Invited to the studio to discuss her first book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking , she brought along eggs and utensils to make an on-the-air omelet for the television host.
Her breezy manner, unique voice, and relaxed chatter made her an instant hit and launched her acclaimed television series, The French Chef. After the war she married Paul Cushing Child, a diplomat with the foreign service. Her husband was soon posted to France and en route to Paris, he took her to the oldest restaurant in the country, La Couronne.
This was her first experience with classical French cuisine and she fell in love. That reminded me of what it was like to spend time with Julia, how it always seemed as if Paul were in the next room, that he would appear at any minute, pull up a chair and join you at the table.
Until she met her future husband, Julia had never given much thought to food on her own she made do with frozen food. She learned to cook to please Paul, attempting to seduce him with her kitchen prowess; she liked to tell the story of how she had, in her early attempts at cooking, exploded a duck and set the oven on fire. Girls of her class did not cook—there were servants to do that—and they certainly did not do it professionally.
At 6-foot-2, however, husbands were not easy to find, and after graduation from Smith College, Julia McWilliams ended up in New York, sharing an apartment with two friends, writing ad copy.
She played a great deal of golf and joined the Junior League. For someone with her drive, intelligence and energy, this little life must have been a nightmare, and when the war came along she happily joined the OSS, propelled as much by boredom as by patriotism. By then she was already in spinster territory—the dread 30s.
But the real adventure began when she met Paul. It changed her life—and, by extension, ours. Paul loved highly spiced and garlicky dishes, and she was never one to do things by half measures. She enrolled in a professional cooking school—the Cordon Bleu—and then started a school of her own.
By the time Paul left the diplomatic corps in , she had been working on what would become Mastering the Art of French Cooking for nine years, and the couple moved into their new house in Cambridge with little money and few expectations. To save money, Paul designed the kitchen himself. Mindful that his tall wife had been stooping in their tiny European kitchens a picture he took in their Paris kitchen shows her stirring a pot almost at the level of her knees , Paul raised the counters.
Aware of her passion for order, he figured out the perfect place for every pot and pan and drew its outline on the pegboard; a blind person could cook in this kitchen. But Julia set a standard for far more than a genre that has grown exponentially ever since. She made sophisticated cooking techniques accessible while promoting the art of cooking to men and women alike. She was a funny, witty and debonair character who charmed all who knew her - even if just by her television appearances.
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