Cooking with Julia Child

Julia Child was born in Pasadena, California on August 15, 1912. She came from a wealthy background, her father was a banker and her mother came from a wealthy family who owned a paper company. She was very popular in high school and went on to graduate from Smith College in 1934. After that she went to secretarial school in Boston and got a job but was fired for insubordination. In 1941 she volunteered for the Red Cross and attempted to enlist in the WAVES and WACS but was rejected due to her height of 6'2". She then moved to DC and became the assistant researcher at OSS. When she was stationed in India she met her husband, Paul Child. They married and then moved to Paris. After a few years she became bored with her marriage so she enrolled in the Cordon Bleu cooking school. In 1961, Child and two other women published a cookbook called Mastering The Art of French Cooking. A few years later they moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts and Paul retired from his job. Paul was perfectly content with doing nothing while his wife became the breadwinner. He believed that she was perfectly capable of being successful. She then proposed the idea of a cooking show to PBS and in 1963 The French Chef aired.


“Just speak very loudly and quickly, and state your position with utter conviction, as the French do, and you’ll have a marvelous time.” I think this quotation by Julia Child shows her strong and independent nature. Child shined more light on the cooking world. In France it was frowned upon for a woman to be a chef, however, she was not deterred by this notion. It took her about 6 years to publish her book because the French would not publish it so she had to get it published in the U.S. This did not stop Child. She then started a cooking show on PBS about French foods.


I really enjoyed the lecture on female chefs. I think it is really interesting how Julia Child just picked up cooking in her early thirties and brought up a whole new conversation about cooking. She brought the idea of female chefs to the world when nobody even thought about it. Cooking food was just something you needed to do to feed your family, a task mainly done by women, but being a chef on the other hand was mainly a man's job. I believe the difference between the two has to do with a hobby versus a profession. Women cook because it is their duty to their family, however being a chef would require them to leave the home and not be able to focus on their families, thus the reason most chefs are male. Nobody thought it was out of the ordinary for only men to be chefs until Child published her book and started a cooking show. Even I never thought about this idea until I heard the lecture. Child had many people disagree with her and try to put her down but she never gave up on her passion. “Find something you're passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it.” This is another quotation by Julia Child that I believe she embodies because she always pursued her passion and never let anything get in her way. I really love that quote because I think it is extremely important to keep in mind. Overall, I really liked the lecture about Julia Child and female chefs because it really opened my eyes into a topic I had never even thought about and it taught me a lot about pursuing my goals no matter what.