Today would have been Julia Child’s hundredth birthday, and her many fans and admirers have rallied to commemorate her with a new biography, a Google doodle, at least one silly tribute video, and a number of non-silly, moving tributes. Child’s centennial provides an opportunity to look back at the enormous impact she made on American pop culture, from Dan Aykroyd’s bloody sendup on “Saturday Night Live” to Meryl Streep’s uncanny turn in Nora Ephron’s 2009 film, “Julie & Julia.” But perhaps the best way to remember Julia is by looking back at images and words of Julia herself, because she is one of those rare stars who is somehow better in reality than in the popular imagination. No matter how many times one hears about how charismatic, how natural and unembarrassed, or how funny and charming she was, seeing Julia onscreen or hearing her talk about food always surpasses those expectations—she’s so perfectly Julia every time. Here is a list of essential Julia Child material to remember the culinary icon on her centennial.
WGBH’s show “The French Chef,” which aired from 1963 to 1973, made Julia a TV personality. Only short clips from the show are available online, as in this classic snippet from her chicken episode, in which Julia introduces a troop of birds of varying shapes and sizes like a platoon officer calling her men to attention. As wonderful as her later PBS show with Jacques Pépin was (see below), watching Julia on her original TV show is a total revelation, especially for those who know her but haven’t dived into the archives to see her in her TV heyday.
Julia and her friend and fellow French chef Jacques Pépin cooked side-by-side in the 1999 PBS series “Julia and Jacques: Cooking At Home.” (Full episodes are available on Hulu.) This splices together clips from the show that highlight the always entertaining, always good-natured disagreements that Jacques and Julia frequently had in the kitchen—about whether to wash chicken before cooking it, how to make a roux, or the merits of Jacques’s spinach. “I think it’s very tender,” says Jacques, shooting an imploring look at the camera. “Maybe you have sharper teeth than I do,” says Julia.
“My Life In France,” Julia’s memoir about living in France with her husband, Paul Child, was written with Paul’s great-nephew, Alex Prud’homme and published posthumously, in 2006. In the book, which formed the “Julia” half of the film “Julie & Julia,” Julia recounts her transition from blue-blooded California girl to full-blown Francophile and master chef. “Those early years in France were among the best of my life,” Julia writes. “They marked a crucial period of transformation, in which I found my true calling, experienced an awakening of the senses, and had such fun that I hardly stopped moving long enough to catch my breath.” You can read Prud’homme’s forward and Julia’s intro in an excerpt here.
Calvin Tomkins’s profile of Child, published in this magazine, in 1974, captures Julia as an established TV personality preparing for a cooking demonstration at the Kabuki Theater, in San Francisco. The piece also traces Julia’s early aspirations (she wanted to become a woman novelist), her time serving in the O.S.S., her first cooking classes at the Cordon Bleu alongside ex-G.I.s, in 1949, and the making of her tome, “Mastering the Art Of French Cooking,” on which she worked for a decade. The piece captures Julia’s quirks and charms, but also gives a sense of the diligence and hard work she put into her career. “A great deal of scholarship underlies that breezy self-assurance on camera,” writes Tomkins. “She can afford to appear casual, because she knows precisely what she is doing.”
This 1990 piece in the New York Times reports on Julia’s response to critics who, at the time, were attacking her for her liberal use of fat in her cooking (“If you’re afraid of butter, use cream” is Julia’s famous line). “The dinner table is becoming a trap rather than a pleasure,” Julia complains to an audience. She defends her approach to food in typically shameless style (“I remember a wonderful recipe for spinach. You put in as much butter as the spinach could possibly hold.”), but also calls for a “more sensible” approach: “something of everything in moderation,” she says. Her 1989 book, “The Way To Cook,” even contained tips for healthy eating.
One of the best displays of Julia’s off-the-cuff sense of humor and utter composure and naturalness before the camera is this footage from her appearance on “The Late Show with David Letterman.” She goes on the show to demonstrate how to make a hamburger but, on discovering that the burner was broken, seamlessly decides she’ll make a beef tartare instead and, after topping it with shredded cheese, breaks out a blowtorch to give the top a “gratinee” finish. The best part, though, is when Letterman asks Julia what she does when her food turns out badly. “Oh, I give it to my husband,” she says without skipping a beat.
