Julia Child Pictures and the Story of a Master Chef
Known mainly for her quirky television cooking show appearances, Julia Child was a master of French cuisine. She was also the author of a well-known and critically-acclaimed cookbook published in 1961, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. A film was even made of her life in 2009, called "Julie and Julia," which tells the story of the parallel lives of a cooking blog writer and herself, played by Meryl Streep. Not only was Child a regular part of American TV viewership for many years, she would change the way women and men thought of cooking, and expand their horizons about cuisine and cooking.
As a young woman
Born in 1912 in Pasadena, California, Julia McWilliams was the daughter of a Princeton Graduate and a paper company heiress. She was the eldest of three children and would go to boarding school at Westridge Polytechnic in Pasadena. Following high school, she earned her Bachelor of Arts in History from Smith College in 1934. This photo here shows Julia at age 23, which would be the year after her graduation from Smith College.
A tall girl, Julia stood six feet, two inches and was active in sports, playing golf, tennis and basketball, a sport she would go on to play a Smith. After college, she worked as an advertising copywriter in New York City for a prominent home furnishings company, then went back to California in the late 1930s to write for local publications and to work once again in advertising. During World War II, Julia wanted to enlist in the Women's Army Corp., but found that she was too tall. So, she joined the Office of Strategic Services, where she worked directly for the head of office as a research assistant.
She also worked as a file clerk and later an assistant to development at the Emergency Rescue Equipment Section of the OSS in Washington, D.C. She was later posted in Asia where she worked with classified communications, and then on to China where she was awarded the Emblem of Meritorious Civilian Service.
From cooking student to cooking star
At the age of 34, Julia married Paul Cushing Child in 1946. after her husband joined the U.S. Foreign Service, the couple moved to Paris where she was introduced to fine cuisine. This would lead Julia into a life-long appreciation and love of French Food and she would go on to study at the famed Le Cordon Bleu school in Paris. In this photo here, Julia Child can be seen learning the skills that would eventually make her a household name,
In addition to her training at Le Cordon Bleu, she studied with master chefs and joined a women's cooking group called Cercle des Gourmettes. It was in the group that she met Simone Beck who with Louisettte Bertholle, was working on a French cookbook aimed at an American audience. Beck suggested that Child help with the book and the three would go on to teach a cooking class in Child's own kitchen. They called their informal school L'Ecole de Trois Gourmandes, or "The School of the Three Food Lovers."
After some travel through Europe, Child returned to the United States, settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts, yet continued to work with the other two women, testing and perfecting recipes. Child would translate the French instructions into English and make them usable to an American cooking audience. In 1961, the three woman published a book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The 734-page tome became a best seller and, afterward Child would become a columnist for The Boston Globe newspaper and articles for other magazines.
Julia Child meets America
After Child appeared on a Boston TV show, she was invited to do a regularly aired aired cooking show called "The French Chef" in 1963. The show became famous not only for its content, but also for the host's enthusiasm for cooking and for her unmistakably warbly voice. Though it was not the first television show on cooking, it was the most widely watched and it became the first TV show to be captioned for the deaf. The show would run for 10 years and win an Emmy and Peabody award.
Child went on to star in the shows Julia Child & Company and Dinner at Julia's which aired in the 1970s and 1980s. In this striking and somewhat humorous photo, taken in 1979 on the set of "Julia Child and Company," she can be seen holding up the tail of a rather large sea creature known as a monkfish.
While doing the cooking shows at this time, she also worked on her greatest cookbook, The Way to Cook. The book was published in 1989 and was different form her first in that she was the sole author, and it included not only French cuisine, but also traditional American dishes. After four printings in only the first month of its release, The Way to Cook is still on print today.
Continuing to cook
During the 1990s, Child continued with her cooking shows, with "Cooking with Master Chefs," "In Julia's Kitchen with Master Chefs," "Baking With Julia," and "Julia Child & Jacques Pepin Cooking at Home." One these shows, guest chefs would often appear, and all the while, she would continue writing cookbooks, even collaborating with the famous French chef, Jacques Pepin.
In one of her shows, which ran throughout the 1990s, she turned her own kitchen into a TV set, complete with lighting, and cooked from a large island in the center of the room. The island featured both an electric and gas range oven, while her own home stove remained untouched during filming. In 1996, Child appeared on the cover of Time magazine and she was even parodied on the sketch comedy show, "Saturday Night Live," where her character was played by Dan Aykroyd.
In 1994, Child's husband died and she moved into a retirement home a few years later. The cooking star donated her house to her alma mater and she died of kidney failure in 2004, only two days before she was to turn 92. Before she died, however, she was awarded the French Legion of Honor and the U.S Presidential Medal of Freedom. She also earned honorary doctorates from Smith College, Brown University, Harvard and several others.
I miss her! I still watch some of her older shows on PBS web site. As a child I would watch her on PBS. Every early evening she was on mon-fri. RIP Julia!