“Just speak very loudly and quickly, and state your position with utter conviction, as the French do, and you’ll have a marvelous time!”
—Julia Child, My Life in France
Nobody talks quite like Julia Child.
Her voice alone could have made her famous—that instantly recognizable, operatic loop-de-loop of a voice, blooming and wobbling, with its big round glissando vowels and patrician, half-slurred syllables, its wild chortles and yodels and yawps, the breezy mid-word reaches for breath. When Paul Child, who would become Julia’s husband, first met her—the two were stationed together in 1944, in the Kandy, Ceylon branch of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency—he described her in a letter to his brother as “a warm and witty girl” with a habit of gasping as she spoke. “Her slight atmosphere of hysteria,” he wrote, “gets on my nerves.” Years later, after they had fallen in love, and married, and their passion for one another had grown and deepened into an uncommonly rich and enduring devotion, Paul wrote a poem of love to her voice, describing her “mouth so sweet, so made for honeyed words.”
The six interviews in this volume together tell a richly dimensional story of how Julia McWilliams—a talky California girl, intelligent and outgoing and a gawky six-foot-something—would grow to become Julia Child, a woman who stepped into her fame late enough in life that she was already formed, already confident in her height and voice and manner, already richly content in her life with Paul. Even in her earliest public appearances, as in the 1961 radio interview with The Martha Deane Show, where she and Simone Beck discuss the creation of the first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, there’s a preview of the Julia to come—the jokes and playfulness, but also her forceful evangelism for the notion that the best results come from the best product and the best method. Often this meant techniques that might appear at first to be bizarre, or flat-out wrong, but which reveal themselves to be exquisite models of efficiency and grace. “When you first do it, it doesn’t seem the right way to do it,” Julia tells Deane of the French method for fluting mushrooms, which involves holding the blade steady, while turning the fungus. “But you learn that it is the right way. That the mushroom is cutting itself against the knife. And it’s very pretty.”
When she appeared in the homes of television-owning Americans in 1963, Julia was both an oddity—the voice! Her height! The relative novelty of an instructional cooking show!—and an instant, magnetic success. Already famous as the co-author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which had been published to wild acclaim two years earlier, Julia’s television career seems, in retrospect, like an inevitability: Her charisma, her extraordinary knowledge of cuisine, and her natural talent as a teacher, all of which had been instrumental in the success of the book, were seemingly tailor-made for the camera. The French Chef, produced by Boston public television station WGBH and distributed nationwide, was a sensation. It ran for ten years, airing over two hundred episodes, each of them just Julia: a solid thirty minutes of her swooping voice and her strong arms, conversationally delivering to the viewer a precise and foolproof method to make quiche, or pot-au-feau, or a whole three-course ham dinner for guests in under half an hour. She was the most famous French chef in the world—despite not being French, nor (as she insisted, futilely, for her entire life) a proper chef.
There’s no shortage of chronicles of Julia’s extraordinary impact on American gastronomy. Through her books and television shows she almost single-handedly changed the way we ate, leading home cooks out of a post-war industrial stasis of canned vegetables and E-Z-meal efficiency. In advocating for a French way of cooking she promoted seasonal vegetables, good dairy, and whole ingredients; to the tired rituals of making and eating dinner, she reintroduced a pleasure that wartime and its attendant industries had stripped away. Over the years she shared the stage (figuratively and often literally) with culinary titans like James Beard, M.F.K. Fisher, Craig Claiborne, and Jacques Pepin, but among them Julia was the best known, the most influential, the most beloved—”The most famous cook in the world!” declared the cover of Julia Child’s Menu Cookbook. When Julia went on television and told her viewers to start tonight’s dinner with a nice whole duck, or lovely fresh artichokes, butchers and grocers would be sold out in an hour.
Her story has been told so many times it takes on the smoothed-out shape of legend. A college graduate who worked in advertising when World War II began and wanted to do her bit, but she turned out to be too tall for the WACs and the WAVEs (the women’s military units), so she volunteered for the OSS. There, she was stationed in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where she had full security clearance and was, if not quite a spy, certainly well-sourced in various secrets. Before the OSS Julia had felt at loose ends (she was unmarried at the decrepit old age of thirty-two, and was nursing dashed hopes of becoming a writer) but in her new job she found both a thrilling vocational competence, and—in Paul Child, a cartographer and aesthete ten years her senior—a soul-sweeping love affair. They both ended up transferred from Kandy to Kunming, in China, where their romance blossomed. After the war, they returned to America; they spent some time apart, and then some time together, and then they got married, and then they moved to France.
And then they moved to France. In Kunming, Julia had become enamored of Chinese cuisine—Yunnan province was, she recalled in her memoirs, the place where her palate had first truly awakened. “The Chinese food was wonderful, and we ate out as often as we could. That is when I became interested in food,” she wrote, rhapsodizing about the joyous rituals of Chinese banquet dining, the extraordinary range of flavors, and—not least—the culinary sophistication of everyone around her, Chinese and American alike. It’s hard not to wonder what would have happened if Julia and Paul Child had remained in Kunming, or if Paul had been sent to Tokyo instead of Paris, or to Bangkok, or Delhi, or any of the other capitals of great cuisine. How would the world have changed? Would a wok or a handi have become ubiquitous in American kitchens, the way omelette pans and boning knives are now? But Paris is what it was: the Foreign Service sent the Childs to France, where Paul worked in the U.S. embassy, and Julia was left to find a way to fill her days. She ended up at Le Cordon Bleu, in a morning class taught entirely in French and attended entirely by Americans, and the rest, as they say, is history.
For most of Julia’s public life she maintained an apolitical mien, but in her later years, she spoke more openly about her liberal politics, holding forth on the lingering evils of McCarthyism, the ongoing immorality of the Republican party, and the fundamental necessity of the feminist and pro-choice movements. In this volume’s 1989 interview with journalist Polly Frost, from Interview magazine: “I don’t think this administration seems interested in doing anything about the environment. These people are anti-abortion, but they’re not doing anything for the future.” Or two years later, speaking with Jewell Fenzi for Foreign Affairs’ fascinating project of taking oral histories of the spouses of Foreign Service officers, an eighty-one-year-old Julia says of her involvements, “the American Institute of Wine and Food, that’s mostly what I do now. That, and I am very much interested in Planned Parenthood, and Smith College, and the Democratic Party.”
Julia’s political fierceness wasn’t something she came to late in life. As the wife of a career civil servant, and a former intelligence worker herself, she stayed well informed and was unafraid to be vocal. In 2013, the historian Helen Horowitz uncovered among Julia’s papers a blistering letter written in 1954, while Julia was living in Paris and immersed in Mastering the Art. It was to Aloise Buckley Heath, a fellow Smith alumna and the sister of William F. Buckley, Jr., the prominent conservative author and defender of McCarthyism. Heath had written urging Child and other Smith graduates to withhold donations until the college had sacked five professors suspected of being communists. An enraged Julia replied, “In the blood-heat of pursuing the enemy, many people are forgetting what we are fighting for. We are fighting for our hard-won liberty and our freedom; for our Constitution and the due processes of our laws; and for the right to differ in ideas, religion and politics. I am convinced that in your zeal to fight against our enemies, you, too, have forgotten what you are fighting for.”*1
I think about this letter often (what would Julia think about the darkness of America today?), and in particular I come back again and again to Julia’s fiery closing paragraph:
“I am sending to Smith College in this same mail, along with a copy of this letter, a check to duplicate my annual contribution to the Alumnae Fund. I am confident that our Trustees and our President know what they are doing. They are only too well aware of the dangers of totalitarianism, as it is always the great institutions of learning that are attacked first in any police state. For the colleges harbor the ‘dangerous’ people, the people who know how to think, whose minds are free.”*2
I never met Julia Child, though I saw her once, from far away, making her way across a grassy lawn. It was my sophomore year at Smith College, where I matriculated some seventy years behind Julia—she was one of the institution’s most luminous alumnae, certainly our most famous, and despite being, at the time, in her late eighties, she had made the trip down the Massachusetts Turnpike from her home in Cambridge to visit her alma mater. News of her arrival rippled across campus—she had sat in on someone’s French seminar, she had been spotted entering Hubbard House, her own old red-brick dormitory, for a dining-hall lunch. I was rushing to an afternoon philosophy class when I saw her, moving slowly with age but smiling at the students and aides who buzzed around her, and I remember marveling to myself: “Julia Child—she’s real!”
At that time, in 2001, cooking as a widespread artistic hobby was just on the cusp of being truly in vogue. Modern food culture—with its built-in assumption that things like obsessive ingredient provenance and fine details of technique are of universal interest—was ascendant, but not yet at critical mass. My micro-generation was the last, I think, where it was still something of an oddity for a teenager to throw a dinner party, though now it’s unremarkable for young adults to approach the preparation of dinner with the same adolescent solemnity previously reserved for composing world-weary poems, or practicing guitar in public. I had earned some mild infamy at my lunch table for using a juice glass to whip together vinaigrettes for my salad-bar greens, which was about as far as things went. “I wonder if Julia would like my dressing,” I had said to a friend, earlier that day. She rolled her eyes at me. “Julia likes everything,” she said.
Julia, despite her effervescent personality, did not actually like everything, though I understand what my friend meant: the Julia who appeared on our televisions and in the pages of our cookbooks (and, for some of us, on the sidewalks crisscrossing the college lawns) almost always wore the sunny, encouraging expression of a favorite teacher, the sort of person who believes in you, who laughs off your failures while praising your effort. In fact, she considered herself to be a teacher, first and foremost—and from the start: During the ten-year period that she and co-authors Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle were writing the first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, it was Julia who insisted that the book be instructional, rather than just a collection of recipes, and it was that meticulous, conversational instruction that catapulted Mastering the Art to its instant status as an indispensable classic.
What didn’t Julia like? More than anything, she loathed snobbery—though with her patrician upbringing and Francophilia she was often caricatured as a snob herself, she labored endlessly to rid French cuisine of its reputation as haughty and upper-crust, and avoided fussy equipment and the word “gourmet.” (She preferred the much more egalitarian phrases “good cooking” and “good cuisine.”) She loathed cilantro. She was endlessly frustrated by people who gave up on cooking because they refused to follow instructions, or who wouldn’t put in the effort to get the proper result. She famously disdained the 2003 blog “The Julie/Julia Project,” in which writer Julie Powell cooked her way through all of Mastering the Art. (“I’ve heard of her,” she sniffed of Powell to The New York Times. “I haven’t read any of her stuff.”) She also, to my great delight, hated bottled salad dressing—in her 1999 conversation with Michael Rosen, in this collection, an extraordinarily detailed account of her television career, she says, “I don’t believe in bottled salad dressing…why should you have it bottled? It’s so easy to make. And they never use very good oil.”
As I said, nobody talks like Julia Child. In her hundreds of hours of television, in the thousands of pages of her books, in her magazine columns, while dining at restaurants, at private dinners, in letters to friends, across the table from reporters, with her loved ones, she was a person who found her greatest self in having something to say, and saying it frankly. The Julia we know is not soft-spoken or demure, not prettily laying the table, not blank-faced and blinking in the spotless, appliance-sponsored kitchen of tomorrow. She is telling stories, explaining techniques, recalling in extraordinary detail the names and faces and qualities of all the people who passed through her great and grand life, the meals they ate together, the conversations they had. She was—she remains—a teacher and a voice, a rushing, swooping, whooping, glittering river of words.