WGBH Food: Celebrating Julia: Recipe: Quiche Lorraine Pouring the egg mixture for Quiche Lorraine, as see on The French Chef (/WGBH) Quiche Lorraine (Cream and Bacon Quiche) A quiche hot out of the oven, a salad, and a cool bottle of white wine—there's the perfect light meal. Baked in an open-faced pastry shell, the quiche is really just a custard in fancy dress, a mixture of eggs and flavorings. Quick to assemble and practically foolproof, it requires an expert hand only for its crust. And if you've been having troubles with pastry dough, give this recipe a whirl in your electric mixer. 6 to 8 pieces thick-sliced bacon An 8-inch partially cooked pastry shell placed on a buttered baking sheet 3 eggs (U.S. graded “large) 1 ¼ to 1 ½ cups heavy cream ¼ tsp salt Pinch of pepper and nutmeg 1 to 1 Tb butter (Preheat Oven to 375 degrees) Slice bacon into ¼ inch pieces and brown lightly in a frying pan; drain and spread in bottom of pastry shell.

Beat eggs, cream, and seasonings in a bowl to blend. Just before baking, pour cream mixture into the shell, filling to within 1/8 inch of the top. Cut butter into bits and distribute over the cream. Bake in upper third of oven for 25 to 30 minutes, until quiche has puffed and browned, and a small knife, plunged into custard, comes out clean. Serve hot, warm, or cold; quiche will sink slightly as it cools. Serves 4 to 6 In 1961, as a recent graduate of the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris, Julia Child co-authored the book Mastering the Art of French Cooking and launched her career of educating Americans in delicious ways with food. In 1963 she began her own cooking show The French Chef, produced at WGBH. This recipe was published in The French Chef Cookbook*. This month, fans can see these new episodes from the first year of The French Chef, 1963: French Onion Soup , Quiche Lorraine and French Apple Tarts on WGBH 2 and online.

*THE FRENCH CHEF COOKBOOK by Julia Child, copyright © 1968 by Julia Child. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. For online information about other Random House, Inc. books and authors, see the Internet Web Site at More Food & Wine Julia's Life: Books | The Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts writing the book with Julia Please note: Books were published by Alfred A. Knopf with the exception of Baking with Julia, which was published by William Morrow Cookbooks and Julia Child's Menu Cookbook, which was published by Wings Books. In addition to bookstores, Julia's books are also available online from booksellers such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble . She'll take you on a kitchen odyssey In the beginning there was the book. Before Julia Child became TV Julia, Julia of the warbling voice and towering stature, fearless and flamboyant with the boning knife, there was Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the ambitious 1961 volume she co-authored with French friend and fellow cooking teacher Simone Beck (and officially, with Louisette Bertholle, whose contribution, it seems, was slim).

Most of the recipes in the first volume of MTAFC came from the French Beck but were rewritten by Child after she'd tirelessly vetted them on electric stoves with American cuts of beef and high-gluten American flour, and even American frozen vegetables. They ended up with a book "for the servantless American cook who can be unconcerned on occasion with budgets, waistlines, time schedules, children's meals, the parent-chaffeur-den-mother syndrome or anything else which might interfere with the enjoyment of producing something wonderful to eat." For the readers of MTAFC, cooking was an avocation, not a chore. (The cookbook never assumes that there's a woman in the kitchen.) In many ways, Julia's greatest contribution to cooking was not bringing French food to America—although she did that, with help from restaurateur Henri Soule; René Verdon, the Kennedys' French chef; and later Jacques Pépin and Madeleine Kamman—but in freeing Americans from the necessity of cooking for a purpose other than pleasure. Although Child demystified French cooking, she and Beck refused to dumb it down.

(This is one reason the book was rejected by their first publisher, Houghton Mifflin, who wanted something that wouldn't intimidate busy housewives.) The book, eventually published by Knopf, has few "easy" recipes. Mushrooms are fluted, lettuce is braised for hours, and chickens are boned out, then filled with pâté and sewn back together. MTAFC also has a rhythm rather different from that of the cookbooks that preceded and followed it. Ingredients are not sequestered at the top of each recipe, but rather printed in the left column at the point in the procedure when they are introduced. Recipes flow into one another as a master recipe is elaborated into multiple variations. The format can be a little disorienting and is sometimes downright frustrating. In a review of the second volume of MTAFC, which first came out in 1970, New York Times book reviewer Nika Hazelton wrote that the elaborate recipes would appeal to those people "who learn to drive a car by having the workings of the internal combustion engine explained to them in full detail." Contemporary cookbooks generally shy away from this theme-and-variations approach, presenting readers with more fully realized dishes and less technique.

(One very successful exception is Sherry Yard's The Secrets of Baking, which rekindles the master recipe format.) But even today, MTAFC is a very workable book—and it's the exacting details that make it so well worth revisiting. Here are six recipes to start with. Advertisement Page 126: Omelets Omelets are simple to make but easy to screw up, and omelet recipes, correspondingly, are notoriously difficult to write. MTAFC presents a 13-page treatise on the subject, helped along by Sidonie Coryn's line drawings (based on Paul Child's lovingly observant photographs of his wife's hands). The chapter makes one desperate to achieve the desired "smooth, gently swelling, golden oval that is tender and creamy inside." MTAFC's omelet-making directions are almost comic in their precision, but they bring great clarity to the whole operation. How much should one beat eggs before cooking? Thirty to 40 vigorous strokes with a large table fork should be sufficient.

When a utensil-free omelet-rolling technique is described as difficult but "the most fun of any method," the book offers a training regime to help you master the necessary movement: Go outside and practice tossing a cupful of dried beans in a pan until you can flip them all at once with a flick of the wrist. Then you may come back inside and make your omelet. Page 84: Béarnaise Sauce When Julie Powell, the Long Island secretary who cooked every recipe in MTAFC , was planning a celebratory visit to the Smithsonian, where Child's kitchen is installed, she hoped to leave behind a stick of butter as an offering. The 1961 recipes are definitely pre-nouvelle cuisine, unafraid of butter, eggs, or other nutritional bugbears. (The first draft had been an 850-page volume on rich sauces and poultry alone.) Sometimes, it's hard to remember just how good those war horses of la cuisine bourgeoise are, and a good béarnaise sauce, the emulsified butter and egg yolk flavored with tarragon and shallots, makes a great refresher.

Although the gadget-savvy Child, et al., have a blender version available, they prescribe trying it by hand at least once, "for part of every good cook's general knowledge is a thorough familiarity with the vagaries of egg yolks under all conditions." The recipe for the temperamental sauce comes ready with solutions for common problems—if it won't thicken, if it curdles, if it is too thick. The béarnaise recipe comes from the subchapter on hollandaise sauce, but its slightly more aggressive flavor seems more modern than plain hollandaise. Try it spooned on steak (which, of course, has its own detailed chapter). Page 436: Aspèrges au Naturelle Child and Beck helped teach Americans that vegetables are not "purely nutrient objects" but things of pleasure. They devote 100-odd pages to vegetable dishes and crusade against the American tendency to overcook them. In MTAFC, vegetables are highly manipulated—whittled and carved to cook evenly and quickly. Even asparagus gets some serious treatment; it is peeled and tied into bundles before being blanched.

(Although Julia says they must be stripped with a knife, I disagree; today's sharper peelers do just fine.) Whether you then douse the cooked spears in hollandaise (or béarnaise!) is a matter of how much pleasure you can handle. Advertisement Page 559: Mousse de Foies de Volaille Child was a gadget fiend, as a pilgrimage to her kitchen will attest. She carefully examined modern conveniences, noting which were worth embracing and when traditional hand methods were imperative. (Contemporary readers might even be a little alarmed by MTAFC's pragmatic and relatively uncritical use of clam juice, canned pineapple, and frozen spinach.) The blender was one technology that passed muster—although, according to the book, it was not up to the delicate task of grinding fish fillets for quenelles. Thanks to the blender, this chicken-liver mousse is one of the simplest, but most effective, recipes in the book. Naturally, the authors give readers the option of making it more complex, suggesting that it might be packed into an aspic-lined mold before serving.

Page 223: Homard à L'Americaine Child had a natural sense of the theatrics needed to make entertaining television, whether it involved dropping food, carving meat with a big sword, or executing lobsters, as she did to make homard a l'americaine. The latter was first detailed in MTAFC as a humane alternative to steaming the creatures to death: The lobster "may be killed almost instantly just before cooking if you plunge the point of a knife into the head between the eyes, or sever the spinal cord by making a small incision in the back of the shell at the juncture of the chest and tail." For cooking exhibitionists, there are few recipes that pack as much drama as this classic: After you assassinate several live lobsters, you light them on fire as they simmer in cognac. Page 646: Tarte au Citron et Aux Amandes Many of MTAFC's desserts are all-day kitchen odysseys and, frankly, a little oversweet and dated: charlottes made with homemade ladyfingers and lots of orange liqueur, rice pudding with glacéed fruits, and jellied Bavarian creams.

This tart, by comparison, lets two big flavors—lemon and almond—shine without much fuss. My only improvement: Toast the almonds before grinding them. But just to make sure it feels like Julia, there is a fiddly but flavorful bit of candied lemon zest to garnish the tart. If you make it through these six recipes, consider turning to the second volume of MTAFC, in which Child and Beck approach even more complicated preparations, including a 20-page method for a great French baguette made entirely with American ingredients. As ever, in the world of Julia Child, there was pleasure in taking pains. Laura Jacobs on Julia Child | Vanity Fair Twitter Julia Child, photographed in her Cambridge, Massachusetts, kitchen, June 29, 1970. By Arnold Newman/Getty Images. The mirror was always in the drawer, the little handheld signal mirror, to use if one is lost. It was standard issue for Americans working in the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.), the dashing precursor to the C.I.A., active during World War II.

In 2001, when Julia Child’s entire kitchen was relocated from her house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the first floor of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, in Washington, D.C., the rescue mirror went, too. It is displayed on a wall in the exhibit, forever near the kitchen drawer where she kept it—a leap of light, an SOS, symbolic of the point in her life when she was found. VF.com asked the country’s top chefs to create twists on Julia Child’s classic recipies. Sample the results. Alfred Portale of Gotham (above) offers Duck with Roasted Peaches and Baby Turnips. It is at this point—the two years she spent in the O.S.S.—that Noël Riley Fitch begins her 1997 biography of Julia Child, Appetite for Life. “I asked myself,” Fitch remembers, “What’s the critical moment that changed her life and initiated her into the woman we know—the adult Julia?” The answer was Paul. In early 1945, the O.S.S.

had transferred Julia McWilliams from Kandy, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), to Kunming, China, where she continued her work as head of the Registry, processing all top-secret communications. She was glad of the transfer because fellow O.S.S.-er Paul Child had been sent to China some months before. A worldly intellectual with a poetic sensibility, an artist and photographer who relished wine, women, and song, he designed war rooms for General (Lord) Mountbatten in Kandy and for General Wedemeyer in Kunming. Paul thought Julia unworldly, unfocused, and doubtless a virgin—“a hungry hayseed” is how she would describe herself—but also steady, game, a “classy dame,” and “brave,” he wrote his twin brother, Charlie, “about being an old maid!” He was 42 to her 32, five feet ten to her six feet two. He was looking for a soulmate, but had counted Julia out. And yet their sure-footed friendship, forged over Indo-Asian food and shared danger, was climbing, slipping, into love. Which led to bed. And then, in 1946, when the war was over, marriage.

It is at a later life-changing moment that the historian Laura Shapiro begins her biography, Julia Child, of 2007. She describes one of Julia’s performances on The French Chef, a television show that first aired nine months after the 1961 publication of Child’s momentous Mastering the Art of French Cooking (co-authored with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle). Presented on Boston’s fledgling educational channel, WGBH, The French Chef was an instant success—the first cult cooking show in America. It was the only time the word “instant” would attach to this embracing, warm, spontaneous yet methodical woman, who stood firm against the priggish, frozen, in-minutes cooking of midcentury America. “Mastering the Art of French Cooking is a great, great book,” Shapiro explains. “And it actually has a fair amount of personality in it. But if that’s all we ever had, Julia would have been over and forgotten by now. It was television that made her.

The Julia that you see on television is the one who registered on the national consciousness and created a place for herself in the national heart.” This, too, was a soul match, the marriage between Julia and the camera, between food and the tube. It is hardly an overstatement to say that the child of this marriage was public television as we know it today. Julia, photographed by her husband in Paris, 1948. Courtesy of the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. In a spiritual sense, however, the making of Julia Child—“Our Lady of the Ladle,” as Time magazine would dub her in 1966—happened over lunch. It is here that the new movie Julie & Julia, based on Julie Powell’s popular blog of 2002–2003—a year in which Powell made all 524 recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking—begins. Written and directed by Nora Ephron, and starring Meryl Streep as Child and Amy Adams as Powell, the movie starts in November of 1948, when Julia and Paul landed in France for his new post in the diplomatic corps.

Straight from the ship they drove to a restaurant in Rouen called La Couronne (the Crown). For Julia’s first meal on French soil, Paul ordered sole meunière, that simplest, purest, most implicitly French preparation of fresh fish. All it required was butter, flour, parsley, lemon, precision, history, and heat. “It was heaven to eat,” Julia wrote in From Julia Child’s Kitchen—“a dining experience,” she remembered in My Life in France, “of a higher order than any I’d ever had before.” One could say it was another shaft of light, not angled upward as from a signal mirror, but piercing inward—an annunciation. “Paul and I floated out the door into the brilliant sunshine and cool air. Our first lunch together in France had been absolute perfection. It was the most exciting meal of my life.” Mrs. Child had received her vocation, her crown. America’s First Lady is not always the president’s wife, though she does tend to be tall and tireless, and has in the past come from Wasp stock. The 20th century can count three such women, all of whom were cheerfully generous in the spotlight and wholly dedicated to causes that were democratic in character.

Each of these women came into her own in middle age, and thus, to the American public, was never young, and each gave existential comfort by her very presence. The first was Emily Post, the author of 1922’s Etiquette, and the conscience of the 20s and 30s. The second was Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and a moral beacon through the 40s and 50s. When Post died, in 1960, and Eleanor Roosevelt, in 1962, it was not the svelte and sloe-eyed Jacqueline Kennedy who moved into this matriarchal role—she was too young, too shy, too feathery, too fashionable. It was Julia Child, just turned 50. Twenty-three-year-old Julia at her summer home in Saint Malo, California, 1936. Courtesy of Philadelphia Cousins and Nick Moran. Given the first 40 years of her life, begun on August 15, 1912, in Pasadena, California, the later fame of Julia Carolyn McWilliams hardly seemed fated.

Her wealthy father, John McWilliams Jr., owned and managed farming and mining lands, and had a conservative vision for his daughter’s life: marriage to a good Republican just like him. Her mother, Caro—an old-money Weston from Massachusetts (the family fortune came from making paper)—was far more free-spirited in her views, but not aggressively so. Julia was the oldest of three children, and her chief distinction growing up, along with ebullient spirits reflected in a breathy, swoopy voice, was her height. Yes, she had William Cullen Bryant and Oliver Wendell Holmes in her maternal bloodline, but she wasn’t a particularly avid student, and it didn’t help that her father equated intellectuals with Communists. Julia preferred sports, where she excelled because she was taller and stronger than anyone else, and theater, because she was a ham. In school plays Julia was always cast as the man or an animal—“never,” Fitch writes, “the princess.” In her diary, though, Julia wrote that she felt “meant for something.” As her mother had before her, Julia McWilliams went to Smith College—class of 1934.

She graduated with a degree in history but not with the Mrs. that had been the ultimate four-year goal. Photographs show that Julia was lovely in her 20s, as lean as the young Kate Hepburn, with sun-streaked curls, a high brow, and penetrating blue eyes. She had dates and crushes. Still, when a woman is six feet two in size-12 flats, the view is unique, and not always in a good way. As O.S.S. friend Jack Moore told Fitch, “Looking down on all the males she ever [met]—she had to evolve a sense of herself that was different from the person who is a physically standard specimen.” Julia chose to put the focus on others and to mute her own ego; she was modest, yet socially gung-ho. The couple’s 1956 Valentine’s Day card. Courtesy of the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

Meanwhile, fitfully searching for that “something,” she ping-ponged between East Coast and West, between career-girl aspirations—trying to write, doing P.R.—and the country-club life for which her upbringing had prepared her: golf, tennis, luncheons, dinner dances. When Harrison Chandler, the man who would one day run the Times Mirror printing operations, proposed to her, in 1941, Julia, lukewarm, eventually declined. Despite the plaintive lines of poetry she’d copied into the back of her diary—“Oh why do you walk through the fields in gloves, / Missing so much, so much?”—Julia wanted true love, what she called “sympatico,” and was not willing to settle. Then, too, the war was on and her country was calling. She answered by heading to Washington, D.C. Too tall for the wacs or waves, she took a job as a typist in the Office of War Information, and two months later applied for a position in the O.S.S. Julia, it turned out, had formidable organizational skills: soon enough, she was supervising an office of 40 people.

In 1944 she shipped out to India. “The war,” she said, “was the change in my life.” That first meal at La Couronne wasn’t just about the sole. It was also about salad served after a meal, and wine served with lunch! It was about the importance of a meal, its place in a day, in life, the at-table meeting of body and soul, and the pleasure of sharing that. In the O.S.S., the sympathy between Julia McWilliams and Paul Child was related to food, their eager explorations into Ceylonese and Chinese cuisine and culture, tastes both sensual and cerebral. Back in the States, the couple’s love letters reflected the playful and frankly lusty nature of their relationship. “I want to see you,” Paul wrote, “touch you, kiss you, talk with you, eat with you … eat you, maybe.” Come 1948, could there have been a better diplomatic posting for Paul and his wife of two years than Paris?

While Paul was at the American Embassy, running the exhibits office for the United States Information Service (U.S.I.S.), Julia was shopping the markets, haunting Les Halles, taking French lessons at Berlitz so she could talk to the butcher, the fishmonger, the vegetable woman—to find out how to make the kind of food she’d eaten at La Couronne: la cuisine bourgeoise. In the months before she married, Julia had tried to cook and it wasn’t pretty. She never forgot the first meal she’d made for her new husband: calves’ brains simmered in red wine. It was “messy to look at,” she later wrote, “and not very good to eat.” She had 25 cookbooks but no technique, and she wasn’t what anyone would call a natural. Yet Paul had lit the pilot light, and in Paris—wooomf—the flame. “I loved the people, the food, the lay of the land, the civilized atmosphere, and the generous pace of life,” she exclaimed in My Life in France, the memoir she wrote with her grandnephew Alex Prud’homme, published in 2006, two years after her death.

“I fell in love with French food—the tastes, the processes, the history, the endless variations, the rigorous discipline, the creativity, the wonderful people, the equipment, the rituals.” The operative word is “love.” In a video Julia made for the Smithsonian, in 2001, to run alongside the display of her famous Cambridge kitchen, she said of the house it was in, “If we could just have the kitchen and our bedroom that would be all we’d need.” And that’s pretty much what Paris was for Julia and Paul, a kitchen and a bedroom. The inheritance Julia had received when her mother died, and the helpful supplements sent by her father, not only meant that the couple had extra cash to sample French restaurants but also made possible Julia’s leap: enrollment in the Paris cooking school Le Cordon Bleu. There, she worked with a passion she’d never known before. “I was beginning to feel la cuisine bourgeoise in my hands, my stomach, my soul.” Though she called Paul a “Cordon Bleu widower,” he wasn’t really.

“I would go to school in the morning,” she once said in an interview, “then for lunch time, I would go home and make love to my husband.” If there is one line that sums up the Julia Child enterprise it is this one, written in My Life in France: “My immediate plan was to develop enough foolproof recipes so that I could begin to teach classes of my own.” This was the seed of her great achievement. Julia did, in fact, teach classes in Paris. With Simone (Simca) Beck and Louisette Bertholle, the two women she would always call her “French sisters,” she founded L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes, a twice-weekly class for American women who wanted to cook French. It was merely a warm-up. With Beck and Bertholle she would write a book—the book—a masterpiece that almost 50 years later still stands alone. It began as a fixer-upper in 1952, when Beck and Bertholle asked Julia to groom a 600-page cookbook they’d sold to Sumner Putnam of Ives Washburn, French Home Cooking.

In recasting the recipes for American kitchens, Julia tested them and found every one overcomplicated or unclear. She decided that they had to start from scratch—rethinking, researching, re-testing—and with American ingredients, American measurements, and cultural translations (for instance, what the French call le carrelet, the British call plaice, and Americans, sand dab or lemon sole). During this deconstruct/reconstruct process Putnam fell away and Houghton Mifflin signed on as the publisher; the book got bigger, its ambition deeper. Six years and 700 pages later, the manuscript was so involved and encyclopedic it scared the suits at Houghton Mifflin. They asked for a scaled-down (dumbed-down is what they actually wanted), more user-friendly format, and this imperative brought focus. It would be, Julia told their editor, “a collection of good French dishes of the simpler sort, directed quite frankly to those who enjoy cooking and have a feeling for food.” At this point Bertholle had very little to do with the book.

(Her royalties were whittled down to 18 percent, the rest split between Beck and Child.) Instinctive, inventive Simca and analytical Julia were the creators; Julia wrote the book, and it was her supreme and unrelenting powers of organization and test-kitchen rigor that gave the final manuscript its singular form and clarity. The book they produced was magisterial and yet intimate, serenely serious yet plainspoken. When it appeared, in 1961, majestically titled Mastering the Art of French Cooking, it was like nothing the world had ever seen before. The great James Beard wished he had written it, and Jacques Pépin, who saw it in manuscript, says he “read it like you read a novel, turning the pages fast, late into the night I couldn’t believe that someone had broken it all down like that. I was jealous.” The recipes were indeed foolproof. Houghton Mifflin, to its everlasting regret, rejected the manuscript as still too formidable. But Judith Jones, a young editor at Knopf, took one look and knew it was a classic.

Like Julia, she, too, had found herself—plus a future husband, the writer and editor Evan Jones—in France. She too was in love with French food. When she tested *Mastering’*s recipe for boeuf bourguignon, “my first bite told me that I had finally produced an authentic French boeuf bourguignon—as good as one I could get in Paris.” Julia and Paul correct proofs of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Mount Desert Island, Maine, June 1961. From the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. “It’s not just a book of recipes,” Jones says today. “It was a revolutionary book in the sense that Julia knew she had to translate French cooking into terms that we would understand. Lots of the recipes are Simca’s, but I think even then Julia often put her imprint on them in more detail, more detail.” Also part of that imprint? Principles—a belief in a right way as opposed to a wrong way.

Just as Emily Post’s Etiquette set forth a blueprint for civilized conduct, an ethical structure, if you will, that anyone—no matter what their birth—could learn, so Mastering set forth the structural verities of classic French cooking, the disciplined themes and variations, tantamount to an art, that Julia had found so liberating: how to make the foundation sauces, how to do a roux, how to lay in flavor, how to be patient. The centuries-old techniques that the French learn like a language could now be learned step-by-step by Americans. “She knew how she wanted it to look on the page,” Jones says. “The ingredients appearing when you use them, instead of having to go back five pages.” Which meant one had to read the whole recipe before starting. This in itself forced a cook to take the enterprise seriously, to see in advance the architecture of the recipe, and to understand the alchemical flash points (its quickenings and transubstantiations) and the perils (what could go wrong and how to fix it). “We can’t cater to the flimsies,” Julia used to say to Jones, “flimsies” being people who weren’t serious about food.

(“Fluffies” was another Julia word, for people who were grandiose about eating, overly gourmet-ish.) “It was an amazing book,” says Nora Ephron, who still cooks Julia’s lamb stew in the spring, still makes the boeuf bourguignon and the chicken breast with cream and mushrooms (deliciously filmed in Julie & Julia). “You understood cooking from having taken that book seriously.” And the timing couldn’t have been better. Just as Etiquette punctually met America’s booming Babel of the 1920s, new waves of the unwashed and the upwardly mobile in need of instruction, so Mastering coincided with the Kennedy presidency, which saw a decidedly liberal worldliness in the White House and a French chef in its kitchen. “There was that whole postwar Francophilia,” says David Kamp, the author of The United States of Arugula and a V.F. contributing editor. “So French cooking was in the air; it would have happened. But it happened explosively with Mastering. It caught on like wildfire among a certain kind of educated, upper-middle-class housewife, back when ‘housewife’ was still the right term to use.

It was a pretty significant demographic that really did drive change in how America approached food.” “It was an almost hilarious epidemic of cooking from that cookbook,” says Ephron. “People would just pitch themselves into these things, and it was very much part of the fabric of all our lives in the early 60s.” “We’d called Julia Child by her Christian name the moment Mastering the Art of French Cooking appeared in 1961, because she seemed to be talking directly to us,” writes one of those “pitchers,” Betty Fussell, in her 1999 memoir, My Kitchen Wars. “To cook French, eat French, drink French … was to become versant in the civilized tongues of Europe as opposed to America’s barbaric yawp.” Mastering the Art of French Cooking sold more than 100,000 copies within one year of publication and by 1969 had sold 600,000—an astonishing number for a cookbook in the 60s. It is now in its 47th printing. The book paid for a small house Paul and Julia built and loved in Plascassier, in Provence—and it made life comfortable.

Today, the royalties accrued from Mastering, as well as from Julia’s 10 other cookbooks and other intangible property rights, go to the grant-giving Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts. The foundation operates with a base of around $1 million, and promotes cooking as a serious study. In February 1962, four months after *Mastering’*s publication, Julia appeared on I’ve Been Reading, an interview program on WGBH, Channel 2. Paul, who had retired from government service in 1961, was now Julia’s full-time, if unofficial, manager, and they arrived for the 30-minute show armed with a copper bowl, a dozen eggs, mushrooms, a whisk, and a hot plate. “I did not know what [I] could talk about for that long,” Julia later said. On the show she whipped the egg whites, turned the mushrooms, and made an omelet. The station received 27 letters (unheard of!) asking for more.

And so, with producer-director Russell Morash and associate producer Ruth Lockwood (who’d just finished a series featuring Eleanor Roosevelt), Julia made three pilots: “The French Omelette,” “Coq au Vin,” and “Soufflés.” On July 26, 1962, a half-hour show called The French Chef was aired at 8:30 p.m., and a 49-year-old star was born. “There I was in black and white,” Julia wrote in My Life in France, “a large woman sloshing eggs too quickly here, too slowly there, gasping, looking at the wrong camera while talking too loudly, and so on.” She’s right. The first French Chefs were rudimentary and self-conscious. They were also straightforward and mesmerizing. Julia wasn’t flimsy or fluffy; she was simply the sum of her experiences standing there in a studio kitchen and turning la cuisine bourgeoise into a charmingly earnest, slyly earthy, and surprisingly droll one-woman show. But, really, was there a face and figure that seemed less made for the unforgiving medium of television than Julia’s?

She was middle-aged, with a hairdo of short curls that David Kamp has called “unreconstructed Smith ’34.” She’s frumpy in a button-up blouse of stiff cotton, like a home-ec teacher, until you notice how tall and lean she is over the low counter, her slim hips girded by a tightly wrapped apron, a towel tucked into the waistband—rather swashbuckling. She’s like a knight without armor—not of the roundtable but of the dinner table—and she even has a coat of arms: the “Ecole Des 3 Gourmandes” embroidered badge (designed by Paul) that’s pinned to her blouse. She could be a mezzo-soprano singing a trouser role—the Rosenkavalier, perhaps, or Cherubino. Which brings us to the voice. Paul, when he first met Julia, in the O.S.S., described “her slight atmosphere of hysteria.” No doubt he was referring to Julia’s almost operatic vocal tonalities, the here floating, there plunging falsetto she seems to have been born with.

Hers is one of the distinctive voices of 20th-century entertainment, and it has known myriad descriptions: “a flutey schoolmarm tone,” the “Edwardian inflections of Lady Bracknell,” “like a great horned owl,” “two parts Broderick Crawford to one part Elizabeth II.” Yet the voice is only half of it, the other half being her silence as she kneads the dough or wields the knife, the intervals of rigorous quiet, pure concentration, that give the show a spellbinding inner rhythm, an almost medieval sense of heat and light. For Julia Child, French cooking was a guild art requiring a committed apprenticeship, years of practice. And it required courage too, or as she said to viewers after she muffed the flip of a potato cake, which fell in pieces on the stovetop, “You see when I flipped it I didn’t have the courage to do it the way I should have.” She proceeded to press the cake back together and uttered one of her most famous lines: “But you can always pick it up, and if you’re alone in the kitchen, who is going to see?” Julia wields a mallet on The French Chef, circa 1970.

Right, Dan Aykroyd as Julia in the Saturday Night Live skit, 1978. From Everett Collection; by Owen Franken/Corbis. The French Chef officially premiered on February 11, 1963, and ran through 1973 (Julia did many other television shows, and won three Emmys). As the show caught on, a whole cult of Julia stories sprang up. That dropped potato cake soon became, in the retelling, a dropped chicken, a roast, a whole salmon on the floor, which she picked up while saying (not), “Your guests will never know.” And because Julia used wine in her cooking and toasted viewers at the show’s end, people thought she was drunk on-camera, not knowing her glass of wine was really Gravy Master mixed with water.

In 1978, Saturday Night Live presented a Grand Guignol spoof of The French Chef, co-written by Al Franken and starring Dan Aykroyd as Julia, who slices off her thumb while making poularde demi-désossée, bleeds copiously, and then passes out crying, “Save the liver.” The skit is still aired today and still funny, a testament to Julia’s continuing stature in the culture. (She herself loved the skit, and kept a videotape of it under the television in her kitchen.) In the 10 years that The French Chef aired, Julia’s subtext was not out of sync with the era’s counterculture or its overt message of psychosexual liberation. Julia wanted her viewers to loosen up, get physical, not with controlled substances but with food, not through a glass darkly but at table, with delight. Hers was a civilized sensuality, the integration of the senses that she’d learned in France. This is why her following was legion—Julia’s appetite appealed to young and old alike. “Americans didn’t come over on the Mayflower trusting food,” says Laura Shapiro. “Julia’s whole thing about food was that you had to trust it.

That, to me, is her great message. Getting your hands into it—touch it, breathe it, smell it, live it. If we as Americans have overcome to any degree our fear of food, our weird neurotic thing about the body, it starts with Julia.” “I felt very related to her,” says Judith Jones, “because we were both released from very traditional, middle-class American values. And it was France that released us. She wanted to bring this message to America—that we were still steeped in the Puritan attitude towards food, and what the food industry had done to make us feel that food was not for the modern woman. It’s what an artist does: you want to express it so that you awaken sensibility. And she really did that.” “Her favorite point in her life was the years in France, that period of discovery and awakening,” says Alex Prud’homme. “As she said, ‘I felt myself opening like a flower.’ It was a lovely phrase. And I think one of the reasons that—this is my personal theory—she wanted to write all these recipes down and transmit them to Americans is it was a form of distilling experience, almost like a short story or a poem.

She used the recipe as a way of talking about France and its values, which are so different from ours. You know, doing things correctly and taking the time to get it right, and to work hard and learn your technique, and also to have fun.” Paul Child died at the age of 92, in 1994. Ten years later, in 2004, Julia Child died two days short of her 92nd birthday. In the last year of her life she suffered knee surgeries, kidney failure, and a stroke. On August 12, when her doctor called to say she had an infection and would need to be hospitalized, she chose not to be treated. The meal that turned out to be her last, before she went to sleep and never woke up, was *Mastering’*s recipe for French onion soup. “Her birthday was August 15,” says Alex Prud’homme. “And we had people from all over the country and around the world coming for this big party in Santa Barbara for her 92nd birthday, and she died two days beforehand. And I’ve always wondered, Did she do that on purpose? We’ll never know.

But it would be a very typical Julia move, knowing that all her favorite people were coming from all over, and wouldn’t this be a nice moment for her to, as she would say, ‘slip off the raft.’” Did they still come? “Everybody came. And it turned into a sort of three-day Irish wake, everybody telling stories and laughing and crying and eating and drinking. I think she felt very lucky to live the life she did. I think she loved it.” Laura Jacobs is a Vanity Fair contributing editor. Share Julia Child autotune: Video celebrates chef’s 100th birthday - NY Daily News Julia Child autotune: Video celebrates chef’s 100th birthday Julia Child autotune: Video celebrates chef’s 100th birthday email Legendary chef, author and TV personality Julia Child wrote "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in 1961. She co-starred and co-authored with Jacques Pepin the PBS series "Julia and Jacques: Cooking at Home." She is widely credited with helping Americans discover French cooking after World War II.She was also a spy, working during the war for the OSS directly for its legendary founder "Wild" Bill Donovan, while in Washington.

Then she was sent by the agency, a precursor to the CIA, to Sri Lanka and China. (Jim Cooper/AP) Wednesday, August 15, 2012, 4:30 PM For her 100th birthday, Julia Child got the auto-tune treatment. PBS used the voice-warping technique to produce a viral video as tribute to the adored chef and TV personality on Wednesday, what would have been her centennial. The song, “Keep on Cooking,” is a mashup of Child’s voice — dishing out recipes and cooking tips — to tunes by John D. Boswell, a.k.a. melodysheep. She melts chocolate, roasts chicken, stirs stews and hammers dough — don’t be surprised if you’re hungry after watching. PBS posted the clip Tuesday on its YouTube page, where it’s gotten about 100,000 hits. Child died in 2004, aged 91. She was portrayed by actress Meryl Streep in the 2009 film, “Julia and Julia.” Streep won a Golden Globe “Best Actress” award for her part.

Child isn’t the first beloved icon be honored with a remix. In June, PBS paid homage to Mr. Rogers with his own auto-tuned hit, “Garden of Your Mind.” Julia Child - Create TV Lidia's "Lemony Chicken" Julia Child Julia Child was born Julia McWilliams in Pasadena, Calif. After she graduated from Smith College in 1934, she spent several years in advertising and publicity, and joined the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. Her war career took her to Washington, D.C., Southeast Asia, and China, where she met her husband, Paul Child. Following their marriage in 1946, Paul joined the U.S. Information Service in Washington, and they were eventually sent to Paris, where Julia began her culinary career at Le Cordon Bleu. After more than four years in Paris they were stationed in Marseilles, then in Germany; and Paul ended his diplomatic career in Norway. They then settled into a large, gray house in Cambridge, Mass. After Paul’s death in 1994, Julia spent the winter months in Santa Barbara, Calif.

In 2001 she closed up the Cambridge house and moved permanently to her native California, where she resided until her death in 2004. While in Paris, in 1949, Julia met Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, and joined the French gastronomical society, Le Club des Gourmettes. Later the three women opened their cooking school, L'Ecole des Trois Gourmandes, and began work on their first book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which was eventually published in 1961. By this time, the Childs had returned to America and settled in the Boston area where Julia taped her first public television series The French Chef, which aired in February 1963. After some 200 programs in classical French cooking, she branched out into contemporary cuisine with the television series Julia Child and Company, followed by Dinner at Julia’s. All of these shows were produced by Russell Morash, also the producer of the public television favorite, This Old House , and The Victory Garden .

In 1972 she received an Emmy nomination, and was awarded Emmys in 1995 for the Master Chef series and in 1997 for Baking with Julia . In 1984, with WGBH, she completed six one-hour teaching videocassettes, "The Way to Cook," published by Alfred A. Knopf. In 1999 she received the Ralph Lowell Award for Programming Excellence from public television. Further, she was elected a member of the prestigious National Academy of Arts and Sciences. In addition to repeats of the public television series, Julia’s other television appearances were with such national shows as David Letterman, Good Morning America, and Rosie O’Donnell. Julia was featured on the Television Food Network, and served as host to the Master Chef series, which appeared on public television stations nationwide. The first 26 episodes, Cooking with Master Chefs, were taped in chef’s home kitchens, while the next two series were done in Julia’s own kitchen. In Julia’s Kitchen with Master Chefs was followed by Baking with Julia , which was accompanied by a large, fully illustrated book authored by Dorrie Greenspan and published by William Morrow & Company.

In her final television series, she teamed up with Jacques P�pin in Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home, accompanied by a book and video series of the same name. All of these series were produced by Geoffrey Drummond and A La Carte Communications. Her own books include Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961), The French Chef Cookbook (1968), Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. II, co-authored with Simone Beck, (1970), From Julia Child's Kitchen (1977), Julia Child & Company (1979), and Julia Child & More Company (1980). From 1982 to 1986 she authored a monthly cooking column in Parade Magazine, the photographs for which formed the pictorial basis for her large, illustrated basic book, The Way to Cook. These books are published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

A new work, Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom, an aide memoir for the home cook, was published by Knopf in the fall of 2000 to accompany a public television special including snippets from a goodly number of her television shows dating back to the very first one, Beef Bourguignon, in February 1963. Mrs. Child was interviewed and written about in such publications as Time, Life, Newsweek, The New Yorker, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, TV Guide, USA Today, US News and World Report, Newsday, and The New York Times. She appeared on numerous national radio and television shows such as Larry King Live, Fresh Air, The Johnny Carson Show, the Phil Donahue Show, A&E Biography, and Charlie Rose. She received honorary degrees from Bates College, Rutgers, Smith College, Harvard University, Brown University, Newbury College, Johnson and Wales University, University of Massachusetts, and Boston University, and was made an honorary member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Radcliffe College.

She was elected a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, and was awarded the French Ordre de M�rite Agricole, Ordre de M�rite Nationale, and Confr�rie de C�r�s. Mrs. Child was very much committed not only to the furthering of gastronomy as a recognized discipline, but also to the encouragement of young people to enter the profession. To this end she was an active member of the International Association of Culinary Professionals, was an honorary trustee of COPIA – The American Center for Wine, Food, and the Arts in Napa Valley, and was particularly involved with The American Institute of Wine & Food, of which she was one of the Founders. The Institute is a non-profit educational organization established in 1981, whose object is to advance the understanding, appreciation, and quality of wine and food. Julia Child revolutionized the way Americans think about cooking and appreciate food. She had a major influence on our American lifestyle through her television series, books, national appearances, and involvement with all levels of the culinary world. Her famous Cambridge, Mass.

kitchen was removed by the archivists of the Smithsonian Museum of American History, and set as an exhibit open to the public in September 2002. Julia Child died on Aug. 13, 2004 at age 91, but her culinary legacy lives on. · Find Julia Child Recipes from PBS and Others | Julia Child | PBS Food quiz Find Julia Child Recipes from PBS and Others Looking for a Julia Child recipe? Whether you are looking for an old favorite or new inspiration, we’ve got you covered with this selection of cookbooks and online resources. Browse our collections and pick your favorite dish to cook for #CookForJulia . Recipes on the Web In 2009, the Smithsonian compiled this blog featuring Julia Child recipes. Continue Cookbooks, Technique and Memoirs Mastering The Art of French Cooking, Volume 2 The sequel to the classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking! Here, from Julia Child and Simone Beck, is the sequel to the cooking classic that has inspired a whole American generation to new standards of culinary taste and artistry. Available at shopPBS Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Box Set The perfect gift for any follower of Julia Child–and any lover of French food.

This boxed set brings together Mastering the Art of French Cooking, first published in 1961, and its sequel, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume Two, published in 1970. Available at shopPBS My Life in France Julia Child single handedly awakened America to the pleasures of good cooking with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television show The French Chef, but as she reveals in this bestselling memoir, she didn’t know the first thing about cooking when she landed in France. Available at shopPBS Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home Two legendary culinary masters – Julia Child and Jacqes Pepin – join their talents in a creative cookbook that demonstrates the best in traditional French home cookery, with a delectable assortment of recipes that range from soups to desserts. Companion volume to the public television series. Available at shopPBS Baking With Julia Baking with Julia is not only a book full of recipes, but also one that continues Julia’s teaching tradition. Here, basic techniques come alive and are made easily comprehensible in recipes that demonstrate the myriad ways of raising dough, glazing cakes, and decorating crusts. This is the resource you’ll turn to again and again for all your baking needs.

With Baking with Julia in your cookbook library, you can become a master baker. Available at shopPBS Julia Child’s Kitchen Wisdom Book Julia Child has given us answers to these and other questions in the ten masterful volumes she has published over the past 40 years. But which book do you go to for which solutions? Now in this little volume, your can find the answers immediately. Information is arranged according to subject matter, with ample cross-referencing. Available at shopPBS Julia Child Home: Would You Like To Buy Julia Child's Home in France? Would You Like To Buy Julia Child's Home in France? AddThis Photo Sotheby's Have you always wanted to cook like Julia Child ? Forget cookbooks! How about getting your hands on the late chef’s French cottage complete with her original gourmet kitchen? Child’s vacation home in the French countryside is now on the market and it can all be yours for the price of 800,000 euros ($859,360). The 1,614-square foot stucco cottage was built in 1963 on grounds belonging to Child's best friend and cookbook collaborator Simone Beck (who co-authored Mastering the Art of French Cooking).

The History of Julia Child's French Home The property is called La Pitchoune (which means “the little one” in Provencal) but Child adorably dubbed it "La Peetch." It is located in Plascassier, a town in the heart of Provence and just a half hour north of Cannes. For three decades, she and her husband Paul visited the house every year and even hosted “other culinary legends such as Jim Beard and M.F.K. Fischer,” according to the listing by Sotheby’s. The property features a pool, a grand living-dining room with a wood-burning fireplace, three charming bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms and a separate studio. JULIA CHILD'S FRENCH KITCHEN The real gem of the property is the kitchen which was designed by Paul and built to look like the kitchen in their Cambridge, Massachusetts home. It has extra tall custom-built counters and Child’s signature pegboard walls covered with original cooking equipment. What is even more amazing is that it is the only still existing private Julia Child kitchen in the world. Below are some images of the stunning property but swing by Sotheby’s to get more details on the listing.

Also, check out this incredible article from the New York Times about Julia Child's home in France. all images via Sotheby's WGBH Food: Celebrating Julia Coq au Vin Julia Child's Coq au Vin Recipe Coq au Vin (The French Chef/WGBH) Coq Au Vin (Casserole of Chicken in Red Wine, Garnished with Onions, Mushrooms, and Bacon) Coq au vin is probably the most famous of all French chicken dishes, and certainly one of the most delicious, with its rich red-wine sauce, its tender onion and mushroom garniture, and its browned pieces of chicken with their wonderful flavor. Ideal for a party because you may prepare it completely a day or more before serving, coq au vin seems to be even better when done ahead so all its elements have time to steep together. A 3-to 4-ounce chunk of lean bacon A 10-inch flameproof casserole or electric skillet 2 Tb cooking oil Remove rind and cut bacon into sticks 1 inch long and ¼ inch across. Simmer for 10 minutes in 2 quarts of water, drain, rinse in cold water, and dry.

Sauté slowly in the casserole (260 degrees for the electric skillet) with the oil. When bacon is very lightly browned, remove to a side dish, leaving fat in pan. 2 ½ lbs. 3 lbs. cut-up frying chicken ½ tsp salt ¼ cup cognac Dry chicken thoroughly in a towel. Brown on all sides in the hot fat (360 degrees). Season chicken with salt and pepper, return bacon to pan, cover pan, and cook slowly (300 degrees) for 10 minutes, turning chicken once. Then uncover, pour in cognac, ignite with a lighted match, shake pan back and forth for several seconds until flames subside. 3 cups Burgundy, Macon, Chianti, or California Mountain Red wine 1 to 2 cups beef stock or bouillon 1 Tb tomato paste 1 bay leaf Pour wine into pan, and add just enough bouillon to cover the chicken. Stir in tomato paste, garlic, and herbs. Bring to the simmer, then cover and simmer slowly for about 30 minutes, or until chicken meat is tender when pierced with a fork.

12 to 24 small white onions Salt to taste 1 to 2 Tb cooking oil While chicken is cooking, drop onions into boiling water, bring water back to the boil, and let boil for 1 minute. Drain, shave off to ends of onions, peel carefully, and pierce a deep cross in the root end with a small knife (to keep onions whole during cooking). Heat oil in a frying pan, add onions, and toss for several minutes until lightly browned (this will be a patchy brown). Add water to halfway up onions and ¼ to ½ teaspoon salt, cover pan, and simmer slowly for 25 to 30 minutes, or until onions are tender when pierced with a knife. 2 Tb softened butter When chicken is done, drain out cooking liquid into a saucepan. Skim off fat and boil down liquid, if necessary, to concentrate flavor. You should have about 2 ¼ cups. Remove from heat. Blend butter and flour together in a saucer; beat into the cooking liquid with wire whip. Bring to the simmer, stirring, and simmer for a minute or two until sauce has thickened. Scrape onions and mushrooms into sauce and simmer a minute to blend flavors.

Carefully taste sauce, adding more sat and pepper if you feel it necessary. Then pour sauce over chicken. (Chicken is now ready for final reheating, but can be set aside until cool, then covered and refrigerated for a day or two.) Shortly before serving, bring to the simmer, basting chicken with sauce. Cover and simmer slowly for 4 to 5 minutes, until chicken is hot through. (Do not overcook at this point!) Serve from casserole, or arrange on a hot platter and decorate with sprigs of parsley. Accompany with parsley potatoes, rice, or noodles; buttered green peas or green salad; hot French bread; and the same red wine you used for cooking the chicken. Serves For 4 to 6 people In 1961, as a recent graduate of the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris, Julia Child co-authored the book Mastering the Art of French Cooking and launched her career of educating Americans in delicious ways with food. In 1963 she began her own cooking show The French Chef, produced at WGBH. This recipe was published in The French Chef Cookbook*.

See these new episodes from the first year of The French Chef, 1963: French Onion Soup, Quiche Lorraine and French Apple Tarts. They will be broadcast as part of WGBH's celebration of Julia's 100th birthday. Thurday, Aug. 16, 8–9:30pm on WGBH 2 *THE FRENCH CHEF COOKBOOK by Julia Child, copyright © 1968 by Julia Child. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. For online information about other Random House, Inc. books and authors, see the Internet Web Site at More Food & Wine

Question: What TV chef co-authored "Mastering the Art of French Cooking"?
Answer: Julia Child