THE EVENTS IN Julia’s Cats are based on original letters, photos, and other documents in the Papers of Julia Child, 1925–1993, at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, and on interviews and material from private collections.
All quotations in the text are from Julia’s letters, Paul Child’s letter-diary to his twin brother, Charles Child, from 1948 to 1977, and the personal correspondence of Julia Child with Simone (Simca) Beck et al. from 1965 to 1982. Simca’s letters to Julia have been translated from the French by the authors. We are grateful to the Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts and to the Schlesinger Library for permission to publish these excerpts from the collection.
1 Julia responded to many requests for “a last meal”; this description is based on a column by restaurateur George Lang and quoted in Laura Shapiro, Julia Child: A Life (New York: Viking Penguin, 2007), 175. Julia’s actual last meal: interview, Stephanie Hersh.
2 Colette at the Palais Royal: Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme, My Life in France (New York: Knopf, 2006), 52–53.
3 Presents first Cordon Bleu dinner with cat on her shoulder: Noël Riley Fitch, Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (New York: Anchor Books, 1999), 175.
4 Mrs. Child did “not have any great natural talent for cooking.”: Fitch, 180.
5 “Maybe the cat has fallen into the stew…”: Child and Prud’homme, 71.
6 Julia and Simca’s shared cat: Simone Beck with Suzanne Patterson, Food and Friends: Recipes and Memories from Simca’s Cuisine (New York: Penguin, 1991), 300.
7 “Paul Child, the man who is always there…”: Julia Child, The French Chef Cookbook (New York: Knopf, 1968), xvi.
8 Julia might have become a feline vet: Lisa McKinnon, “To Market with Julia,” Ventura County Star, March 3, 2003, http://www.vcstar.com/news/2002/Mar/03/to-market-with-julia, accessed March 12, 2012, quoted with author’s permission.