Julia still casts a shadow in the world of food
- Scott Daniels: We Ate Well and Cheaply
- March 2, 2018
- 1654
For those of us with a passion for cooking, there is no shortage of great shows on television to learn from some of the very best chefs in the world. You can learn how cooks create extraordinary dishes served in the best restaurants, see eateries both successful and banal. Food trucks, impossible cake creations, Vietnamese pho, it’s all there around the clock, and it all started in a tiny, perfectly ordinary kitchen studio in Boston more than 50 years ago.
I’ve just picked up six DVDs with dozens of episodes of "The French Chef" series with Julia Child. It’s remarkable and quite fascinating to watch them now, and two things keep coming to mind: They seem quite clumsy, and Julia still has plenty to teach us.
She was the first with a successful cooking instruction show. Today such programs are ubiquitous and highly produced. The equipment is all sparkling new with product placements poised for lucrative endorsement deals.
No one ever makes a mistake, the end results are always flawless and camera ready, the counters are kept hospital clean, and the numerous camera cuts are edited together carefully to present a tight, glamorous picture.
Watching those early episodes of "The French Chef," many of them in black and white with lights glaring hot spots in the cookware, it’s surprising how low-budget they were.
Julia is obviously using her own well-scratched and somewhat war-weary pans. She employs the kinds of plastic spoons and ordinary equipment found at any hardware store in the early 1960s.
She makes mistakes on camera as in demonstrating a french fry cutting gadget. When it doesn’t work, she simply says, “Well, that’s no good” and throws it aside. The shows were filmed, at least in the beginning, in continuous shots, so she has to cover on the fly if she drops something out of camera range or sloshes boiling water over the range top. She’s cooking on the kind of electric-coil burners we curse now. And you catch her often looking at the wrong camera or offstage for signals from the crew. It’s all wonderful.
Julia Child is famous for her detailed, foolproof instructions, and here she keeps a continuous dialogue going in her distinctive, unplaceable speech: “Watch the butter bubbling for the right timing, dry your mushrooms thoroughly, use a good homemade stock.”
One of my earliest memories is of being glued to the TV set, watching these programs over and over again. I couldn’t have been more than 7 or 8. Somehow, she hooked us. It wasn’t necessarily that we were going to make the things she taught us to cook, as in my case at the time, but it was marvelous entertainment and seemed the height of poshness for her to know so much and rattle off French words. And she did indeed know a lot.
Watching them this week, I learned several things I either didn’t know or had forgotten, like how to get the stains off carbon-steel knives or the onion smell off your hands. She carefully gave us the reasons behind what she was doing, which are still illuminating.
She taught most of us alive today how to cook in one way or another, and we all owe so much to Julia Child. She still has a stronghold on our national imagination with a stream of books being published about her and her husband Paul. Her 6-foot frame still casts a long, wonderful shadow in the world of food, a shadow formed in a tiny studio in 1962 when she was past 50.