could do stews and braises and everything else.
ROSEN: How did you know how much time you had left?
CHILD: That was a problem that we, I think in the third—the third show, which was French onion soup, when we were doing the three trials, we found that I didn’t have any feeling for time and there was so much to do in that show and I was just galloping through it. We found that we had eight minutes left; we did it over and the same problem happened so we changed the system of having idiot cards, they said, you know, “move the spoon.” We divided it up into sections and I could have as long as I wanted in one section, and then we’d move to the next one, so that fixed the timing.
ROSEN: So someone would be off-camera with cue cards and a stopwatch?
CHILD: Well, Ruthie Lockwood was always right there, she was very good at that. She knew exactly what we were doing, so she’d pass up something to the floor manager who would hold it under the camera and I would see it, and that worked extremely well. But that disastrous one when I was galloping through and had so much time left—
ROSEN: Tell me about that.
CHILD: Well, that was the French onion soup one, where I had so much to do and I was going very fast and did it all too fast, and we came up to the end and I had eight minutes left with nothing to do but talk. So we wiped that out and developed our new system, which worked out very well. And in those days—this was before, before you had the monitors that fit right over the lens, and these, you had to have an idiot card, and you can definitely see some of these guys go down with an idiot card and come up again.
ROSEN: How, um, I’m assuming—because television, public television is notorious for not having much money—that you didn’t have much of a budget.
CHILD: No, we had very little budget and I think I was paid fifty dollars a show. Well, PBS never pays much of anything. And what we would do, we would auction things off—say if we had a steak show, we would auction off the steaks afterwards, but usually we ate everything, so that was nice. [Laughs]
ROSEN: But also, I mean, I would assume that because of all the fresh ingredients you needed and considering you had to, if you’re showing how to cook duck, you have to have a couple ducks, that gets expensive. How would you do it?
CHILD: Well, I guess, I don’t remember, but I guess we definitely had a budget.
ROSEN: And then what about all the pots and pans?
CHILD: Paul and I did all the shopping, and then we gradually bought pots and pans as we went along. At first, they were all mine which we’d bring over, but I don’t know…I don’t remember now how the expenses went. But we were never—never extravagant, certainly. And very often we would have—raising money for GBH, we would have an audience come in. I remember when we were doing tripe. There’s—one of the good things about public television was that we could throw things that a commercial station never would, like tripe wouldn’t have enough appeal, but it was fun seeing the big piece of tripe, a big raw piece, looked like a shaggy rug. It was interesting; we had older people and we had a bunch of young people in that came from the school, and when we passed it around for people to taste it, older people just went “no.” All the younger ones wanted to eat it and try it out, but people weren’t very adventurous then. In our crew, a lot of the crew had never eaten a fresh artichoke, or never eaten fresh asparagus; it was interesting that at that point people didn’t—weren’t very adventurous. But there wasn’t that much offered. But imagine not ever eating fresh asparagus, for instance.
ROSEN: It was always canned, or…?
CHILD: Yes, I don’t know what, ‘cause I—we never ate that, but the general public evidently did. So we really taught a lot of people things. There weren’t any leeks anywhere until we began showing them, and we found also that a lot of the markets began finding out what we were doing and then they would stock what we had. Williams-Sonoma, the cookware store, was very useful to us ‘cause anything that,—we had oval perforated metal egg poachers, if you know how hard it is to get an egg, poached egg, to look, and you can find these little oval metal things, and I have some here, and you drop the egg into it and then it keeps its shape. And then, you know, we then began to find them around and then—it was interesting about the egg poacher—then people said eggs were dangerous, you know, back then people didn’t have eggs, even two a day, so the egg poachers were back in. That’s odd, isn’t it?
ROSEN: It is. So Williams-Sonoma started getting requests for certain cookery?
CHILD: Yes, they were very, very helpful because they would carry these things—they had a lot of very good things that I would like to use. I liked to show new things like a salad dryer, like it spins like in a basket, and it has—at least the one I have—has this string and you pull it and it rotates ’round and ‘round and all the water is thrown off, and I think our show was the first place that it was shown. And then also, the use of a blowtorch, which is very useful if you want to…you could unmold—say, for if you have a gelatin dessert, and you want to unmold it, you have to take a blowtorch and run it around just to loosen it and then it unmolds very easily. Or you can brown something nicely with it. I think we were the first to use that.
ROSEN: And a lot of these techniques and the cookery, you got from France.
CHILD: Yes, they were all French, but some of them were mine. At least we showed a lot about knives and utensils and it was always fun having funny things, like I have a great big knife which I call “fright knife”. [Gestures] It’s about that long, about that wide, and jagged edges on it. It does look very dangerous. And we were the first people to use the food processor when we produced it on the TV. So it was very useful for people to know it was out there.
ROSEN: And it certainly fell in line with what WGBH stood for, and certainly public television: education.
CHILD: And what’s nice was—I said, it was nice that you could show things like tripe, and also you can go into detail. I know, I’m very much interested in the Food Network, but they have a difficulty because they have to make money, so they have to have entertainment, and they really can’t have the kind of serious teaching shows that we can have on PBS. Because the audience attention is short.
ROSEN: Well, I want stay with The French, uh, Chef, here, and I didn’t mention that the first episode of The French Chef aired on January 23, 1963, and it was a Monday evening, eight o’clock, it aired.
CHILD: Mm-hmm. We had a wonderful hour, I wish we still had that.
ROSEN: It’s the prime time.
CHILD: Monday at eight, that’s primetime. That was wonderful.
ROSEN: What did the set look like?
CHILD: Well, the set looked just like a kitchen. It was all open; you just had a counter in the front, with a counter here, and then enough room so that you could stand and move around and then in the back of the room was the sink and work spaces. So it looked like a kitchen. You almost had a window, and there was something to look at outside, like a tree, so it looked like a kitchen.
ROSEN: And tell me briefly: the preparation for a show. How many shows a week did you shoot?
CHILD: Well, the first—I don’t know how we did it; it seemed to me that we did four shows a week. You know, it’s so long ago, it was over thirty-five years ago; I kind of forget what we did. [Laughs] But of course, I knew everything very well because I’d done it all. But we would have to do all the shopping. At first, Paul and I did all the shopping. And we didn’t really practice, but Ruth and I would always work it out together and then shoot it. It was wonderful having Russ, because he was always full of ideas and his family were cooks, and his wife was a cook, so that helped a lot. But we would have to set it up and sort of just go right to it—in a way, it’s rather the way Jacques Pepin and I did the Cooking at Home, in which we had all the stuff out and we just cooked. We were making two a day, easily, with that setup, at least. We were able to do two a day, twice a week. If you know what you’re doing and it’s not—and it’s fairly simple—it’s possible to do, and I think, at The Food Network, they do. Emeril Lagasse, does more than that, probably.
ROSEN: I like watching him. Speaking of which, I mean, back in ’62, ’63…this was a brand new thing. People had never seen something like this before.
CHILD: No, they hadn’t.
ROSEN: How did you make cooking educational but also interesting and dramatic and make people watch?
CHILD: Well, I think cooking is—it’s kind of a drama anyway, because you start with nothing and you end up with something to eat. And I’m, luckily, I’m a natural ham, and I think that helps. And I don’t get flustered because I’m not doing anything that I don’t know how to do. So, we made it fun because I was having a good time, and that makes a lot of difference. And I wasn’t doing anything that I didn’t know about.
ROSEN: And you love food.
CHILD: I love food and I enjoyed it.
ROSEN: You mention humor, too. How important is humor?
CHILD: Well, I think it’s very important. You can’t—it has to be a natural humor, I think; it has to come out of what you’re doing.
ROSEN: Now I want to also ask this: was this show live or was it…it was taped?
CHILD: It was taped. It was live, it was really live on tape because we didn’t stop, we went right through. But of course which we now don’t do, now we do it in segments.
ROSEN: That’s different.
CHILD: Yeah, very different. And there was always a kind of breathless—is it really going to turn out? You don’t quite know. Which I think has a certain charm, to get all this done in twenty-seven minutes.
ROSEN: Who were the sponsors of the first French Chef?
CHILD: I think, the first one I think we had—I know we had Polaroid, I think Polaroid was at the very beginning. It seemed to me there was a market; I don’t remember. Luckily, I don’t have to do anything at all about getting sponsors. That’s what you want, as I understand, is—the first thing is to get a producer and the producer gets the sponsors.
ROSEN: Well, would it have mattered what kind of sponsor?
CHILD: Yes, I wouldn’t do anything for a product I didn’t like. Like I don’t believe in bottled salad dressing, so I would not want a bottled salad dressing doing the show.
ROSEN: Still to this day you don’t like bottled salad dressing?
CHILD: Well, why should you have it bottled? It’s so easy to make. And they never use very good oil.
ROSEN: That makes sense. Um, now as you mentioned, another thirteen episodes were added, and then by 1965, The French Chef was seen in ninety-six stations around the country.
CHILD: Mm-hmm, I think almost everyone carried it then. We’d been—we weren’t clever enough to have a book tag on it, so it never advertised our book, which everything does now. That was too bad, but I unfortunately am not a very good business woman, and we never thought of that.
ROSEN: Well, I think you’ve done pretty well. How was The French Chef received by critics? Remember?
CHILD: I don’t know, did they even pay attention to it? I’m not sure, I don’t know. I remember when we did Dinner at Julia’s, there must have been some kind of a depression but we had; it was supposed to be a real dinner party, this was out in Santa Barbara, and some of the boys at the UC Santa Barbara had an old Rolls Royce which we borrowed and we had to push into the set. We were criticized for having a Rolls Royce in such harsh times.
ROSEN: 1965 was a very good year to you; you received a Peabody award and an Emmy, in fact. It was the first educational television show…actually, you, personally, to win an award.
CHILD: As you could always tell, if you went to one of these events, you had television people, and public television has always been at the very bottom of everything. You could tell, if anyone was sitting next to you, that they were probably on their way out. [Laughs] So that was kind of—we knew it was the kiss of death.
ROSEN: Now, who were the major chefs at that time, in the mid-sixties here? You’ve mentioned a chef for Kennedy.
CHILD: That was really before, before chefs became so popular as they are now. People didn’t know, really, much about them; you knew more the name of the restaurant, but you didn’t know the name of the chef. I think—was that before Paul Prudhomme started out? Oh yeah, I think he was getting famous by then. We didn’t have so many American chefs then. Well, they would be foreigners who were here.
ROSEN: But it’s traditionally been a man’s profession.
CHILD: It has.
ROSEN: And here you were, not only—
CHILD: But I’m not a chef; I’m a teacher and a cook. So that’s quite different. But in France, there’s still—cooking is not a woman’s profession at all, and it’s very hard to find women in the profession, oddly enough.
ROSEN: Why?
CHILD: Because they don’t take it as a serious discipline, and they’re not welcome.
ROSEN: We were talking about The French Chef, the first show, The French Chef, which ran from 1963 to ‘66. Now, this show was in black and white.
CHILD: This show, that was before color was invented. And we really had—I think we had two cameras at the most at that time. And it wasn’t until…I can’t remember what the date was, that color suddenly came in. And we had never seen color at all in our house, and they had a big national meeting of public television stations, and they had—they were showing—they had one color camera and they had a black-and-white camera, and they had them side by side. And they had everyone come in to do their shows just a little bit. I remember I did a strawberry tart, and I did a salade niçoise, and I did a blanquette veal, and it was like night and day. The blanquette veal was different shades of grey, then in color you could suddenly see the subtle difference between the veal and the sauce. And of course the salade niçoise was a riot of color with green and tomatoes and so forth and beans. And we went home right afterwards and got a colored television. That was just…it was like…it was amazing, the difference. And that was…I can’t remember when color came out.
ROSEN: Well, I have it here that you didn’t have color until 1970 on the second French Chef show.
CHILD: Yes, mm-hmm.
ROSEN: The first show was in black and white.
CHILD: Yep. The first 119 were all in black and white. That little book I held, The French Chef Cookbook, was a very nice little précis of French classical cooking, that was all black and white.
ROSEN: Did you have to do anything differently to the food to make it more appealing?
CHILD: No, no. But we had my nice friend Rosemary, who was our food developer. We didn’t call her “stylist”; she was “food designer.” But she was very conscious of that, too. We always had a beauty shot at the beginning and at the end.
ROSEN: I forgot to mention whether you remember the first time you saw television? And what you thought of it.
CHILD: Well, we’d been living abroad. So we hadn’t really seen any television at home when we—our last foreign post was in Norway, and we came home in, I guess it was ‘56. So we got ourselves a little black—a little television. They were all black and white. And that was the first time we ever saw it.
ROSEN: What’d you think of it? Did you think it would…?
CHILD: It was wonderful. We didn’t see…it was mostly the news that we saw. Huntley-Brinkley, they had at that time. They were wonderful on the news.
ROSEN: Did you ever think that you would be on television?
CHILD: No, I didn’t think of it at all. I didn’t ever do any planning of doing this or that. I just…I happened to fall into it on the whole. If it happened to be the right person at the right time, you’re very lucky.
ROSEN: In 1966, The French Chef went off the air for four years. Why was that?
CHILD: I guess I was doing something else. I don’t remember. And then we came back with…
ROSEN: Well, you had The French Chef Cookbook. You published The French Chef Cookbook.
CHILD: Mm-hmm. And then we did volume two of Mastering. That probably—that probably took a lot of time, I imagine. Then we came on again with Julia Child and Company. We had two series of that. And then, then we went out to Santa Barbara and what was that called?
ROSEN: Uh, Dinners at—
CHILD: Dinner at Julia’s! That was fun.
ROSEN: Well that’s in ‘83. So I’m not going to let you go there yet.
CHILD: Oh, all right.
ROSEN: I just want to get a couple more specifics on The French Chef. As we mentioned, the second show, The French Chef, which premiered in 1970, was in color. Um, did that make any difference to you in regards to how you did the show?
CHILD: No. No, not at all.
ROSEN: How many people were working for you at this point?
CHILD: Well just on my team alone, we always had—it was Ruth, and me, and we had Rosie, the food designer. And we had Liz, who was kind of head, we had a group called dishwashers who also were, who did everything else. We had about eight people, I think. In the kitchen, we had…Marian Morash at one time was our executive chef. That was when we planned to have definitely things in various stages, like if it was a stew there was a second stage and the third and so forth. So we had about eight people, I think.
ROSEN: Did you have associate cooks to help?
CHILD: Yes, so that was the executive chef and then her associates, usually two or three.
ROSEN: And, you had Polaroid as the sponsor as well?
CHILD: Polaroid was our first sponsor. I don’t remember who the other ones were. It seemed to me we had Safeway at one point? I had nothing to do with the sponsorship. I think Russ did that.
ROSEN: And I see here that you shot some episodes in France?
CHILD: That was fun. Well, we…Gosh, it was not Russ that was with us, it was some,—another director. We went to Marseilles and showed the fish markets, and we were in Paris and we did some shots with Professor Calvel when we were doing French bread and baguettes and things; that was wonderful. And we had some…a wonderful pastry chef. Went to several restaurants. That was…those were fun to do.
ROSEN: So you really let some air into television there.
CHILD: Yes, we did.
ROSEN: Which I don’t think was ever done before.
CHILD: That I don’t know. But that was great fun. I’m glad we did that.
ROSEN: But only a year later that show was canceled. Why was that? Do you remember why?
CHILD: What show? What series?
ROSEN: The French Chef. The second French Chef was canceled.
CHILD: Maybe I was doing another book.
ROSEN: But it wasn’t…it wasn’t because of WGBH or anything?
CHILD: No, I think anytime, I just canceled it. And I did, let’s see, I did Julia Child’s Kitchen. I think the first time it was canceled was when I was doing volume two of Mastering. With a book like that, it takes your whole time.
ROSEN: So, it really, you remained in control of the shows and the books were demanding enough that you couldn’t do, really, both.
CHILD: Well, you can’t. If you’re going to do a really serious book, you can’t do anything else. At least I can’t.
ROSEN: And ‘77, you—as you mentioned, Julia Child and Company was also produced by Russ Morash.
CHILD: Mm-hmm.
ROSEN: And Ruth Lockwood. And as I understand, it had a much bigger set, bigger crew.
CHILD: Yes, we had our whole building then, which was wonderful, because before we’d always had to set up every time. But when we had our own building, we could have things in the fridge. It was—everything was much, much easier.
ROSEN: And was this also French cooking?
CHILD: Well, my background is always French, but we were just doing regular cooking.
ROSEN: “Regular” as in American or, like, American recipes?
CHILD: Well, it wasn’t classical French, so it was…it was just cooking.
ROSEN: And at this point you were also, as I noticed—you started writing for magazines. McCall’s.
CHILD: Yes, I did an article for McCall’s for several years, and then we did a monthly one for Parade Magazine. That was fun. McCall’s was nice, but it was kind of ladylike, and at the—for Parade Magazine I could do whatever we wanted. I liked very much the editor there and the people we worked with. That was—they really did very well on the photographs. And then when I did my book, called The Way to Cook—which was a great book, I think. It has wonderful pictures in it—they were very kind. They gave me all these how-to photographs that we’d use, and I’m forever grateful because we never would’ve written the book if they hadn’t been so kind. They were awfully nice to work with.
ROSEN: That always makes the job easier.
CHILD: Oh, yes.
ROSEN: And you mentioned briefly about your appearing on Good Morning America. You became a regular on Good Morning America!
CHILD: Yes, I was. I enjoyed that very much. We were…what was his name? David? [thinking] Hm. I can’t remember his name. Who was the male anchor?
ROSEN: Um…David Hartman?
CHILD: David Hartman! Yeah, he was there first. And then Charlie Gibson, whom I just love. I enjoyed being with him very, very much.
ROSEN: And do you occasionally continue to appear on there?
CHILD: Once in a long while. I suppose we will probably appear when our new book comes out. Well, I think they would—when I came in, which was nice for me—they’d put me up in the hotel, and I would have some per diem, and they would pay my way, and I think they just found it too expensive.
ROSEN: But you enjoyed that?
CHILD: Oh, very much. Very much. It was awfully nice just to have a paid visit in New York. I loved that.
ROSEN: And, now, did you have a contract with WGBH at all? I mean, you were able to jump to commercial television here on ABC.
CHILD: No, we never had a contract and I think—I guess we had one with ABC. But I have a very nice family lawyer and he took care of all of that. We must’ve had a contract.
ROSEN: And, now, Paul continued to work very closely with you on—
CHILD: Yes. He had retired by that point. He was a paid-to-earn photographer so he could spend as much time with me as he liked. We were always together, which was very nice.
ROSEN: That’s ideal.
CHILD: Yes, he was a supporting advisor, and—he was wonderful.
ROSEN: And you mentioned also in Dinner at Julia’s in 1983, that’s where you hosted dinner parties in Santa Barbara.
CHILD: Yes. We had Jim Beard, and we had all the wine-makers. Everyone had a California winemaker, and that was very nice, I think. Well, I always had wine in the show, which I think is so necessary. I remember once, for red wine, when it was in the black-and-white days, you couldn’t see whether it was red or white so we always used Gravy Master in water for red wine and I said—we were having something, and I said—’And now we’re going to serve a château gravie mastère!’ Nobody noticed that at all. [Laughs] That always pleased me very much. [Laughs.]
ROSEN: Now Dinner at Julia’s was thirteen episodes. Why always thirteen episodes?
CHILD: Well, if you want a full year you have fifty-six. Then half, of course, is twenty-three or whatever it is. Or fifty-two and half is twenty-six and thirteen is a quarter. It was always divided up in the weeks.
ROSEN: But why not fifty-six?
CHILD: How many weeks are there in the year?
ROSEN: I mean, why not a full schedule?
CHILD: Well it would depend on how much time we wanted to spend.
ROSEN: But you seemed to always limit it to about thirteen shows and I’m just wondering.
CHILD: No, it’s always just because it’s a quarter of a year. You do either thirteen, twenty-six, or fifty-two, or whatever it is.
ROSEN: But you never wanted to continue a show for a few years?
CHILD: That long? No, because I was doing other things as well. So I was never a complete TV person. I was always a writer as well.
ROSEN: Did you watch TV at this point? Did you have favorite shows?
CHILD: I look at the news only. And once in a while, if I happened to be alone for the evening, I’ll watch. I saw a program last night on Channel 33 here, it was…who’s that? Stephen King who was in an automobile accident?
ROSEN: Just recently? Uh huh.
CHILD: Just recently. It was one of his shows. I can’t remember the name of it. A very gloomy one. Well, I’m very glad I saw that last night. [Laughs]
ROSEN: Was it a little scary?
CHILD: No. It wasn’t scary. It was upsetting. There was a woman who had a horrible husband who beat her, and I don’t know why she stayed. I guess she stayed with him because she had no money and no place to go. And he was very brutal, and he was chasing her and he stumbled into a rotting well. And she could’ve helped save him, but she stood there in horror as it fell and then it fell again, and there was the end. But he had been horribly brutal to her, so she let him die.
ROSEN: You ruined the movie for me. [Laughs]
CHILD: And then, there was an upper-class woman for whom she worked. And she had told the woman—she was sobbing one day when she was supposed to be polishing the silver—she finally told the woman that her husband had gone into the savings account, and she had painfully paid in forty dollars a month and had about five thousand dollars she was going to use to send her daughter to college, and he had stolen it all. And the woman helped her, so when the woman herself began to fail, she went to help her. She was really failing so much, that she wanted to commit suicide. And this, our heroine was charged with the murder. But the woman had thrown herself down the stairs. It was quite gloomy, as you can see.
ROSEN: [laughs] It sounds very gloomy. Did you watch the whole thing last night?
CHILD: I did.
ROSEN: [laughs] Ah, well there’s so many books here, there’s so many specials, but I just want to hit on some of the key ones here—
CHILD: I think, well, the main reason that I would stop was that I was doing another book, or I was doing a Parade thing or something like that. Well, that meant, I didn’t—I had no intention of being a complete television person. It was too limiting.
ROSEN: Why’s that?
CHILD: I also wanted to write.
ROSEN: You enjoyed writing at this point?
CHILD: Yeah. And television never paid much.
ROSEN: Do you enjoy watching yourself on television?
CHILD: I look at it once in a while. I don’t look very much—I look at one cooking show, usually. I don’t—I don’t look at them very much. I’ll look at some—a weird story like this one, or the news, always. I’m a news freak.
ROSEN: In 1993, there was a show called Cooking with Master Chefs on PBS.
CHILD: Mmm, yes.
ROSEN: Tell me about that.
CHILD: That was when I met our new producer Geoff Drummond, whom I like very much. And he was serious about food and about television, and I’ve always wanted to bring some real professional chefs into the picture. And he was interested in that too, so that’s how we managed that. And I think it’s wonderful for people to be able to see the real pros.
ROSEN: You don’t consider yourself a real pro?
CHILD: I’m a home cook, not a restaurant cook. There’s a tremendous difference, and you can see it very clearly in our Jacques Pepin shows. I mean, he is—he is just a remarkable pro. He cooks so fast and so perfectly in everything. And I take my time because I can, but if you’re a professional chef, you have to work very fast. And if you’re really good, you can work very well and very fast the way he can.
ROSEN: So it’s the efficiency?
CHILD: I mean, he can cut up a chicken in about eight seconds. He and Martin Yan have contests to see who can do it faster. It takes me about five minutes; I take my time and I enjoy doing it. I don’t care how long it takes. So there’s a great, great difference.
ROSEN: Well, in the same year that Cooking with Master Chefs was produced, which was also thirteen episodes, something called the Food Network was launched. Now, thirty years, virtually, after you started The French Chef, someone finally got the idea that it might be a good thing to do. Were you involved with the launching of the Food Network?
CHILD: A little bit. They took all of Dione Lucas, the early first television cook, they took all of hers. Then I think they bought some of the—well, they bought a group of ours, I don’t know which ones. And I’ve been on it several times; I’ve always been very much interested in hoping it would work. I think they’re having a difficult time because they have to get a big audience, and if you’re going to be serious and then not just amusing…I mean with Emeril Lagasse, all of our gas station attendants, they just adore him, but they’re looking it at for fun and amusement, just the way they look at The Frugal Gourmet. But they’re not going to watch a serious thing on how to debone a turkey or something like that. They want entertainment.
ROSEN: How do you draw that line, though? If the average viewer is watching television, and watching your show for example, um—
CHILD: Well, we don’t have an average viewer. We have people who want to learn how to cook, which is quite different from people who just want to be amused by cooking. But our shows are definitely teaching shows, and they’re not going to look at a teaching show unless they’re interested in the subject. I don’t think—at least, I would direct myself to people who want to learn to cook. And that’s quite different than just being, having fun.
ROSEN: So what’s your audience been? What are your demographics?
CHILD: People who like to cook. They’re from all walks of life. I have a lot of men, and I imagine now that we have two parts of the family working that a lot of people aren’t really going into serious cooking, except those who really love it as a hobby or want to go into it professionally. There’s so many…where you go into a market today, there are ready-made foods, and you can take home and cook them or you can take home and sauté them because they’re all cut-up. So it’s quite different.
ROSEN: Have you always—did you always see these shows as educational, and treated them as such?
CHILD: Yes, I mean, they’re teaching shows, very definitely, because I’m not interested otherwise.
ROSEN: You had mentioned earlier about how cooking itself is dramatic and how you add humor, and those are elements of entertainment.
CHILD: But I don’t add it for entertainment at all. It’s just, I don’t consciously entertain anyone. I’m consciously teaching them. But, I’m entertaining myself by cooking, so maybe that comes across.
ROSEN: So it comes out of the process?
CHILD: It comes out of the process. But they’re serious teaching shows. And, you wouldn’t really look at it unless you wanted to learn something, I think.
ROSEN: Now in ‘94, you started in a two-hour PBS special, Julia Child and Jacques Pepin—
CHILD: Yes.
ROSEN: —Cooking in Concert.
CHILD: Cooking in Concert.
ROSEN: You did two of those, right?
CHILD: And it’s out of that that our new series has come.
ROSEN: What’s that called?
CHILD: It’s called Jacques and Julia Cooking at Home.