From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
Julia Child's Lessons in Living
She combined a Puritan work ethic with a love of life.
If someone with a fake French accent, or $400 haircut, told us that genes, not butter, would kill us, we might not believe her. But when Julia Child said it, we were ready to place our lives in her hands--and pass the leg of lamb.
Call her our Lewis & Clark of the kitchen. Ms. Child took wary Americans by the hand some 50 years ago and led them through an unexplored landscape of edible French words. Dressed in the style of a third-grade teacher, a glass of red sometimes tilting dangerously in her hand, she made calves brains appetizing and kitchen mishaps forgivable on her PBS program, "The French Chef."
Technically, Ms. Child, who died last week at age 92, is classified more often as a "cook" than as a "chef." She was an amateur, who entered marriage as a culinary virgin. Raised in a wealthy Pasadena, Calif., household in which the mistress experimented at the stove only on the cook's day off, Ms. Child had thought that she might become an actress or a "lady novelist"--or even, briefly, a spy. But she learned to cook as a bride, to please her worldly gourmand of a husband, an American diplomat 10 years her senior.
Ms. Child used a puritan's industry--classes to improve on her Smith College French, intensive cooking lessons, a decade of punctilious research for her magnum opus, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking"--to an end that was anything but puritanical. The aim was the satisfaction of lust--for red meat, sugar, eggs, good wine and butter. Ms. Child's was not an unbridled lust, though. Just as she worked carefully toward her life's goals, she lavished methodical attention on each step of a recipe, building to its climax--the eating of it.
She addressed one glaring flaw in the American ethic--our aversion to actually enjoying what we've labored for. In this she shifted the focus of pride at American tables away from the heartland cliché--that of "plenty," the visible fruits of labor--toward an emphasis on quality, and the senses. A purring palate was more important than a piled-up platter.
She appeared on public television in the 1960s, for $50 a week, in her serviceable blue blouse, slashing away at fowl carcasses like a madwoman, reviving terminally fallen soufflés and delivering dry one-liners between separating and whisking. Audiences devoured her. It was as if they'd been waiting for an authority figure to tell them it was OK to make a mess in the kitchen, as long as they were taking on new challenges and enjoying the results with a decent Burgundy.
Her stewardship of French cuisine, her prodigious gifts as a teacher and author, have been well documented in many sweeping obits. But even before she died, the Web site chowhound.com, for example, was posting frequent messages about her, though her cooking may not have been the stuff of the foodie e-zine vanguard.
This one is typical: "Hey, chacun à son goût. Beard was a titan, but Julia is, well, God." When a prominent food critic wrote an essay about Ms. Child that was mildly unworshipful, fierce attacks on the young journalist ensued on that Web site. (Don't mess with Julia.)
Many food trends have come and gone since she became famous, and she remained unmoved, deriding the anti-butterfat lobby and other bores. Health-food zealots were a baffling irritation to Ms. Child, and she delivered a consistent message over the decades: Ignore them. No wonder our feelings about her are still so passionate, several decades after her most oft-cited accomplishment (bringing coq au vin to Peoria).
Food was the medium, but the message amounted to a philosophy of life. She did something more important than teach us to cook; she taught us to eat, and some of us in the new Atkins World Order could still use a few lessons. She knew how to indulge, in moderation: food of all kinds (in normal portions); drink (but not drunkenness); smoking (until she did the mature thing and quit); and the company of men (she was a happily married flirt).
Her husband, Paul Child, was a man invariably described as "a sensualist," and like all good husbands he brought out the best in his wife, channeling her energies in ways that pleased him, of course, but also allowing her distinct signature to emerge. But even if she'd never met Mr. Child, and discovered exquisite food in his company, she might have found greatness in other ways, through her ability to subvert Americans' love of suffering.
She said that her greatest achievement was marrying a nice man and cooking nice food. Her fans understood that she valued the rewards of her effort more than the effort itself, and that she had mastered the art of eating.
Her popularity never waned, even in an age in which food is sometimes treated as a toxic substance. Perhaps because she came across as a no-nonsense Yankee with a can-do approach, she convinced us that it was not merely safe, but sensible--and not merely sensible, but imperative--to keep slathering butter on those potatoes.
