For Women’s History Month this year, I’m presenting a children’s cooking program on Julia Child. In preparing for the program, I learned so much about her fascinating life! She grew up in California in the early 1900s, attending boarding school and playing sports. When World War II broke out, she tried to enlist in the Army (WACS) and Navy (WAVES), but was too tall, so she joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, a precursor to the CIA). She handled top-secret documents and invented a shark repellant to try and keep divers and sharks safe around underwater mines.
When Julia was assigned to work in China, she met another OSS employee, Paul Child; they bonded over their love of food and eating and eventually got married. When he joined the United States Foreign Service after the war, they were posted in France. Julia fell in love with French food and attended Le Cordon Bleu cooking school to learn to make it herself. She joined French cooks Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle and created a cooking school (L’école des Trois Gourmandes) run out of her Paris apartment. They wrote the bestselling two-volume cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking, with Julia extensively testing each recipe over and over again, making the directions concise and replicable for an American audience.
In 1962, Julia began hosting a public access cooking show called The French Chef. Former soldiers missed the food from where they’d been stationed during the war, and French cuisine was only available at fancy restaurants. She taught generations of Americans how to cook it at home. The show was filmed live-to-tape, so accidents and mishaps were made into part of the show. Julia became the most famous chef in the country; she was entertaining, relatable, and she really wanted you to succeed.
In one episode, she made a speech that really spotlights her philosophy in the kitchen:
If you’re going to have a sense of fear of failure, you’re just never gonna learn how to cook. Because cooking, is, well, lots of it! It’s one failure after another, and that’s how you finally learn. For instance, you’ve got to have developed what the French call je m’en foutisme, or ‘I don’t care what happens.’ The sky can fall, and omelets can go all over the stove. I’m gonna learn, I shall overcome! It’s sort of women’s liberation, and everything like that.
Julia Child kept cooking all her life, with more cookbooks and TV shows, by herself or paired with other famous chefs. Because she didn’t learn to cook until her late 30s, she always advocated for learning new things. As I teach kids simple cooking lessons at the library, I am inspired by a foreword she wrote for her cookbook Julia Child & Company about the Montessori method (Maria Montessori is another great Women’s History Month mention) for teaching children in the kitchen. She continues to have books, movies, and TV series made about her life, and I love introducing new people to her story!
Kelly is a Customer Service Lead at OCLS
