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Julia Child presents the Chicken Sisters
Miss Broiler, Miss Fryer,
Miss Roaster, Miss Caponette,
Miss Stewer and old Madam Hen.
But we're spotlighting Miss Roaster of the Year.
Manage to get in between the vertebrae.
Give it a big tie. Good and tight.
Slice right down.
It should have a butter massage.
It gets right into that skin,
and it gives it a lovely flavor,
and it helps it brown nicely.
French food is just wonderful.
I hadn't been turned on by anything
until I really got into French food.
You can poach it or you can roast it
the old-fashioned way in the oven,
or you can roast it on the spit.
I find that if people aren't interested in food,
I'm not very much interested in them.
They seem to lack something in the way of personality.
I'm gonna turn this chicken around
so that whenever you think of roast chicken,
you think of it this way.
I just love that food.
I could eat nothing but that the rest of my life.
She's one of the most distinctive
personalities that television has presented, ever.
Julia Child.
PRUD'HOMME: Julia was more than a cook.
She was a cultural force.
She changed America.
I think Julia introduced us
to a world of food.
She made it look like it was fun.
Today, you have rock star chefs.
Julia is the first.
She's Madonna.
Like, she's the first that does all of that.
Julia was a pop icon.
I'm Julia Child.
You could say "Julia,"
and everybody knew it was Julia Child.
I didn't start
on television till I was in my 50s.
Just by chance, I got onto television.
I seemed to be the right woman at the right time.
...behind me in this unassuming concrete building,
filled with the tools
of a remarkable industry called television.
I was a producer-director of WGBH,
the public television station in the Boston viewing area.
I was there in the office, and the phone rang.
And it was a woman
with this kind of a gasping, strange,
very, very distinctive voice.
And she said,
"I would like to request
a hot plate be provided
for Mr. Duhamel's program that I will appear on tonight."
It was the book review program calledI've Been Reading.
She was going to talk about her book,
Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
I said, "I'll pass that along, madam,
but I just have to say that it's highly unusual."
MALE ANNOUNCER This series is presented by WGBH-TV Boston.
Few people in those days
watched educational television.
How can we find the size of the Earth?
We had some distinguished
faculty members who would explain high-energy physics
and high-energy literature.
The Wrath of Achilles
an introduction to The Iliad.
All readers of The Iliad have felt the deep contrast
between the bleak camp life of the Greeks
and the warm domestic atmosphere
of the scenes inside Troy.
I mean, there was some pretty heavy going.
So I pointed out to her
that we don't really do much in terms of demonstrations.
She said, "Well, I will still need that hot plate."
She made a proper omelet
in a proper omelet pan that night.
And the host was blown away by its lightness and its taste.
You have to understand, in those days,
no one had an omelet pan in metro Boston.
If you were to say, "Go out and get some leeks,"
we wouldn't know what-- Where to start.
Or a garlic press.
MALE ANNOUNCER Smart mother.
Plenty of time when you keep Swanson TV Brand Dinners
in the freezer.
No more than 25 minutes,
serve a meal that rivals real home cooking.
- Taste pretty good? - Delicious.
American food was focused on
convenience foods-- Frozen items, canned items.
- -that were all being advertised
and touted as great ways to save time.
Everywhere,
there was packaged, processed, frozen,
under-plastic, in-boxes food.
It was all very... not recognizable.
FEMALE ANNOUNCER Just pop them into the frying pan
with a little water
to produce mouthwatering fried potatoes in minutes.
People discovered "canned soup as sauce."
Pour it over the chicken, fish, whatever,
and that was your sauce.
Americans were eating
Jell-O salads,
and it might have chopped-up carrots
with marshmallows in them.
It was pretty awful.
People used a lot of Spam.
It would not be unusual to go to a dinner party
where there was grilled Spam
with slices of pineapple on top of it.
We ate without much style,
flair and imagination.
So when Julia did her omelet
on that first example of her cooking on television,
the phone began to ring,
and the station actually got a pulse.
"What a sketch. What a take on French cooking.
Boy, I think I'm gonna buy her book when it comes out."
It was all positive,
and it gave the station management
the idea that maybe a TV series could arise
from this appearance.
I was summoned to the office, and they said,
"We'd like to try two or three programs
featuring Julia Child cooking.
We'll make three pilots."
Hello. I'm Julia Child.
Welcome to The French Chef,
and the first show on our series on French cooking.
We're gonna make boeuf bourguignon--
beef stew in red wine.
And it's a wonderful show to begin our series on
because it shows you
so many useful things about French cooking.
From all the stews I've made...
When I did The French Chef,
I'm interested in people who make
beautiful food that tastes good.
And I'm not gonna crowd the pan either.
That's another extremely important thing,
because if the pan gets crowded,
then the meat steams.
My point is to make cooking easy for people
so that they can enjoy it and do it.
It should be, and is, I think, everybody's pleasure.
I think you should have no fear of cooking.
That's terribly important,
that you must be a fearless cook.
And the more you learn how to cook,
the easier it is and the more fun it is.
That gives me a sense of, "I belong. I'm here."
Cooking is about
bringing people to the table.
And once you surround yourself with people you love,
that's how you connect with each other: by sharing food.
Food, for me,
is really a window into our own identity.
It looks back at the history that was here before us.
It really tells us who we are.
If you want to taste who I am, taste this.
I was born in Pasadena, California,
August 15, 1912.
It was a lovely, lovely place to grow up.
Pasadena was like paradise.
My grandparents had this big old rambling house with
an entire walled garden
that had avocados, lemon trees.
It was just beautiful.
She was the oldest of three children.
There was Julia and then John
and then my mother, Dorothy.
We used to hang onto bicycles, and we rode all over,
and we just had a good time horsing around.
She was 6'3", John 6'4".
My mother was 6'5".
And Grandma Caro's reaction
to having these three enormous children was,
"Good heavens!
I've produced 18 feet of children." Heh, heh.
We had very sensible, New England-type food
'cause my mother came from New England.
Roasts and fresh peas and mashed potatoes.
But nobody discussed food a great deal
because it just wasn't done.
In that white, Anglo-Saxon society,
there were proper things you talked about,
and there were things you did not discuss.
Anything to do with sexuality.
You didn't discuss politics.
You definitely did not discuss money with people.
She told people
that she was middle-class.
But they had to be really wealthy.
The fact that she never cooked--
I don't think that her mother cooked.
I think the cook cooked.
I was entered at Smith College.
And in those days,
women weren't taken very seriously
as anything but just broodmares.
You could get married,
but you didn't go in for a career
'cause there weren't any.
I wasn't preparing myself for anything.
I was leading, really, a leisurely, butterfly life.
I graduated in 1934.
My mother became ill.
She died when she was around 60.
I went back to Pasadena, took care of my father.
Julia's father, John McWilliams,
was very strict and very conservative.
I think Julia loved him very much,
but it was hard to get close to him.
Her father really believed that like should marry like
and that Julia should become a traditional,
upper-middle-class, well-married woman.
PRUD'HOMME: Most of the women
in Julia's circle were getting married,
and she wasn't.
She was always a bridesmaid, never a bride.
Julia's father, he wanted her to marry
the scion of theLos Angeles Times family,
and Julia didn't want to do that.
If I had to marry
a conservative banker or lawyer,
I would have played golf and tennis,
and I probably would've been an alcoholic.
PRUD'HOMME: She was proposed to, but she declined.
Julia broke with her father,
and she stood up to him.
PRUD'HOMME: She had these kind of
romantic dreams for what her life might be.
She was really pining for adventure.
America is at war.
Its battle cry penetrate to the four corners of the Earth.
Army, Navy and Marine recruiting stations
bulge to overflowing.
Every day, new legions are being called
to active duty, afloat and ashore.
Wasn't until World War II
that everything really changed.
Everyone was dying to do something.
You wanted to get in and help.
So I joined up.
I had nothing to offer except I could type.
So I ended up doing office-- Menial office work,
and eventually got into the Office of Strategic Services,
the OSS, which was the precursor
of the CIA, or Special Intelligence.
I did want to be a spy,
and I thought I'd be a very good one
because no one would think that someone as tall as I
would possibly be a spy.
She was not a spy.
She did work with spies,
working with top secret files as a clerk typist.
The OSS began to recruit people
to go to the Far East, so I volunteered.
With Julia,
World War II made a big difference.
It was freedom.
She never looked back with any wistfulness
on the conservative,
rather narrow life that she had lived until then.
We sailed to Ceylon.
It's a mountainous island.
Charming and fascinating in those early days.
Kind of exotic.
And that's... That's where I met Paul.
We were building the Burma Road at that point,
going to China.
And Paul, he was in charge of maps and diagrams.
He was a graphics artist.
Paul was a polymath.
He did not go to college.
He was self-taught.
But he was a very, very bright guy.
PRUD'HOMME: Paul was 10 years older than Julia.
He had experienced life in a way that she hadn't.
PRUD'HOMME: After Sri Lanka, they were posted
to Kunming in China.
When she met Paul,
she felt she really knew so little about civilization
and just enjoying the world.
Paul was a gifted photographer,
and he gradually introduced Julia to artworks
and the way people lived and to food.
We were able to go out and eat
in the restaurants, and that food was delicious.
I'm sure it was a revelation.
Paul helped open up another world, other worlds.
Try and imagine what it must have been like
for her to discover food and love and everything else
all at the same time.
What a whoosh of joy and life it must have been for her.
Unconditional surrender
and the return of happier days.
After the bomb dropped,
the war ended really immediately.
We went back home and decided we'd get married.
So we had a nice wedding.
PRUD'HOMME: Paul Child and John McWilliams
were at either ends of the spectrum.
Julia's father would dismiss Paul as an artist
and a liberal who cared about food and wine.
Paul would dismiss Big John as a conservative businessman.
Julia's father was very Republican.
When Julia married Paul, she became a Democrat.
My grandfather was, "What?"
That's not supposed to happen.
After the war,
the diplomatic corps sent people abroad.
And Paul spoke beautiful French,
so he was sent over to Paris.
And that was where our wonderful life together
really began.
We drove through this beautiful French countryside.
I was just beside myself with excitement,
seeing these ancient buildings and old churches.
And we landed in Rouen.
I remember my first meal there.
We had a beautiful first lunch at La Couronne.
They have this delicious filet of sole with butter.
It was my first French food, and I never got over it.
Sole meunière.
If you have a sole meunière...
First, you need a big sole.
Thick filet.
You melt butter,
and when the butter start to make little bubbles,
you put your sole on both sides.
And the flesh is transparent.
It's absolutely delicate.
It's one of the finest things in life.
You just add some salt-- Very few salt.
- -and some drops of lemon.
Just a fish.
Perfect fish in butter.
C'est parfait. It's perfect.
And she said, "Voilà. Voilà.
I found my way with a sole."
It was just absolutely delicious.
And as soon as I got into France
and realized what it was all about,
it came upon me that
that was what I'd been looking for all my life.
One taste of that food, and I never turned back.
We settle in the top floor of an old private house
in Paris.
They take food so seriously,
and that's what really got to me when I got over there,
that the waiter is so much interested in what you order.
It's a very serious business.
SIMON
She didn't care about fancy things
like Louis Quatorze.
And what a lot of people love about France is froufrou
and all that.
But she loved the way of life and the food.
PRUD'HOMME: In the summer of 1950,
Julia invited her father
and her stepmother to come to France.
Paul and Julia did their best to take them
on a trip around the country,
show them some of their favorite places.
But John would spend a lot of his time
complaining about the French
and didn't understand the culture,
didn't understand the food, and didn't really want to.
I decided that I would really like
to do serious delving into cuisines,
so I enrolled in the Cordon Bleu.
The Cordon Bleu,
it's the oldest cooking school in Paris
with the top, top chefs-- Professional chefs.
- -and we glorify the artistry of cooking.
You have to understand that French look to their cooks
and always has been looking to their cooks as artists.
They had classes for the GIs on the Bill of Rights.
Because of the GI Bill,
all the soldiers who had come back from World War II
had the right to be funded to go back to civilian life.
So Julia was in fact with 11 GIs,
being trained by Max Bugnard, a fantastic chef.
Let's face it: Max Bugnard, as very many, uh...
chefs-- Uh, male chefs,
was thinking,
"She was the only female with the 11 GIs.
Was she going to be serious?
Could she even be a true professional?"
In France,
cooking was a world of men.
SIMON
In my youth, I always heard
a woman cannot be a chef
because, uh, in kitchens, pans and pots are heavy.
It was just fascinating
to see how much there was to learn.
The more I got into it, the more I loved it
and the more I appreciated it as a true art form
that you could spend your life over.
We French love codifying.
The last 200, 300 years,
France codified the technical skills
and the fundamentals of cuisine.
It's like architecture or, um, in music:
you have to know your fundamentals,
and then you can play with it.
A lot of it's handwork that you have to develop
how to chop rapidly
or the perfect dicing of things.
All that takes practice.
It really requires every aspect of your psyche
and imagination and creativity.
Nothing was too much trouble
if it's gonna produce a beautiful result.
I would go to the Cordon Bleu at 7 in the morning
and finished at around 11.
And then I would rush home and prepare a fancy lunch
for my husband Paul.
God knows it's a love affair
with Paul.
I say it was obvious.
He was smaller than Julia,
but he was looking at her with eyes, magnifique,
and, uh, and she would... "Paul?"
She was always asking, you know?
It was like-- How's a pigeon do?
"Oh-coo," you know. "Paul?"
Cooking, it's an expression of what you learn
and what you see, what you smell,
what you are able to do with your fingers.
And when you cook, you give your love.
It's more than to feed your body.
It's, um... Have pleasure.
SIMON
With Julia and Paul,
clearly you read between the lines.
I mean, he comes home, she makes him a great lunch,
and they obviously go to bed every day.
Julia's advice for a good marriage
was to maintain the three Fs.
You had to feed your man, you had to fuck your man,
and you had to flatter your man.
Everyone we knew in France was interested in food.
Most discussions were about food, really.
Julia met Simca
at a party, and they found
many, many things that they could share.
Simca, Simone Beck, she was a very good cook.
We met and we just immediately became bosom friends.
I had some American friends who wanted to learn cooking.
So they said, "Will you teach us?"
And I thought, "Heavens, I'm not ready for that."
But Simca was.
And then she also had her colleague and friend
Louisette Bertholle.
So we started our little cooking school in our kitchen,
which had room enough so we could have six pupils.
Simca and Louisette had been doing a book
on French cooking for Americans,
and they needed an American collaborator.
They needed an American view.
American attitude.
So we started writing our book.
The goal of the book was
to make French cooking for Americans
with American products
so that you could replicate it here.
Simca, her partner, found that difficult
'cause Simca felt it should only be done
the French way, regardless.
My aunt Simca was a very willful woman.
"You don't do it like that!
No. That's not how you do it.
You do it like this!"
It sounded like orders,
like she wanted to regiment everyone,
like a police officer.
Simca was not an easy woman.
Nor was Julia.
They both had very strong opinions.
I had started in quite late
when I started cooking,
and I found that the recipes in all the books I had
were really not adequate.
They didn't tell you enough.
So I felt that we needed fuller explanations
so that if you followed one of those recipes,
it should turn out exactly right.
They would try the recipes again and again
to make sure they work.
There were a lot of revisions.
Julia was quite scientific.
She was kind of like a chemist,
doing the experiment over and over
and over again until she got it right.
She did not know how to take shortcuts
or to do things by half measures.
"Okay. It's not working this way.
We're gonna have to do it all over again."
Do it all over again.
I sent a copy of this group of recipes
to a friend of mine at Houghton Mifflin.
And they offered us a contract for a book,
so we were delighted.
Then Paul Child's career
took them away to Marseille.
At the time, we didn't have the means that we have now,
email or anything.
So it was all by mail.
Simca would type recipes,
send them to Julia.
Julia would send her own ideas,
and back and forth.
It was a tremendous amount of work.
It took 12 years to write the book.
She would type all of the recipes in triplicate,
and she would send one copy to my mother,
who was her younger sister,
to test out the recipes as an American housewife.
Her directions are as though she's standing there
in the kitchen with you, holding your hand
each step of the way.
The book was finished,
and we sent it to Houghton Mifflin...
...and they rejected it.
They said to her,
"Nobody wants to read a treatise on French cooking.
People want a mix-and-stir cookbook.
They want something that's convenient."
Cookbooks at that moment in time,
they would not go particularly deep
in terms of explaining recipes.
And Julia's book was
a very different proposition
than anyone had ever seen before.
That was very disappointing,
to have Houghton Mifflin turn it down.
Terrible.
She really had great hopes that it was gonna take off.
PRUD'HOMME At the same time,
Paul was deeply frustrated with the bureaucracy
and the petty politics in the U.S. embassy.
He was called back to Washington
and was accused of being a communist and a homosexual.
The accusations were untrue,
but he was humiliated and furious,
and he ended up taking an early retirement.
In 1961, Julia and Paul moved into their house
in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Paul didn't have a career at that point.
I think they were a little mystified
as to what they'd do.
An editor at Knopf by the name of Judith Jones
got the manuscript, read it,
and in a memo, she wrote,
"Reading and studying this book seems to me
as good as taking a basic course at the Cordon Bleu.
I think this book will become a classic."
Judith needs to convince Alfred A. Knopf,
the publisher, that this is a book that has merit.
Alfred was not convinced at the outset,
although Judith's passion for the project
led him to believe that this is a book
that they should take a flier on.
The title that they arrived at is
Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
When Judith presented that title to Alfred,
he said to her,
"If anybody buys this book, I will eat my hat."
When the book came out, Simca came to the USA.
At that point, in 1961,
I don't think there were many book tours.
But we decided to go around the country
to promote the book.
I was invited to be in a book review program
in Boston.
To liven things up, I made an omelet.
So that's how the idea of a cooking show started out.
From the first time she appeared on that show,
Julia was different from anything on television.
On television, women were
basically part of the window dressing
young and attractive in a sexy way,
or everyday housewife type, but a housewife on steroids
because nobody dressed like that in reality
to be in their homes.
And you certainly didn't see them
telling people what to do or teaching in any kind of way.
They were objects.
There are no clean socks.
The tradition was essentially
that only the men were important.
Women were really to be in their place.
They were told,
"Stay at home, be docile,
and forget that you ever had a brain."
When we started The French Chef,
I think I was paid $50 a show
because it was just an experiment.
The station executives wanted to see
if this thing would fly. And they said,
"You know, not everything we try is successful."
We had no studio space for the show,
and the Boston Gas Company came to the rescue,
and they said, "You know what?
We have a demonstration kitchen.
It's got a nice flat floor
so you can roll your cameras around on it."
WGBH was kind of wild and woolly.
Everything was pretty low budget.
They scraped by month to month.
Only with this bus crammed with equipment
can we record on-the-spot reports for you.
Most of the major programming was done
out of a mobile unit
that had a generator, three cameras and a cable.
We carried all the cameras up three flights of fire escape,
which, in the winter, was a daunting project.
We had big, heavy, awful cameras.
I hated those cameras.
Tubes-- Literally, tubes would fall out on the floor.
There was a lot of creative work with duct tape
holding things together,
patching things up that started to fall down
in the middle of things.
I pointed out to her
that we had no tape editing.
We weren't to cut it in any way.
There was no teleprompter,
so we had to do it in long takes.
Welcome to The French Chef.
I'm Julia Child.
Today, we're cooking a goose.
We're gonna use the goose liver.
And the goose liver is enormous.
A pale liver is usually the best color,
rather than the dark one.
So we're gonna use this in the stuffing.
So we just chop it up.
Then we're gonna sauté it in butter.
The first shows were live on tape,
which gave it a kind of breathless quality
which was rather nice.
This should sauté for, oh, just about a minute or two.
But whatever happened happened.
When you're ready to cook them...
I'm sticking on a bean.
She had to devise an outline
of points that she wanted to cover,
but she didn't memorize anything.
She prepared her work meticulously.
She would type these things out, single space,
two or three pages
of what happens after this and after that.
And mix them all up.
They would do this to the chicken,
- would do that to the chicken. - There.
She knew what she was going to do,
and I was just really the traffic cop.
Turn the blender on...
Julia was a master
at getting everything together and then just letting it roll.
...adding a little olive oil till it gets thicker.
She could ad-lib endlessly.
...which is a smaller amount of vinegar in the beginning.
By about this time, it'll be so thick.
So in that case, you thin it out
with a little lemon juice.
I had the young producer Ruthie Lockwood.
She had a very good sense of drama,
and she always said, "You want to come on with a bang,
and you don't want to go out with a whimper."
What's missing in this picture?
The goose.
And here it is, all juicy and ready to eat.
This is a dough with yeast in it
that I'm slapping around here.
Look at this magnificent head.
We're gonna do bouillabaisse today.
It was often just one dish
so that we could really go into detail.
They had to have food in different stages ready
the raw fish, the partially cooked fish,
the fully cooked fish.
There. Now that's ready to eat.
We used the heavy, nasty mic.
In fact, it even had a little charge to it.
Occasionally, she would get a little shock.
Every time I touched the stove, the microphone would go:
If Paul wasn't busy,
he'd be sharpening a knife or he would be
scrubbing some residue
off of the bottom of an omelet pan.
He was a big, big help.
We'd find that I didn't have
any feeling for time
and they're just galloping through it.
So we changed the system of having idiot cards.
I had little signs that said
"slow down" and "speed it up."
"Sweat."
The producer, Ruth Lockwood--
Bothered her that Julia would be dripping sweat
into the various dishes that she was working on.
I've got my heat on so high, I'm just getting boiled.
I would hold the "sweat" thing,
and Julia was supposed to mop her brow
rather than continue to pour.
Everybody in the crew enjoyed watching her prepare the food.
And we knew we were gonna get to eat it at the lunch break
and then again at the end of the day.
- DIRECTOR: And how was the food? - Oh, delicious.
Of course.
When you hold your knife,
you take your thumb and forefinger
and grip the top of the blade like that,
and then hold the rest of the knife
in your other fingers.
You see? That way.
It was really a teaching show.
I was trying to teach the proper way of doing things.
And your knife knocks against your knuckles
as you move your finger down like that, see?
'Cause it makes all the difference
in the taste.
That care, thatcuisine soignée--
That's what gives it that lovely French taste.
She really got across
what was the essentials of the dish.
If you just cook the flour slowly,
you're gonna get a much smoother
and nicer-tasting sauce.
If you felt that it didn't have enough garlic,
you could put some in now.
And you must remember
to taste as things are cooking.
It's good, but it needs more salt and pepper.
Does it need more salt?
We need more sugar.
Is it getting too sticky?
Well, that's very good.
Here is a great big old bad artichoke.
And some people are terribly afraid of it.
At that point,
people weren't very adventurous.
The general public never had eaten a fresh artichoke
or fresh asparagus until we began showing them.
I'm gonna try and flip this over,
which is a rather daring thing to do.
You just have to have the courage of your convictions,
particularly if it's sort of a loose mass like this.
No, that didn't go very well.
If she made a mistake,
she was not remotely rattled.
I didn't have the courage to do it the way I should've.
But you can always pick it up,
and if you're alone in the kitchen,
who is going to see?
She felt that
making a mistake was a good thing
just so that she could then show you how to fix it.
Anytime that anything like this happens,
you haven't lost anything
'cause you can always turn this into something else.
We'll pretend that this was supposed to be
a baked potato dish.
Some people would accuse me
of doing things purposely,
but anyone who's been in the kitchen knows
that awful things happen all the time,
and you just have to make do with whatever happens.
This is a maximum-security oven.
It's not to be opened for 25 minutes
or everybody will be court-martialed.
There's a soufflé in it.
I think educational television
has to be entertaining.
It can't be dull.
Here it is, just sitting up, waving at you.
We made it fun
cause I was having a good time.
So many people seem to hate fish.
"Oh, I hate fish!
Why do we have to have fish? I just hate it!"
She was such a character.
That voice.
...called la tarte tatin.
The fact that she was so theatrical.
You just beat it.
Flit-gun! That's all you need!
I'm all ready to make fish!
She was always waving things or banging things.
I'm Julia Child.
But she really knew
what she was doing.
Terrific technique.
Here's the dome of caramel.
She would make
the most ridiculously complicated recipes
and then pretend like it was simple as can be.
She comes off.
Whether you cooked or didn't cook,
people would just watch her for fun.
Everyone would say,
"Have you seen Julia this week?"
The French Chef, a mere inexpensive effort,
seemed to capture the imagination of its audiences
and granted public television
audiences that it never had before.
The inimitable Julia Child.
She really had a big hand
in making public television take off.
Welcome to my Emmy kitchen.
She's a celebrity
wherever people see her television programs
or read her books.
I cannot tell you
what it was like to look out of a hotel window
at 7:30 in the morning
and see 500 or 750 women
waiting to see Julia Child cook.
And of course, sales of Mastering absolutely soared.
Julia really started the whole love of cookbooks
and the whole desire for publishers to promote them.
Mmm.
Mmm. I think I love you.
Ooh, it's good.
It was a surprise,
how it took off.
She was in her 50s.
I don't know what she expected,
but I imagine she hoped it was gonna work.
But I don't think she had any idea of the magnitude of it.
Will you please welcome Julia Child.
Tell me something,
is there an attitude or a-a frame of mind
or, um, a personality type or something
that makes for a good cook?
Would I qualify, for example?
If you're hungry, yes.
Looking forward and salivating
over what you are about to prepare,
- I think, is very important. - Mm-hmm.
And I find there's a sensual pleasure in handling food.
- Oh, I think so. - Does that mean I'm odd?
It seems that-- I think
that you're following the modern trend of America
'cause I think more and more people
are getting interested in cooking...
Yeah....as a creative activity.
I happened to appear at the right time,
just when people were ready
to go into some more interesting cooking.
The Kennedys were in the White House
when I started out.
They had their wonderful French chef,
René Verdon.
Everything they did was news.
And when they did,
the food, of course, then became news.
America was looking
beyond its borders.
It seemed to be a moment where we were ready
to embrace culinary horizons.
We were ripe for a change,
and there I was.
Today, we're gonna make chocolate cake,
and it's a very special,
very chocolately, bittersweet, lovely cake.
Julia was not
a particularly remarkable beauty.
She was middle-aged with freckles,
and her hair changed daily.
But you were mesmerized, spellbound,
by what she was saying.
Cooking is--
Well, lots of it is one failure after another,
and that's how you finally learn.
Now shatter it.
Just like that.
It's very nice to know that you can
make all these goodies yourself.
She opened doors for me as a person,
that I could cook.
We're making the stew of stews!
Boeuf bourguignon.
We would watch Julia's show
with my grandmother,
and then Grandpa would go buy the ingredients,
and we would cook that meal.
She just seemed so unpretentious
that you thought, if she could do it, you could do it.
We all grabbed onto Julia,
and we began cooking her things.
You might mispronounce it
or you might not know which fork to start with.
It's okay. But you can do it.
Her coming on television
and telling America that they could make great food
out of the supermarket
virtually changed the landscape of food in America.
People didn't make Jell-O salads
and serve them at a dinner party anymore.
There, this wonderful, steaming stew.
You see how nice it is to have these big chunks.
There.
That's all for today on The French Chef.
This is Julia Child.
Bon appétit.
In France,
Julia has no reputation at all.
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
was never translated in French.
When I talk about Julia and Simca, no one knows.
There's no trace of their work.
- Ah, Simca. - SIMCA: Here we are.
Ready, finally. Okay.
So we're going to make this special pâtes de printemps.
Pâtes de printemps.
EÉpi-- Aux épinards. Aux épinards.
I remember once asking my aunt,
"Does it hurt you that she's so successful in America?"
She simply replied,
"She's a businesswoman now."
Now, you could even use, um, a pie crust mix, couldn't you?
I'm French. I hate the mix.
PRUD'HOMME: When Julia and Simca wrote
Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 2,
Julia felt that she brought
all this American publicity to the table.
And so she wanted to get a little bit more
than 50 percent of the deal.
And Simca balked at this,
but Julia stayed tough and insisted.
She wasn't always the genial Julia that you saw.
She had a lot of her father in her.
She could be a very tough negotiator.
And eventually, Simca agreed.
At one point, a magazine sent reporters
to take pictures.
Simca was not included in that session.
I know that she was really hurt.
The relationship became frosty
because it was hierarchical.
It was Julia Child and Simca.
Julia was the star.
The station executives were determined
that we continue these cooking programs.
We're having a cheese and wine party
today on The French Chef!
...onto the platter,
and that unmolded very badly.
That's too bad because it does look very nice.
Rule one, strangely enough, is
read the recipe.
Mastering was such a success that it led to book after book.
There was a great appetite
- for any new Julia content. - Welcome. I'm Julia Child.
You'd better have one of these food processors
'cause then you can do it all by yourself.
Tonight's show features two great cooks
uh, Jacques Pépin, uh, who at one time
was the personal chef to Charles de Gaulle,
and Julia Child,
who needs no introduction or explanation.
We were gonna start with some shrimps, were we?
Yes, okay.
- Start with shrimp. - JULIA: They're down here.
Are you going to sauté those in there?
Want me to do some--Yes. Well, um,
I hate to admit that I just cut my finger beforehand,
so I'm gonna let you do the sauté.
...and Julia took it to cut a shallot
and take the end of her finger off. But...
A big piece like this.
So I push it back together.
It was all-all by the-the skin.
I push it back together, and I tie a towel around.
And then you want a whole orange cut into pieces.
Did you do this in the kitchen?
I did this in the kitchen. I was... Heh.
Excuse me for laughing. Sorry....doing a show
last night... But-but I-I thought good cooks
were not supposed to do that.
Well, I don't know. I just cut a good piece of my finger.
Did it go in the preparation or the, uh...
Well...
That wasn't part of the recipe, no.
I see.
I'm Julia Child.
Today, we're going to make a holiday feast,
or le fête d'holiday.
We happened to turn it on,
and there it was, live.
Err-- Oh!
Oh. Now I've done it.
I've cut the dickens out of my finger.
Well... I'm glad, in a way, this happened.
You know, accidents do occur
from time to time in the kitchen.
Oh, oh, God, it's throbbing!
Oh! Well, a tourniquet...
She had a copy,
and at dinner parties at her house,
she would show the Dan Aykroyd tape.
It was very funny.
We loved that.
Why are you all spinning?
Well, I think I'm going to go to sleep now.
Bon appétit.
One time, I said, "You know, Julia, I sometimes forget,
when I'm with you, how famous you are."
And she said, "You know, so do I."
And I think she did.
Onto the buffet for 19.
Even at the height of her fame,
she didn't become commercialized.
...wine that you'd serve with it.
She really felt very strongly about not endorsing products.
When she would have products on camera,
we were in charge of masking tape over the brand.
PRUD'HOMME: She would say, "You should have some wine,"
but she wouldn't say what kind of wine.
Why should her favorite salt
get promotion from her when she hadn't tried them all
and there might be others that she liked as well?
And not to have anyone buy their way onto the program.
Julia Child, you were quoted as follows:
"I think the role of a woman is to be married
to a nice man and enjoy her home."
Do you stand by that?
Yes, because I'm a-- I'm a homemaker
as well as a TV cook and a teacher.
I wondered if the women's liberation movement
had-had caused any adaptation by you
in your sensibility to their needs? No.
Well, I'm a working woman myself.
- You sure are. - Our working day stops
at around 7,
and when the news goes on, I start dinner.
The making of a home is, to me,
one of the most important things in the world.
I just love living with my husband,
and I can't imagine not having a happy home with him.
PRUD'HOMME: Julia never called herself a feminist,
although she was clearly really important
to the feminist movement.
Women were treated pretty badly
in cooking school.
Teachers were all European male chefs,
and they'd rather not have women in their kitchen.
Most women felt that they couldn't
really have a career making money in food.
But her success really opened up a career path
to a lot of women
who may not have thought about it at the time.
When I started working with Julia,
we'd walk into a restaurant to have a meal,
then afterwards, they'd want to give us a tour of the kitchen.
And the first thing she would say is,
"Where are all the women?
How come there's no women in here?"
She absolutely expanded the possibilities
of what women could do.
A lot of the people
in our neighborhood were Harvard faculty.
All men.
But Julia was one of the major figures.
She was very eager to meet everyone, to learn about them.
But Paul was always an enigma to me.
I never quite knew what was going on in his mind.
He was very exacting about words.
If you used the wrong word or pronounced it incorrectly,
he would let you know.
He was very proper. Very proper.
And he was critical.
People were afraid of him.
But she adored him.
She had a pet name for him.
It was "P'ski."
And that's what he responded to.
He's a one-man art factory.
He's a painter and a photographer,
and he can make furniture and...
Huh....do just about anything.
And we've always liked to do things together.
Hi, Julie. This is Paul.
Listen, I've got two friends I want to bring home to dinner,
and we'll be there in about half an hour.
Can you make it?
Aha. Company for dinner in half an hour.
PRUD'HOMME: Paul became her business manager,
her chief mushroom dicer, dishwasher.
If Julia was the boxer, he was the cornerman.
Paul, who was very organized,
made sure that Julia had everything she needed.
He helped her do the research, he wrote up the cue cards,
made sure she had her knives.
He made sure she was ready to roll.
I wouldn't be doing anything
if I weren't with him 'cause he's been
a wonderful support and an encourager.
He watched with enormous pleasure
as she eclipsed him.
Men of his generation just did not do that.
They did not push their wives
to be the best that they could be
and then happily stand back
and do everything they can to help her career.
My aunt Julia was very sad
about not being able to have children.
I think she would've liked to have had at least one.
But that wasn't to be.
She saw me as a child she didn't have,
and, actually, all her nieces and nephews.
She embraced us as her children.
What she said to me later was,
"Well, because I didn't have kids,
I could throw myself into...to work."
I want to do this very slowly.
Turn it over.
Push it back just a little bit. You can see that's...
She got word that she had breast cancer.
Paul was absolutely devastated.
He thought he was gonna lose Julia.
Julia was very stoical about it.
In Julia's family, you would never talk about illness,
let alone cancer.
You didn't want to upset people.
She never complained about it. She never complained about it.
She would say,
"I've got to go in and get this taken care of."
She had a scar that ran from her shoulder
almost down to her belly.
And she said she was in the bathtub
and looked down at herself and was sobbing.
Paul came into the bathroom and said, "What's wrong?"
And Julia said, "How are you gonna ever love me?
Look at-- Look at me."
Paul said, "I didn't marry you for your breast.
I married you for your legs."
And so she said she never gave it another thought,
and that was... That was that.
I'm perfectly fine now, and thank heaven.
I'm just very grateful to be alive.
She is really a "tomorrow" person.
She's not a "yesterday."
We don't care what happened yesterday.
We only care what happens tomorrow.
Please welcome now Julia Child.
You go at things in a rather fearless manner.
And it just shows a very direct approach, which, uh...
You have to be careful because you do get criticized.
Julia was very strongly pro-choice,
and she supported Planned Parenthood always.
Have you ever been to any of
our Planned Parenthood centers before?
The doctor will...COUSINS: She thought it was
very important for women
to be able to determine their own lives.
Julia Child became part
of what was called our Board of Advocates.
She opened up the idea that we could have people
known for something other than health care,
but who understood the importance of women
and women's rights and women's access to health care,
be part of this movement.
Julia's audience
were women from all walks of life.
They were in rural America. They were in big cities.
And the power of her saying, "I support Planned Parenthood.
I stand with Planned Parenthood,"
was really important.
The crowd at Stepherson's supermarket
was primed and ready for the cook's arrival,
jockeying for the best position
to buy the limited number of autographed cookbooks.
But a group outside was busy protesting
what they feel are far more important matters
than how to best broil the beef.
We're out here to let the people know
what, uh, stores, what agencies and businesses
are supporting the abortionist Planned Parenthood.
They say they're going to picket
every Memphis appearance made by the culinary queen.
She risked her own celebrity,
her own reputation, to associate herself with an issue
that some people found controversial.
That kind of backlash,
she just let that roll off.
In France and Italy, it isn't even an issue anymore.
And if we had the Planned Parenthood in the schools,
then we wouldn't have to have any abortion.
When Julia had deep convictions like that,
she was unflappable.
The best French way of doing green vegetables
is to put them into an enormous pot of rapidly boiling water.
Fifteen years, I've been at people
for how to cook things properly.
Julia had given
our mothers, our aunts,
the idea of trying to make great food,
but our generation
tried to take it to the next step.
These young cooks set out
to start going to farmers to get great food.
Julia's notion was that anybody who learned technique
could cook great food out of the supermarket.
Our mantra was the opposite.
You can't cook good food
unless you've got great ingredients.
You run into all this business on the nouvelle cuisine
of crunchily underdone vegetables.
Then you can't eat 'em 'cause they're practically raw.
She was defensive.
She'd been queen for so long,
and she had so changed American food
that the notion that there was
a generation that was critical--
I mean, she was not used to criticism.
And action.
Give me the wide shot!
Hold for me, freeze! Give me the matches!
PRUD'HOMME: 1980, Julia had
her first really big setback with PBS
when they didn't air her new program all across the country.
Why are we not going to see
your new show here on public television?
I don't know.
It's up to every public television station
- what they want to show. - Th-this--
Maybe they don't like food.
PRUD'HOMME: PBS started to take Julia
less and less seriously,
focused resources in other ways.
I think it had something to do with her gender and her age.
They were sort of easing her out.
They were getting ready to put her out to the farm.
Julia was hugely frustrated by this.
She said, "Forget it, PBS.
I'm done." And she quit.
She could have quietly gone into retirement,
but she didn't want to do that.
She would say, "If they don't see you on television,
they think you're dead."
Julia was a dynamic force that would not be silenced,
would not lay about,
waiting for her next great television show.
PRUD'HOMME: And so she went to work for
Good Morning America, ABC's commercial show.
That's tomorrow on Good Morning America.
This morning, Julia Child is back with us in our kitchen.
PRUD'HOMME: On GMA,
she had to do an entire dish in three minutes.
But she learned to adapt,
and it provided her a much larger audience.
When I first met her, I was intimidated.
I was meeting an icon.
How am I gonna approach her?
I didn't have to.
Knock-knock-knock on the door, and in she bursts.
"Darling, deary,
we're gonna have so much fun!"
You don't put your hands on that.
- Oh, you don't, okay. - And I'll explain that later.
Julia was an incorrigible flirt.
You say to-may-toe, I say to-mah-toe. No, I just...
You say po-tay-toe, I say po-tah-toe.
- I don't say po-tah-toe. - Oh, I'm sorry.
Here's this 75-year-old woman
that I'm talking to-- Or on into her 80s.
- -and yet she's flirting.
She's making you feel as if what you're saying
is just the smartest thing she ever heard.
If you were to invite me to your home for the holidays--
Fat chance, but if that--
- Well, I would. - Would you? I'd come too.
- I would if you'd come up. - I'd love to.
I'd give you a wonderful--What would we have?
We'd have hamburger.
- But in a very special way. - Yeah.
She liked to flirt.
I know.
We better taste it, I think.
I've got an impeccably clean mouth.
You? Yes.
We say in French,
She was wonderful with women, don't get me wrong,
but she really liked men the best.
She was friend with men.
They were-- Some were gay.
The other one, uh, loved woman.
You know, uh... I mean, you know, it's life.
She liked straight men better,
although the cooking world is full of gay men.
Many of them she was very close to.
Bob Johnson was her lawyer,
and she felt a great loyalty to him.
I don't think that Julia thought
that Bob Johnson was homosexual.
He had a girlfriend that came to all the parties,
and she used to say,
"I wonder when they're ever going to get hitched up."
She just didn't see it.
- Did not acknowledge it. - Yeah.
She called homosexuals "homos."
"Did you see all those homos in the audience?"
It was derogatory.
It was new for all of us.
We were coming out of, uh, a period
of when gay-gay people didn't exist,
or weren't-- Really weren't meant to.
Bob told her he had AIDS.
PRUD'HOMME: When Bob Johnson died of AIDS,
it really hit her hard.
She did a 180,
and she had a revelatory moment.
She would say, "Who is gonna take care of these people?
They've got this horrible disease
that nobody understands."
And so she did an AIDS benefit,
and she thereafter became quite outspoken about
her support of the gay community.
AIDS is just
a horrible disease,
and we have to make everyone very well aware of it,
and this is one of the very best ways of doing it.
Food is love, isn't it?
'Cause it gets everybody together.
Julia came from a place
where there was a very set notion
of how a person lived one's life.
But she was a person who was very much about,
"I can learn."
Her whole life was about evolving.
Oh, look at that.
Can I have a little taste?
Mmm.
That's a sausage.
Julia loved to eat.
What are these? Can I try one of those?
Uh, artichokes. We...Artichokes.
- Yes, yes. - I'll just take one.
This one okay?
Julia's appetite was absolutely astonishing.
People were always bringing special dishes.
"Julia, I would just like you to taste this."
And she not only tasted it, she would eat it all.
Mmm.
No matter where we were,
in someone's home or at a restaurant,
when her food came, she started eating.
It was what she called "French rules."
When you're served, you eat.
Oh, those look tender.
Yeah.
She had the fastest fork
of anybody I've ever eaten with,
reaching across and tasting your food,
sometimes without invitation to do so.
She just reached out and grabbed it.
Never had Julia Child eat off my plate before.
That's, uh... Mm-hmm.
Are there any foods that you don't like?
I don't like things that are not fresh
and not well-prepared and cooked by someone
who doesn't know what they're doing.
- PEÉPIN: Beautiful. - JULIA: Look at that.
Isn't that nice?
- And now the best part of it. - Is the eating.
Eating, yes. Okay.
Mmm.
- Very good, huh? - That's good.
- That's great. - Mmm.
Now, would friends think twice
before asking you to dinner?
If they could just give me
a good steak or a hamburger, and I'm very happy.
Good steak or hamburger? Well, this is my kind of gal.
Sure. Really?
You're not a health-- you're not one of these...
I certainly am not. I hate health food of any type.
Julia would cook with butter, a lot of butter.
I have six and a half sticks of chilled butter.
Goodness, Julia, you and your butter.
- I'm telling you. - WOMAN: Isn't butter fattening?
Nah.
I think there's so much talk about health and nutrition
that a lot of people are scared of their food.
So I think,
know what you can eat, and then enjoy things.
Yes.
What was it like to have dinner at Julia's?
Wonderful.
Once you got there, you really got cooking.
It was...That was the entertainment.
We all were given tasks
before dinner to get it ready.
And if you were using a knife the wrong way,
she'd come over and show you how to use it the right way.
"Ooh," she said.
"I got a roast beef from Mr. Savenor,"
her wonderful butcher.
She trimmed the fat.
She slashed it in diamonds
so the drippings would escape.
She'd roast it medium on the outside,
quite dark pink for the rest.
The potatoes you cut in big chunks.
Blanch them, scratch them with a fork,
and they'll absorb more of the dripping,
and so you get a lovely, crusty outside.
And gravy.
There'll be all those nice juices
in the bottom of the pan.
And you add two three cups of beef stock,
boil the hell out of it.
Until it starts to make a very characteristic noise.
And that's gravy.
I'm slightly ashamed to say, um...
I'm constantly thinking about it.
Julia always came back to France.
Julia and Simca renewed their friendship,
and they never ceased being friends.
Julia and Paul built a house on the major property
that belonged to Simca called La Pitchoune.
This is where we live in Provence.
You smell the olive blossoms and the linden trees
and the wild herbs.
It's the most lovely country.
She really loved France
and the markets, and she loved the people.
I could see her come alive
when she got to France.
It was a very special place to her.
It's where she discovered herself.
It was such a respite for her
and Paul to be there.
Paul had a heart attack,
and he had a ministroke.
PRUD'HOMME: That left him with what he called
"scrambled brains."
Here's this guy who was this, uh, wonderful intellect,
very physical person, and he could barely speak.
He was very moody.
He never fully recovered from that.
It was really hard to see him
lose that major part of his personality.
But Julia treated Paul
as if he was as okay as he could be.
So whenever they traveled, he went.
You never saw her without him.
He would be sitting in a corner quietly,
but he was always there.
It was sort of a slow and steady decline.
He had been having dementia problems.
The decision had been made that it was time
for Paul to go to a nursing home.
We took him there,
and she had made sure that there were photographs
and things from their home in this room.
And he sat on the bed, and he said, "Wh-why am I here?"
You know, "Wh-why am I here? Why am I not in Cambridge?"
And she had to talk to him and say,
"Well, this is just a nice place to stay tonight,
and I'll be back in the morning."
And a lot of excuses.
And then we got into the car and she broke down.
It was the only time I've ever seen her like that.
Julia didn't really show her grief very much.
Even when Paul passed away, she was pretty stoic about it.
I know that she cried privately,
but not-- She didn't kn--
She didn't know that anybody knew or heard or saw.
You know, he was her life partner and best friend.
It was hard.
It was very sad for her,
but she didn't let things get her down.
Ever.
She just went right on.
Julia exceeded
everyone's expectations
in her ability to continue in television
long past the time
when most people would've hung up their spatulas
and gone on to their reward.
How much longer are we gonna see you doing television?
Well, till I drop, probably.
We're gonna start out with a bold, stuffed, roasted turkey.
But now...Oh, here you are.
Julia redefined age by example.
When she was 87,
she launched a 22-part series with Jacques Pépin.
Happy cooking. Bon appétit.
PRUD'HOMME: In classic Julia fashion,
she had a détente with PBS,
and she did a few series with them.
- This is a really good dessert. - Oh, yes.
PRUD'HOMME: She was 91
when we were working together on her memoir.
She did not recognize
her advancing age.
She would be resistant to it.
She would not admit to it. She would not lie down to it.
She-she was too big for that.
Julia became enormously generous to young chefs.
She was very supportive of that.
When Julia Child came to my restaurant,
it was like taking somebody out of the TV frame
and walk her into your restaurant.
She created a real sense of excitement
about the notion of food people coming together
and supporting each other.
And here's to our chefs!
And the notion that there was
an American food movement.
When I was a little girl, I used to watch you.
And you could make a mistake, and, as a young woman,
it taught me that it was okay not to be perfect.
Yes, you don't have to be uptight. Yeah. Ha, ha!
She was driven by
the social aspect of what she did.
She loved the energy of having people around her.
Oh, that's wonderful.
With a nice burn on it too. Great.
Will you sign this one too, for me?
I certainly will.
Age did not stop her
until her body really failed her.
Paul arranged all these.
See, when you take it off, you can see where it's to go.
These copper ones are all from when we went over to France,
in-in Paris, in the early '50s.
I think people enjoy seeing things like this.
This was before the food processor.
'Cause you would do like that.
Well, the trouble is you can collect so much stuff,
can't you?
Julia Child died today.
She was 91 years old.
The cooking icon who demystified French cuisine
and brought it into American kitchens.
She changed everything.
We need to tell how important this woman is,
was, will be.
Julia really paved the way
for this incredible moment of food and pop culture,
making this very domestic profession
something extremely popular.
All right! We're here!
We've got eight tablespoons of butter.
They're green beans.
Yum. Ha, ha!
Stand back.
Whoo.
A lot of us write cookbooks
and do TV, as Julia did.
But she got the train out of the station.
We-- In this stew--
we don't want sliced mushrooms.
We want quartered mushrooms.
And you just cut them like that.
We're gonna sauté them.
And it always takes a little while.
You just have to be patient and wait.
One of the first programs
that we ever did was that single take
of boeuf bourguignon.
And our sautéed mushrooms.
She starts with the raw meat,
and she finishes with this lovely stew.
That program, recorded way back in '64,
was still playing somewhere,
on some educational television station,
for 50 years.
This is Julia Child, and for The French Chef.
And see you next time.
Bon appétit.