Julia Child - Julia Child: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations

Just speak very loudly and quickly, and state your position with utter conviction, as the French do, and youll have a marvelous time!

Julia Child, My Life in France

Nobody talks quite like Julia Child.

Her voice alone could have made her famousthat instantly recognizable, operatic loop-de-loop of a voice, blooming and wobbling, with its big round glissando vowels and patrician, half-slurred syllables, its wild chortles and yodels and yawps, the breezy mid-word reaches for breath. When Paul Child, who would become Julias husband, first met herthe two were stationed together in 1944, in the Kandy, Ceylon branch of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agencyhe described her in a letter to his brother as a warm and witty girl with a habit of gasping as she spoke. Her slight atmosphere of hysteria, he wrote, gets on my nerves. Years later, after they had fallen in love, and married, and their passion for one another had grown and deepened into an uncommonly rich and enduring devotion, Paul wrote a poem of love to her voice, describing her mouth so sweet, so made for honeyed words.

The six interviews in this volume together tell a richly dimensional story of how Julia McWilliamsa talky California girl, intelligent and outgoing and a gawky six-foot-somethingwould grow to become Julia Child, a woman who stepped into her fame late enough in life that she was already formed, already confident in her height and voice and manner, already richly content in her life with Paul. Even in her earliest public appearances, as in the 1961 radio interview with The Martha Deane Show, where she and Simone Beck discuss the creation of the first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, theres a preview of the Julia to comethe jokes and playfulness, but also her forceful evangelism for the notion that the best results come from the best product and the best method. Often this meant techniques that might appear at first to be bizarre, or flat-out wrong, but which reveal themselves to be exquisite models of efficiency and grace. When you first do it, it doesnt seem the right way to do it, Julia tells Deane of the French method for fluting mushrooms, which involves holding the blade steady, while turning the fungus. But you learn that it is the right way. That the mushroom is cutting itself against the knife. And its very pretty.

When she appeared in the homes of television-owning Americans in 1963, Julia was both an odditythe voice! Her height! The relative novelty of an instructional cooking show!and an instant, magnetic success. Already famous as the co-author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which had been published to wild acclaim two years earlier, Julias television career seems, in retrospect, like an inevitability: Her charisma, her extraordinary knowledge of cuisine, and her natural talent as a teacher, all of which had been instrumental in the success of the book, were seemingly tailor-made for the camera. The French Chef, produced by Boston public television station WGBH and distributed nationwide, was a sensation. It ran for ten years, airing over two hundred episodes, each of them just Julia: a solid thirty minutes of her swooping voice and her strong arms, conversationally delivering to the viewer a precise and foolproof method to make quiche, or pot-au-feau, or a whole three-course ham dinner for guests in under half an hour. She was the most famous French chef in the worlddespite not being French, nor (as she insisted, futilely, for her entire life) a proper chef.

Theres no shortage of chronicles of Julias extraordinary impact on American gastronomy. Through her books and television shows she almost single-handedly changed the way we ate, leading home cooks out of a post-war industrial stasis of canned vegetables and E-Z-meal efficiency. In advocating for a French way of cooking she promoted seasonal vegetables, good dairy, and whole ingredients; to the tired rituals of making and eating dinner, she reintroduced a pleasure that wartime and its attendant industries had stripped away. Over the years she shared the stage (figuratively and often literally) with culinary titans like James Beard, M.F.K. Fisher, Craig Claiborne, and Jacques Pepin, but among them Julia was the best known, the most influential, the most belovedThe most famous cook in the world! declared the cover of