Julia Carolyn Child (née McWilliams) was born on August 15, 1912, in Pasadena, California, where her father, John McWilliams Jr., was a Princeton graduate and prominent land man…
Julia Carolyn Child (née McWilliams) was born on August 15, 1912, in Pasadena, California, where her father, John McWilliams Jr., was a Princeton graduate and prominent land manager. ◦ She graduated from Smith College in 1934 with a major in history and initially planned to become a novelist or magazine writer. ◦ In 1942 she joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) after finding that at 6 feet 2 inches she was too tall to enlist in the Women's Army Corps or the Navy's WAVES, and was soon given a position as a top-secret researcher working directly for OSS head General William J. Donovan. ◦ While in Kandy, Ceylon, she met Paul Cushing Child, also an OSS employee; the two married on September 1, 1946, had no children, and moved to Paris in 1948 after the State Department assigned Paul there. ◦ In November 2001 she moved to Santa Barbara, and her Cambridge kitchen—where she had chopped, stirred and sautéed for forty years—was moved to Washington, D.C., where it is now on display at the Smithsonian Institution. ◦ She died on August 13, 2004, two days before her 92nd birthday, surrounded by family and friends. ◦ She was an American chef, author, and television personality recognized for bringing French cuisine to the American public with her debut cookbook, *Mastering the Art of French Cooking*, and her television program *The French Chef*, which premiered in 1963. ◦
Child stated her culinary mission plainly in the introduction to *Mastering the Art of French Cooking*: "This is a book for the servantless American cook who can be unconcerned on occasion with budgets, waistlines, time schedules, children's meals, the parent-chauffeur-den mother syndrome or anything else which might interfere with the enjoyment of producing something wonderful to eat." ◦ She framed cooking as a discipline of fearlessness, insisting that "The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you've got to have a what-the-hell attitude," ◦ Her invariable advice to people was: "Learn how to cook — try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless and above all have fun!" ◦ She believed that "To be a good cook you have to have a love of the good, a love of hard work, and a love of creating," ◦ and she insisted that "You don't have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces — just good food from fresh ingredients." ◦ Through *The French Chef*, her humor, exuberance, and unpretentiousness made her an unlikely star, and her influence inspired a generation of Americans to embrace cooking as a joyful and creative endeavor. ◦ She also wrote that "Drama is very important in life: You have to come on with a bang. You never want to go out with a whimper." ◦
When asked to solve the problem of too many OSS underwater explosives being set off by curious sharks, Child's solution was to experiment with cooking various concoctions as a shark repellent, which were sprinkled in the water near the explosives and repelled sharks. ◦ She loyally chose public over commercial television, saying "I'll stick with the educators" when commercial networks competed for her talents. ◦ Behind her unpolished, quirky charm was a driven perfectionist convinced that there was a right and a wrong way to do things, who spent as many as 19 hours preparing for each half-hour segment. ◦
Of her first French meal at La Couronne in Rouen—oysters, sole meunière, and fine wine—Child said, "The whole experience was an opening up of the soul and spirit for me . . . I was hooked, and for life, as it turned out." ◦ She noted that her enthusiasm for her craft came late: "I was 32 when I started cooking. Up until then, I just ate," ◦ She once reflected that "To think it has taken me 40 yrs. to find my true passion (cat and husb. excepted)," and wrote that "the more I cook the more I like to cook." ◦
Child graduated from the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris in 1951 and studied privately with master chef Max Bugnard. ◦ She joined the cooking club Le Cercle des Gourmettes, and in 1951 she, Simone Beck, and Louisette Bertholle began teaching American women in Child's Paris kitchen at a school they called L'école des trois gourmandes. ◦ She is recognized for having brought French cuisine to the American public with her debut cookbook, *Mastering the Art of French Cooking*, and her television program *The French Chef*, which premiered in 1963. ◦ The manuscript of *Mastering the Art of French Cooking* was repeatedly rejected by publishers before the 726-page book was finally picked up by Alfred A. Knopf and published in 1961, becoming a best-seller and a seminal culinary work that is still in print. ◦ *The French Chef* debuted as a regular series on February 11, 1963, on WGBH, ran nationally for ten years, and won Peabody and Emmy Awards, including the first Emmy award for an educational program. ◦ In 1972 *The French Chef* became the first television program to be captioned for the deaf using the preliminary technology of open-captioning. ◦ She resisted being called a chef, stating, "I'm not a chef. I think in this country, we use the term very loosely. I'm a cook and a teacher," ◦ She published nearly twenty titles in all, and her last book was the autobiographical *My Life in France*, published posthumously in 2006 and written with her grandnephew Alex Prud'homme. ◦
Child attracted the broadest television audience with her cheery enthusiasm, distinctively warbly voice, and unpatronizing, unaffected manner. ◦ Reassuring her television audience to never fear a kitchen mistake, she said, "Remember, if you are alone in the kitchen, who is going to see you?" ◦ The PBS *American Masters* biography described her as never afraid of making mistakes—scooping up a potato pancake, coaxing a reluctant soufflé, or rescuing a curdled sauce. ◦ Through *The French Chef*, her humor, exuberance, and unpretentiousness made her an unlikely star. ◦
Behind her unpolished, quirky charm was a driven perfectionist convinced that there was a right and a wrong way to do things. ◦ As a young woman she had confided to her diary, "I am sadly an ordinary person... with talents I do not use." ◦ Yet she became an American icon remembered as a deeply generous person, open to experience, eager to learn and to teach. ◦ She resisted being called a chef—"I'm not a chef. I think in this country, we use the term very loosely. I'm a cook and a teacher"—while spending as many as 19 hours preparing for each half-hour segment. ◦
Child loyally chose public over commercial television, saying "I'll stick with the educators" when commercial networks competed for her talents. ◦ She was remembered as a deeply generous person, open to experience, eager to learn and to teach. ◦ Reassuring her television audience to never fear a kitchen mistake, she asked, "Remember, if you are alone in the kitchen, who is going to see you?" ◦ A 1961 appearance on the WGBH book review show *I've Been Reading*—where Child demonstrated how to cook an omelette—led to her first television cooking show. ◦