Julia Child

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Julia Child (1988)

Julia Child (born Julia Carolyn McWilliams ; born August 15, 1912 in Pasadena , California , † August 13, 2004 in Santa Barbara , California) was a well-known American cook and cookbook author who had her own cookery show. Together with MFK Fisher , Craig Claiborne and James Beard, she is considered to be one of the personalities who significantly influenced American culinary art and food culture between 1930 and 1970 . Her cooking program The French Chef , which was broadcast for the first time in 1963 and familiarized an audience of millions with French cuisine and its cooking techniques, had a great influence . Her best-known book is Mastering the Art of French Cooking , a coproduction with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle. It was largely influenced by La bonne cuisine de Madame E. Saint-Ange , first published in the early 1960s and is still published today. Childs cookbook classic has, in turn, influenced a number of other American chefs such as Ina Garten .

Julia Child, who grew up on the US west coast, found her way to the art of cooking relatively late. Because of her husband, who worked for the State Department of the United States , she lived in France in the 1950s and was significantly influenced by the culinary arts there. She studied at the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris. In 2000 she became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 2003, the then-handed president of the United States , George W. Bush , Child, the Medal of Freedom ( "The Presidential Medal of Freedom"), the highest civilian honor in the United States.

In 2009 the film comedy Julie & Julia by Nora Ephron was released , which tells the life story of Julia Child. Julia Child was played by Meryl Streep .

Childhood and youth

Julia Child was born in Pasadena, California to John and Julia McWilliams. Her two siblings John (1914–2002) and Dorothy (1917–2006) were born after her. Julia Child's family was wealthy and a domestic servant cooked for the family. The meals served for the family were New England influenced as Julia Child's mother was from New England . Julia Child later remembered that her grandmother was excellent at making chicken and donuts on her father's side . However, she herself showed no interest in cooking during her youth. The only culinary experience of her youth that stuck in her mind was a visit to the Caesar's Place restaurant in Tijuana , Mexico , where Cesare Cardini personally prepared Caesar Salad at her table . Julia Childs biographer Joan Reardon does not rule out that Julia Child's restaurant visit was so clearly remembered because this restaurant, where mariachi bands played and beer and cocktails were served, was so clearly different from the prohibitionist American restaurants difference.

Julia Child, who was 1.88 meters tall as a teenager, played tennis, golf and basketball and was a member of various sports teams at Smith College , which she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in history in 1934. After completing her degree, she worked for the advertising department of a furniture store in New York City . In 1937 she returned to California, where she wrote for various publishers and worked in the advertising business for the next four years.

Time of the Second World War

When the United States entered World War II , Julia Child moved to Washington . Because she was too tall to serve in the Women's Army Corps , she worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in the office of General William J. Donovan . However, working in Washington turned out to be less exciting than she had hoped, and she applied for the overseas service as soon as the opportunity arose. Together with a group that included anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Cora DuBois , she first traveled by ship to Australia and from there to India . She herself was transferred to Kandy , Sri Lanka , where she was responsible for the OSS archives. In Kandy she met Paul Child , who was responsible for setting up the command centers . Paul Child, ten years older than Julia Child, had traveled widely, spoke several languages, was an avid photographer and painter, and appreciated good food. Together with Gregory Bateson, Cora Du Bois, the ornithologist Sidney Dillon Ripley and the journalist Theodore White , they belonged to a group of friendly people who avoided what was perceived as boring canteen food to try the various regional specialties of Asian cuisine. By chance, both were transferred to Chongqing and then Kunming at almost the same time . Paul and Julia Child got along well, but were both unsure of the extent to which their mutual affection was due to the unusual situation of the war. After the war ended, Julia Child returned to California. She stayed in correspondence with Paul Child, then they met in Washington to find out if the mutual attraction was still there. On September 1, 1946, they finally married and moved to Washington. Julia Child had taken cooking classes in California to meet her husband's demanding tastes. However, Paul Child later recalled dinners that weren't served until 9 or 10 p.m. by his exhausted wife.

Paris

Early in 1948, Paul Child learned that he was being transferred to the United States Information Office in Paris. Paul Child had lived in Paris as a young man, where he met Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, among others . It was Julia Child's first stay in Europe. On November 3, 1948, the couple arrived in the port of Le Havre . Her first meal on French soil was in a restaurant in Rouen on the way to Paris. This meal, which consisted of oysters , sole meunière and excellent wine, was later referred to several times as a “revelation”. For a short time the couple lived in a hotel. Then they found an apartment on rue de l'Université. While her husband was working at the US embassy , Julia Child began brushing up on her college French at the Berlitz Institute . She spent the rest of the day exploring Paris. The couple were regular guests in the evening in restaurants such as L'Escargot or La Grille , which were among the leading restaurants in the French capital. Julia Child increasingly tried to prepare meals for herself and her husband. However, both agreed that Julia Childs culinary skills left a lot to be desired. Eventually she enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu . She was first assigned a cooking class aimed at inexperienced housewives. Julia Child, however, insisted on the management of the culinary school that she wanted more than a superficial introduction to French cuisine and aimed at a well-founded education. Eventually she succeeded in being accepted into the six-month cooking course, in which twelve former members of the US Army were supposed to acquire knowledge of French cuisine based on the GI Bill of Rights in order to later work in the restaurant business in the States. Classes started at seven in the morning and then lasted two or three hours. Julia Child then returned to the apartment to cook for herself and her husband and immediately put what she had learned into practice. Her sister Dorothy, who was visiting Paris at the time her sister was perfecting her hollandaise and bearnaise sauce , later reported that Julia Child's buttery experiments led to biliary colic in everyone involved.

Parisian baker in the 1950s

In the afternoon, Julia Child returned to Le Cordon Bleu to attend the cooking demonstrations to which Paris's leading chefs were invited. The teachers at the Cordon Bleu included Max Bugnard , a student of Escoffier, and the pastry chef Claude Thillmont , who had directed the pastry shop at the Café de Paris for many years. Julia Child later said about this time that she only found an activity in cooking that really interests her. The classic cookbook La bonne Cuisine de Madame E. Saint-Ange was one of her inspirations.

In 1949, Julia Child met Simone Beck at a cocktail party . Simone Beck shared Julia Child's passion for good cuisine, and Julia Child got on so well with the Frenchwoman that the two women agreed to meet for the next day to continue their discussion about food culture. A few days later, Simone Beck introduced Julia Child to her friend Louisette Bertholle and both women urged Julia Child to become a member of Le cercle des Gourmettes . The association, which only admitted women as members, organized lunches for its members at regular intervals, which were prepared by chefs who were specially invited for the occasion. The members of the association were allowed to be present during the preparation of the meal and to assist the cooks. The three women were some of the few members who took advantage of these opportunities, and the three women became increasingly close friends.

Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle had, at the suggestion of an American friend of Bertholle's, written a little booklet entitled "What's cooking in France", which was supposed to bring French cuisine closer to North Americans. The two women planned to develop this booklet into a comprehensive cookbook, which, like their little recipe booklet, would be published by Ives Washburn Publishing Company. In her opinion, Julia Child was the ideal match for translating the recipes into English and taking into account the cultural background of a North American audience. Since a large number of Americans lived in Paris who were very interested in learning more about French cuisine, the three first founded L'Ecole de Trois Gourmandes . The kitchen in the childs apartment served as a cooking studio.

First work on Mastering the Art of French Cooking

Julia Child was initially skeptical about the idea of ​​a joint cookbook, but increasingly came into the role of those who structured the project and led the negotiations with the North American publishing houses. As early as the fall of 1952, Julia Child had doubts that Ives Washburns Publishing Company was the right publisher for her increasingly ambitious project. When their first cookbook was published, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle did not even have the opportunity to proofread the proofs, the publisher had made little effort to market the booklet, there was no preliminary contract for the planned cookbook and none of the authors had yet a customary one Receive advance payment. Julia Child found a US attorney to represent her interests and asked Ives Washburns to return all manuscripts to translate and review them again. She was also the one who forced her co-authors to be clear about the scope and objectives of the planned cookbook. At that time, the authors were planning a five-volume work on French cuisine.

In the spring of 1953, Julia Child started a pen-friendship with Avis DeVoto by chance. DeVoto's husband, the historian Bernard DeVoto, had complained in a newspaper article about the shortage of decent kitchen knives in the United States. Julia Child had then sent him a French knife and an increasingly intensive correspondence with Avis DeVoto had developed from this. Avis DeVoto worked as a freelance editor for a Boston publishing house and increasingly became an unpaid literary agent for the three authors . Thanks to DeVoto's mediation, the writing team signed a pre-contract with Houghton Mifflin, a publishing house that had a little more experience in publishing cookbooks than Ives Washburn's Publishing.

During this time the first tensions with Louisette Bertholle arose. "You and I are the more straightforward types of cook," wrote Julia Child to Simone Beck after Louisette Bertholle had suggested again that a garnish idea should meet North American tastes. Julia Child's contribution to the cookbook consisted in large part in analyzing and understanding the basic ways of preparing the recipes proposed by Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle. Typical cookbooks of this time were mainly aimed at an audience that had cooking experience and was able to adapt a recipe if other ingredients or quantities required it. A US audience was not expected to be familiar with French cooking techniques, and a cookbook aimed at that audience would have to describe how to prepare it in detail, even if some readers had cooking experience. Julia Child went further than describing kitchen techniques in understandable steps. Basically a very systematic and structured personality, Julia Child wanted to understand what caused a sauce to flocculate or a soufflé to collapse. Whenever she studied the recipes of Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck, she aimed to find the preparation method that would give a good result with the greatest reliability. Without being aware of it, Julia Child laid the foundation for the success of the later cookbook. The recipes were more tried and tested than usual, and even a relatively inexperienced cook could count on achieving a presentable result if he followed the preparation steps. Julia Child also took into account the other kitchen equipment that distinguished a typical American kitchen from a French one. Electrical auxiliary devices such as mixers and kitchen appliances were increasingly finding their way into the US kitchens, and just as systematically as Julia Child investigated the safest way to prepare a hollandaise sauce , she investigated the possible uses of such kitchen devices . Even host of numerous dinner invitations, it was a matter of course for her to break down the recipes into easy-to-prepare steps, and almost every recipe from Mastering the Art of Cooking gives instructions on how a dish can be reheated just before serving.

Stay in Marseille and Bonn

Paul Child had already been transferred to the US consulate in Marseille in February 1953 . A direct collaboration with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle became more difficult. The friends exchanged mostly through letters. When choosing the new apartment, it was crucial that the kitchen was large enough to accommodate Julia Child's increasingly extensive collection of kitchen appliances and to enable her to work more comfortably. From their apartment they could overlook the port of Marseille and the market was not far from their apartment. The move also meant that the joint cookbook covered a wider spectrum than just the characteristic bourgeois cuisine from the Paris area and also reproduced characteristic recipes from Provence. In the late summer of 1954, Paul Child was transferred to the US embassy in Bonn . Julia Child used the two-month stay in the United States between the two transfers to examine the shopping opportunities of a typical US household. The list of things she put together to clear them up during her US stay included the size of turkeys being sold in US supermarkets, how far it was now normal for the typical American household to have frozen ones Groceries To Buy And The Differences Between The Flours Available In The United States And France. Julia Child also realized in the months back in the States how little Americans were familiar with the idea of ​​using wine or marinating meat in cooking.

HICOG settlement in Plittersdorf, photo from 1952

During their stay in Germany, the childs lived in the HICOG housing estate Plittersdorf , a residential complex in Bonn with a large, typically American supermarket, where many Americans lived. Unlike during her time in France, she didn't have a gas stove in Plittersdorf, but an electric stove, kitchen equipment that corresponded more to the average US household. Julia Child used her time in Plittersdorf to adapt the recipes that Simone Beck sent her to US purchasing conditions and cooking options. The move to Bonn also had the advantage that Julia Child was not directly involved in the dispute with Louisette Bertholle. While Julia Child and Simone Beck agreed that the cookbook explained basic French cuisine and that each recipe had to be carefully tested again and again until the perfect method of preparation was found, Louisette Bertholle had aimed at a much less laborious cooking. She became less and less involved in the work on the cookbook. With the help of lawyers, it was finally agreed that Louisette Bertholle should receive a smaller share of the royalties for the future cookbook, but that her name would appear in the same size on the cover. In the spring of 1956, Paul Child was informed that he would be transferred back to Washington in the fall.

Publication of Mastering the Art of French Cooking

Even after her return to the American east coast, Julia Child researched and tested recipes with Beck and Bertholle. In February 1958, the three authors submitted an 800-page manuscript to the publishing house Houghton Mifflin, with whom they had a preliminary contract. Several attempts by the authors to shorten and simplify the book failed, which is why the publisher finally rejected the book project in 1959.

Child then submitted the revised manuscript to William Koshland of Alfred A. Knopf, where the first volume of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" was finally published in 1961. The 726-page cookbook was a bestseller and was almost exclusively received positively. The American restaurant critic Craig Claiborne called it "probably the most extensive, praiseworthy and monumental work on the subject", written "uncompromisingly and not condescendingly".

Following the success of her first book, Child wrote numerous articles and a regular column for the Boston Globe .

TV career and other publications

After Child demonstrated the preparation of an omelette in a book show on the Boston TV station WGBH-TV in 1962 and the station received enthusiastic letters, WGBH-TV decided to produce its own cooking show with her. The French Chef was initially only broadcast in the Boston area. From 1963 the program was broadcast nationwide and in 1966 was the first educational program to be awarded an Emmy . A total of 200 episodes of The French Chef were produced between 1962 and 1973 , starting in 1972 as the first US program with subtitles for the hearing impaired.

In 1968 Child published a collection of her recipes from the show under the title "The French Chef Cookbook", followed two years later - together with co-author Simone Beck - the second volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

In the 1970s and 1980s, other television programs such as Julia Child & Company , Julia Child & More Company and Dinner at Julia's followed, as well as nearly twenty other books - some with co-authors. In 1989 Julia Child published the book The Way To Cook , four years earlier six one-hour video instructions had been published under the same title.

Julia Child's kitchen, where the first three of her television shows were recorded, is on display today at the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC.

Final years of life and legacy

2001 Child moved into an assisted living community for seniors in California and left her home and office in Cambridge (Massachusetts) the Smith College . Her marriage to Paul, who had since passed away, had remained childless.

On August 12, 2004, Child died of kidney failure three days before her 92nd birthday in Montecito, California. Her last meal was French onion soup.

With Child's death, her foundation, The Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and Culinary Arts , began operations. Child founded this private charity foundation in 1995 to continue her life's work. With grants and grants, the foundation finances, among other things, research on the history of culinary art and gastronomic training.

In 2006 the last book Julia Childs was published posthumously, which she had written together with her great-nephew Alex Prud'homme. The autobiographical work My Life in France covers Child's life in France after World War II.

Books

literature

  • Joan Reardon: MFK Fisher, Julia Child and Alice Waters - Celebrating the pleasures of the table , Harmony Books, New York 1994, ISBN 0-517-57748-8
  • Betty Fussel: Masters of American Cookery: MFK Fisher, James Beard, Craig Claiborne, Julia Child , University of Nebraska Press, 2005, ISBN 0-8032-6920-X
  • Bob Spitz: Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child. Knopf, New York 2012, ISBN 978-0-307-27222-5 (biography)

Web links

Commons : Julia Child  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Single receipts

  1. ↑ Lint, pp. V - VII
  2. ↑ AAAS membership directory. (PDF) Retrieved July 23, 2016 (English).
  3. ^ Farewell, "French Chef" . Smith College . Fall 2004. Retrieved January 6, 2011.
  4. ^ Child, Julia, Prud'homme, Alex: My Life in France . Random House, 2006, ISBN 978-0-307-27769-5 , p. 85.
  5. ↑ Amanda Hesser: The Way We Eat: Sauced in Translation . In: The New York Times . December 11, 2005, ISSN  0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed September 19, 2015]).
  6. ↑ February 1958 - Julia Child Foundation. Retrieved May 5, 2018 (American English).
  7. ↑ Calvin Tomkins: Good Cooking . In: The New Yorker . July 21, 2014, ISSN  0028-792X ( newyorker.com [accessed May 5, 2018]).
  8. ↑ Julia Child's rejection letter from Houghton Mifflin . In: Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University . August 14, 2012 ( harvard.edu [accessed May 5, 2018]).
  9. ↑ Calvin Tomkins: Good Cooking . In: The New Yorker . July 21, 2014, ISSN  0028-792X ( newyorker.com [accessed May 5, 2018]).
  10. ^ Child, Paul, 1902-1994, Walton, Albie ,: From Julia Child's kitchen . Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, ISBN 0-14-046371-2 .
  11. ↑ Timeline . In: Julia Child Foundation . ( juliachildfoundation.org [accessed May 5, 2018]).
  12. ^ Barr, Nancy Verde: In Julia's kitchen with master chefs . 1st ed. Knopf, New York 1995, ISBN 0-679-43896-3 .
  13. ^ Julia Child's Kitchen (text only). Retrieved May 5, 2018 .
  14. ↑ JULIA CHILD: 1912-2004 / TV's French chef taught us how to cook with panache . In: SFGate . ( sfgate.com [accessed May 5, 2018]).
  15. ↑ By Elaine Woo: TV Chef Julia Child Dead at 91.Retrieved May 5, 2018 .
  16. ↑ Grants . In: Julia Child Foundation . ( juliachildfoundation.org [accessed May 5, 2018]).
  17. ↑ Jean-Martin Büttner: Sex in the pan. In: Tages-Anzeiger of October 4, 2012
  • Joan Reardon: MFK Fisher, Julia Child and Alice Waters - Celebrating the pleasures of the table , Harmony Books, New York 1994
  1. ↑ p. 113 and p. 114
  2. ↑ p. 115
  3. ↑ p. 118
  4. ↑ p. 118 and p. 119
  5. ↑ p. 120
  6. ↑ a b c p. 121
  7. ↑ a b c d p. 122
  8. ↑ a b p. 123
  9. ↑ a b c p. 125
  10. ↑ p. 126
  11. ↑ a b p. 127
  12. ↑ a b p. 128
  13. ↑ p. 129
personal data
SURNAME Child, Julia
ALTERNATIVE NAMES McWilliams, Julia Carolyn (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American cook and cookbook author
DATE OF BIRTH August 15, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Pasadena
DATE OF DEATH August 13, 2004
Place of death Santa Barbara