No one revolutionized home cooking more than Julia Child, who is such a pop culture icon that even people who never read Mastering the Art of French Cooking or saw her on TV know who she is. And nearly everybody loved her. Unlike boob-tube product pitchmen before her, when Julia first appeared on PBS, the noncommercial network, she was selling nothing other than the glory of French cuisine. Beginning in 1962 and airing for a decade (then followed by Julia Child & Company), The French Chef, as the show and she were called, was a revelation. Here was serious cooking that was nonetheless casual, carefree, and sometimes flat-out hilarious. The chef herself could be hypnotically butterfingered and frequently seemed unpolished and unprofessional—which made her appear all the more true-to-life and made the recipes she demonstrated seem within reach of anyone with the will to try them. What a character she was! A jovial clown with an upper-crust whinny who acted looped (but was only loopy) as she hooted her way through recipes that worked or didn’t (it hardly mattered) and lurched through her TV kitchen and made a big mess of it just as we all do at home.
Like so many cultured people in the early days of television, she looked down her nose at the very medium itself, revealing in her introduction to The French Chef Cookbook (1968) that she kept her own ugly little television set hidden away in an unused fireplace in her Cambridge house. Still, no chef was ever so naturally telegenic, so charming in her awkwardness, and so farcically irrepressible. Like The Continental ten years before her, the video personality Julia Child projected was so original that she became a Dan Ackroyd character on Saturday Night Live, in a legendary sketch where she winds up lying on the floor in a pool of her own blood (having hacked off her thumb) but nonetheless unflappable and crying out her trademark salutation, “Bon appétit!”
Although many viewers tuned in only to enjoy her antics (and discovered good food as a fringe benefit of the fun), Julia Child was an inspiring television teacher and a major force behind ambitious home cooks’ infatuation with French food in the sixties. Americans have always had a fondness for didactic self-improvement schemes, from How to Win Friends and Influence People to the Dummies guide series, and The French Chef was the culinary version: a fast, workmanlike instructional half-hour without a trace of one-upmanship or snobbery. As in her book, every single step of the cooking process was documented and demonstrated so that even a completely inexperienced cook could try to follow along. And to help the detailed instruction go down easy, the soundtrack pulsated with the breathlessly buoyant, reassuring voice of Julia herself (nearly every viewer felt familiar enough to call her by her first name) crooning over the beauty of a poaching egg or the aroma of onions sizzling in butter, laughing off her mistakes, slamming a big old fish around the counter or dropping it on the floor, and gaily extolling the results as the program rushed to its conclusion. Thanks to The French Chef, amiably eccentric cooking teachers became a staple of the television airwaves.