Julia Child, The Troublemaker

Talk about a meta-media whirlwind spanning decades.  First, Julia Child authors a cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which triggers a fundamental shift in the way that Americans view cooking, during an age that celebrated hot dogs and canned soup as viable kitchen ingredients.  Forty-one years later, a young woman named Julie Powell begins a blog, the Julie/Julia Project, which chronicles her journey to create every one of the recipes in Julia Child’s massive tome.  The blog is so successful, it gets converted into a book entitled Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen in 2005.  Four years later, that book has been turned into a film, Julie & Julia, which debuts in theaters on August 7.  And today, I’m happy to report that The Best Food Blog Ever is the featured Blog of the Day on the official Julie & Julia website.  Seriously!  It’s in the lower right hand corner!

So, you got all of that?  A book spawned a food blog which spawned a book which spawned a movie which is featuring a food blog on its website.  As I’ve said, it’s all very meta.  But enough about all of this new media stuff, let’s talk about Julia Child.

Julia Child was quite an inspiration for more than just the obvious reasons.  Yes, she taught generations of people to cook and explore and discover tastes that were beyond the periphery of their experiences, but what many folks may not know is that Julia Child didn’t start cooking until she was 32.  As someone who didn’t start writing about food until the age of 35, that fact commands a certain measure of respect from me.  What Julia Child introduced, and what Julie Powell reinforced with the Julie/Julia Project, was the proposition that everyone can learn to cook at any point in their lives, and that, as intimidating as cooking may be to the uninitiated, you can never fail so spectacularly in the kitchen as to permanently lose your license to turn on your stove.  On a larger scale, the lesson to be taken from Julia Childs’ life is, it’s never too late to start something new.

Above all else, though, Julia Child was a troublemaker, and for all of her troublemaking she has left the world a better place.  Who else would dare, at age 37 in 1950, to be one of the few women to train at the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris?  Who else but Julia Child could possibly convey that cooking, even if it involved tackling the most daunting lists of ingredients, the most intimidating processes of classic French cuisine, could be fun, and that you could actually take the time to laugh in the kitchen?  Cooking is not supposed to be some mysterious and somber dark art, and Julia Child went a long way towards promoting the notion that there’s fun to be had in the kitchen.

Troublemaking was an essential ingredient to Child’s career as an author, for even after completing the manuscript for Mastering the Art of French Cooking, she faced a constant struggle to find a publisher.  An editorial panel at Houghton Mifflin, all men, overruled the recommendation of a female editor and rejected the book.  It was their belief that women wanted recipes that were simple, preferably using mixes (and woe be unto all of us that we may be sliding backwards into that era today), so the complex mechanics of the recipes in Child’s manuscript wouldn’t find an audience.  It’s amazing to think how, if Julia Child was not as tenacious a troublemaker as she was, that such a classic may have languished at the bottom of a slush pile forever.  It wasn’t until the draft found its way to Judith Jones at Knopf that fortune finally began to favor it.  Since its first publication, Mastering the Art of French Cooking has seen many printings and been reissued twice.

Even by current standards, Julia Child’s approach to life would have placed her in the minority.  She was an advocate of moderation, a concept that is all but lost today, where everything is deep fried, supersized, and over-the-top.   A quote attributed to her stated that the secrets to happiness and good health were moderation, small helpings, and sampling “a little bit of everything”.  She never endorsed any commercial products, despite several lucrative offers.  She never advocated any kind of diet that required you to eat only this, or everything but that.

Julia Child used cream.

Julia Child used butter.

Julia Child drank gin and wine.

Julia Child lived to be 91 years old.

Thank you, Julia.  You got a lot of people cooking.