Julia Child
by Wendy Jiang
"Freshness is essential, it makes all the difference.” Julia Child rose to prominence after
her straightforward recipes for the American public. Since the rise of fast food restaurants, fried twinkies, and the overly processed foods in grocery stores, little of our food or meals today consists of fresh foods. While Swanson TV dinners rose in American diets, Julia Child upgraded the culture of food through her TV show, “The French Chef.” Julia Child impacted American cooking by giving people an appreciation of classic cooking as an art form, changing everyday life.
Julia Child was born by the name of Julia McWilliams on August 15, 1912 in Pasadena, California. She was the oldest out of three siblings – John III and Dorothy Dean were younger. In 1930, Julia Child enrolled at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts where she wanted to become a writer. She submitted some of her writings but they were never published. She then moved to New York and worked for a home furnishing company W&J Sloane but was fired for gross insubordination. In 1941, Julia Child moved to Washington D.C, she volunteered to be a research assistant for the Office of Strategic Services. While playing a key role in the communication of top secret documents between the U.S government, Julia started a relationship with a fellow OSS employee – Paul Child. He was an artist, poet, traveled the world and spoke flawless French. Paul and Julia were married on September 1, 1946 in Washington, D.C.
The show felt less like TV than like hanging around the kitchen, but comforting in its familiarity: the clanking of pots and pans, the squeal of an oven door in need of WD-40, all the kitchen chemistry set spectacles of transformation. The show was taped live and broadcast uncut and unedited, so it had a vérité feel completely unlike anything you might see today on the Food Network, with its frenetic editing and hyperkinetic soundtracks of rock music and clashing knives. While Julia waited for the butter foam to subside in the sauté pan, you waited, too,precisely as long, listening to Julia’s improvised patter over the hiss of her pan, as she filled the desultory minutes with kitchen tips and lore. Food television, now rote to the American public, was a relatively new phenomenon in the mid-to-late twentieth century. She brought consciousness of a finer rank of cuisine to the widest possible audience. Beyond merely empowering the home cook to attempt a rack of lamb or soufflé, Child essentially reminded her viewing public that something better—something more sophisticated, food with greater potential and integrity—was out there, along with a generation of young, ambitious, inspired chefs. Chefs who followed in the wake of her success encountered an increasingly eager dining public who were newly devoted to the experience of cuisine. Child had a pivotal role in the success of generations of chefs around the world by endeavoring to bridge the gap between the cloistered traditions of classical French cuisine and the capabilities of the home cook. In bridging this uncharted gulf between an effectively non-culinary public and professional French chefs, Child opened generations of palates to the sublime potential of fine cuisine.
16