What feeds you?

Some lessons from Julia Child (and friends).

I didn’t grow up watching Julia Child. Her PBS heyday was before my time. I learned about her later, via the 2009 film Julia & Julia with Meryl Streep and Amy Adams in the title roles and Stanley Tucci as Julia’s husband, Paul Child.

Julia Child portrait by ©Lynn Gilbert, 1978 via Creative Commons

Then more recently, via the Max (formerly HBO) series Julia with Brit(!) Sara Lancashire as Julia and David Hyde Pierce as Paul. If you happen to be a lover of British television (which I am), you’ll recognize Lancashire from “Happy Valley” and “Last Tango in Halifax.” And then there’s Bebe Neuwirth as Julia’s friend, Avis DeVoto, Fiona Glascott (Irish!) as Julia’s editor, Judith Jones, and Judith Light as Blanche Knopf, co-founder alongside her husband of the publishing house Alfred A. Knopf.

It’s this version of the story that caught my attention and stuck with me after two seasons (apparently, there won’t be a Season 3).

Before cooking.

Julia Child had a whole life before she became “Julia Child.” In 1942, she joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was the U.S. intelligence agency during WWII and the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). She was a research assistant in the special intelligence division and held roles in Washington, DC followed by Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). While posted to the latter, she met Paul Child, whom she married in Pennsylvania in 1946.

The OSS was disbanded after the war, and Paul took a role with the State Department, which led to a posting in Paris in 1948, a city in which Paul, an artist and poet, had lived previously. They tried but were not able to have children. Julia Child would feed her life another way.

_____

Turning to food.

It was in France that she awoke to the transformational power of food. It was a meal at the restaurant La Couronne in the city of Rouen that created the shift. She told The New York Times that the meal had resulted in:

“an opening up of the soul and spirit for me."

Julia would enroll in Paris’ famed Cordonne Bleu cooking school, study with other master chefs, and join a women’s cooking club where she met Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck. It was Beck who suggested they write a cookbook to bring the art of French cooking to America.