Julia Child

Julia Carolyn McWilliams was born on August 15, 1912, in Pasadena, California, the eldest of three children in a prosperous family. Her father, John McWilliams Jr., managed land holdings and investments, and her mother, Julia Carolyn Weston, came from a wealthy Massachusetts family. The household employed a cook, so the young Julia grew up with little reason or opportunity to learn her way around a stove ^[1].

She was tall from childhood, eventually reaching six feet two inches, and she channeled her energy into sports: tennis, golf, and basketball. She attended Katharine Branson School in Ross, California, and then Smith College in Massachusetts, where she graduated in 1934 with a degree in history ^[2]. At Smith she played basketball and wrote for campus publications, and she left with vague ambitions of becoming a novelist.

After college she moved to New York City and took a job as a copywriter in the advertising department of the home furnishings company W. and J. Sloane. Nothing in these years suggested a future in food. She later returned to California, and by her late twenties she was still searching for work that felt like a calling ^[1].

The Second World War redirected her life. Too tall for the Women's Army Corps and the Navy's WAVES program, she joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime intelligence agency that preceded the CIA. She began as a typist in Washington, D.C., and rose to become a research assistant handling classified files ^[3].

In 1944 the OSS posted her to Kandy, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where she ran the registry of a secret intelligence station, and later to Kunming, China. Among her colleagues was Paul Cushing Child, an OSS officer ten years her senior who had lived in Paris and cared deeply about food, art, and photography. Their friendship grew slowly across two continents ^[3].

Julia and Paul married on September 1, 1946, after the war ended. Any account of Julia Child facts has to reckon with how decisive this marriage was: Paul's palate and his eventual Foreign Service posting to France gave her the setting in which her real career began ^[1].

In 1948 the State Department assigned Paul Child to the United States Information Service in Paris. Julia later described her first French meal, sole meuniere at a restaurant in Rouen on the drive from Le Havre, as a revelation. She was thirty six years old and, by her own admission, barely able to cook ^[2].

She enrolled at the famous Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris, studying alongside former servicemen on the GI Bill, and trained privately with chef Max Bugnard. She passed her examinations in 1951 and soon joined Le Cercle des Gourmettes, a women's gastronomic club, where she met Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle ^[4]. The three began teaching American women in Paris through an informal school they called L'Ecole des Trois Gourmandes.

Beck and Bertholle had been working on a French cookbook aimed at Americans, and they invited Julia to join as the collaborator who understood American kitchens, American ingredients, and American impatience. The project consumed nearly a decade. Julia tested recipes obsessively as the Childs moved with Paul's postings to Marseille, Bonn, and Oslo, adjusting French techniques for supermarket ingredients and standard home ovens ^[4].

Alfred A. Knopf published Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 1961, after another publisher had rejected an earlier, longer version. The 734 page volume, credited to Beck, Bertholle, and Child, broke French technique into precise, patiently explained steps. Craig Claiborne praised it in The New York Times, and it became one of the most influential cookbooks ever published in the United States ^[5]. A second volume, written with Beck alone, followed in 1970.

Television turned the book's author into a national figure. In 1962 Julia appeared on a book review program on WGBH, Boston's public television station, and whisked eggs for an omelet on air. Viewer response persuaded the station to give her a show. The French Chef premiered in February 1963 and ran for about a decade, more than 200 episodes in all, eventually in color and carried by public stations across the country ^[6].

The honors that followed rank high among Julia Child achievements. She won a Peabody Award in 1965 and, in 1966, became the first educational television personality to win an Emmy. Time magazine put her on its cover that year under the title Our Lady of the Ladle ^[6]. Later series included Julia Child and Company, Dinner at Julia's, and collaborations with chef Jacques Pepin, and her books eventually numbered more than a dozen, among them The French Chef Cookbook, From Julia Child's Kitchen, and The Way to Cook ^[2].

She also helped build institutions. In the 1980s she co-founded the American Institute of Wine and Food with vintner Robert Mondavi and others, and she supported the creation of a gastronomy program at Boston University, reflecting her belief that cooking deserved serious study ^[7].

Julia and Paul Child had no children, and their marriage functioned as a close working partnership for nearly five decades. Paul photographed her dishes, drew illustrations for her work, designed the famous pegboard kitchen in their Cambridge, Massachusetts home, and managed much of the practical side of her career after leaving the Foreign Service ^[1].

Their correspondence with Paul's twin brother Charles, later collected in the book As Always, Julia and drawn upon by biographers, documents daily life in postwar Paris and the slow making of the cookbook. The couple also built a small house, La Pitchoune, on Simone Beck's family property in Provence, where they spent long working holidays ^[3].

Julia was a breast cancer survivor, having undergone a mastectomy in 1968, and she spoke plainly about it at a time when many public figures did not. Paul suffered a series of strokes beginning in 1989 and died in 1994. Julia continued to work, travel, and appear on television well into her eighties ^[2].

In her final decade Julia remained remarkably productive. She taped Cooking with Master Chefs in the early 1990s, then the series Baking with Julia, and in 1999 she and Jacques Pepin filmed Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home, which won a Daytime Emmy. Their televised debates over butter, salt, and technique became part of her late public persona ^[2].

In 2001 she left Cambridge for a retirement community in Montecito, near Santa Barbara, California, and donated her house to Smith College. Her Cambridge kitchen, cabinets, pegboards, appliances, and all, went to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, where it opened to the public in 2002 and remains a popular exhibit ^[8].

The honors continued: she was named a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor in 2000 and received the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2003. Julia Child died of kidney failure on August 13, 2004, in Santa Barbara, two days before her ninety second birthday ^[5]. Her memoir of the Paris years, My Life in France, written with her grandnephew Alex Prud'homme, appeared posthumously in 2006.

Any Julia Child biography ends with influence rather than recipes. She arrived on American screens when convenience foods dominated home kitchens, and she argued, by demonstration rather than lecture, that ordinary people could master demanding techniques. Generations of American chefs, food writers, and television cooks have cited her as the person who made the profession imaginable ^[7].

Her presence shaped the format of food television itself: unscripted, forgiving of mistakes, and centered on teaching. When a potato pancake flip went wrong on camera, she famously carried on, and that unflappable candor became a model. Dan Aykroyd's affectionate 1978 Saturday Night Live parody, which she reportedly enjoyed, confirmed how deeply she had entered popular culture ^[6].

Her story keeps being retold. Julie Powell's blog about cooking through Mastering the Art of French Cooking led to the 2009 film Julie and Julia, with Meryl Streep earning an Academy Award nomination for playing her, and the movie sent the 48 year old cookbook onto bestseller lists again ^[5]. The Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts, which she established before her death, funds food writing and culinary education, and the Julia Child Award honors people who have improved how Americans cook and eat ^[7].