Too tall to join the military, she moved to Washington in 1942 and found a job as a typist in the War Information Office. She was searching for meaning in her life, she told her biographer, Noel Riley Fitch. She dated Harrison Chandler, whose father Harry was publisher of the Los Angeles Times, but turned down his proposal of marriage. When she was 25, her mother died, and she came home again. Sloane in New York and had some pieces published in the New Yorker. So, with thoughts of being a novelist, she went East, where she got a job writing advertising copy for W.J. Her height was a disadvantage in the dating game. Less a scholar than the life of the party, she graduated college with a C average, then returned to Pasadena where she tried to immerse herself in the rituals of her social class: joining the Junior League and finding a husband. She attended private schools-Polytechnic in Pasadena, Katharine Branson School for Girls in Mill Valley, and Smith College, her mother’s alma mater. Fortunately, Julia had the “appetite of a wolf” and was always hungry. On the cook’s night off, Julia’s mother took over but her efforts were not inspiring: baking powder biscuits, codfish balls and welsh rarebit were mainstays. 15, 1912, Julia McWilliams was the oldest of three children of a patrician Pasadena family who remembered the kitchen of her youth as “a dismal place.” Her parents employed a series of cooks who turned out the standard meat-and-potatoes fare of the day. Her love of gastronomy was not bred at home. If there was any one lesson of Julia’s, that was it,” said chef Patrick Healy. She would just dig into food, swab her plate with a piece of bread. “I can remember eating with her in the great, three-star restaurants of France. In Julia Child’s world, cooking and eating were, above all, about having a good time. She crusaded against the minimalist tendencies of nouvelle cuisine for years. Pro-butter, pro-salt, pro-fat, and pro-red meat in moderation, Child prided herself as the loyal opposition of “food terrorists,” believing their alarms about cholesterol, calories and contaminants would deprive the palate of joyful tastes. ![]() The occasion also was marked by a display of Child’s old Cambridge kitchen, reassembled at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. Her 90th birthday in August 2002 was celebrated by foodies at parties around the country, including at Copia, the wine and food museum in Napa, Calif., that named its centerpiece dining room Julia’s Kitchen. ![]() But by making them and fixing them, she made everyone realize that’s OK.” Said Sara Moulton, a former prep cook for Child before becoming executive chef of Gourmet magazine and a cooking-show host on the cable Food Network. “Never apologize” was her steadfast rule.Īlong the way, Child introduced Americans to the tools of good cooking and to a bounty of unfamiliar foods, launching stampedes to kitchen supply stores and supermarkets for copper bowls and wire whisks, goose liver and leeks. ![]() But, reminding audiences that “you are alone in the kitchen and no one can see you,” Child just sailed the dishes to the table as if nothing was amiss. And, after struggling mightily to carve a roast suckling pig, she set down the knife, rested her hands on the table and, looking straight into the camera, admitted defeat. She pulled a souffle from the oven that promptly collapsed. One time, she accidentally flipped a potato pancake onto the floor. Throughout the piece, Ackroyd trilled and warbled in the distinctive falsetto that millions of Americans instantly recognized.ĭelighted by the spoof, Child was the first to admit that cooking was often messy and its results imperfect. In a classic “Saturday Night Live” skit, comedian Dan Ackroyd blew large her foibles, showing her blithely chattering about chicken giblets and livers despite chopping off her finger and drenching the kitchen in blood. By the late 1970s, Child was an American icon, ripe for parody.
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