She’s the culinary genius behind mutterhood’s favorite Thanksgiving appetizer — cheddar Goldfish crackers served in silver bowls — but of course Julia Child is famous for more than that one perfect pairing.
Julia brought French cuisine to American households in the 1950s and 1960s as a cooking teacher, cookbook author, and the first celebrity television chef. And while it was French cuisine that made her famous, Julia led a very different life before she arrived in Paris in 1946.
Born in California in 1912, Julia was the oldest of three children. Her mother was a paper heiress and her father a land manager and Princeton graduate; her maternal grandfather had at one time been the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts.
She attended boarding school, where at over six feet tall she excelled at sports, and graduated from Smith College in 1934. After moving to New York to work in advertising, Julia tried to enlist in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) and then the Navy’s WAVES at the beginning of World War II, but she was rejected for being too tall. Instead, she joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and moved to Washington, DC, where she began work as a typist.
It wasn’t long before Julia was tapped as a research assistant in the Secret Intelligence division, working directly for the head of the OSS, General William J. Donovan. In 1944 she was posted to what is now Sri Lanka to catalog highly classified communications of the OSS’s top-secret stations in Asia. A year later she posted to Kumming, China, where the OSS awarded her the Emblem of Meritorious Civilian Service for her work.
It was in Kumming where she met her husband, Paul Cushing Child, who also worked for the OSS. They were married on Sept. 1, 1946; two years later Paul accepted a position with the US Foreign Service, and the couple was stationed in Paris where Paul worked as an exhibits officer with the US Information Agency.
Paul had lived in Paris before, and he was happy to share his appreciation of fine wine and French cuisine with his new wife. Julia famously recalled her first taste of oysters and sole meuniére as a revelation, and with Paul at work and nothing to do she began to cook, shop and sample everything the Paris markets had to offer.
She enrolled in the famous Cordon Bleu school in Paris in 1951, studying French cooking with Max Bugnard and other master chefs. She also joined Le Cercle des Gourmettes, a women’s cooking club, where she met Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle; together the three women started a cooking school for American women that they ran out of Julia’s Paris kitchen. They also began to write a French cookbook that would appeal to American chefs.
The book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, was published in 1961; Julia would go on to publish 18 books in all, including My Life in France, which was finished by her grand-nephew and published after she died.
Julia and Paul returned to Cambridge, Mass., after he was recalled from Europe, and in 1962 she appeared on Boston public television to demonstrate how to cook an omelette. She was such a hit that she developed her own show, The French Chef, which debuted in 1963 and ran for 10 years.
Her live cooking demonstrations, obsessive use of butter, and joie de vivre when it came to cooking drew a huge, loyal following; the show itself earned three Emmy awards, one Peabody, and countless parodies. She continued to host her own specials and to make guest appearances through the 1990s, the last of which was cooking with Jacques Pepin and other master chefs on his PBS show.
Julia died on Aug. 13, 2004. During her life she had been awarded the French Legion of Honor, the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, and honorary doctorates from universities around the world. She donated her Cambridge house and office to Smith College, and her kitchen to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. She also founded the Julia Child Foundation, which among other activities grants money to support non-profits in the culinary arts.
Both volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking are still in print, despite criticism in this Food Network world that the recipes are too complicated and fussy. In 2015, The Daily Telegraph ranked it as the second best cookbook of all time.
If you’re interested, the government declassified the OSS files in 2008. While some are hard copy only, Julia’s complete file is available online.
Photo by Lynn Gilbert