Dennis Abrams - Julia Child: Chef

The pleasures of cooking take sproutbrussels sprout, that isin Julia Child's kitchen. Child's infectious personality won her, and the art of cooking, millions of fans. Who would have believed that, decades earlier, her classic book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, had been a hard sell?

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Fortunately, the interview with John Chancellor went well, and the last omelet turned out perfectly. For Child, who still did not even own a television, her first exposure to the world of broadcasting went better than expected. In those days, however, nobody imagined that there would actually be an audience interested in watching someone cook on television. In fact, Child was more pleased with getting mentioned in Life magazine, having her and Beck's photos taken for Vogue, and being asked to write an article for Home & Gardenall more traditional ways to publicize a cookbookthan she had been by her television appearance.

Since the United States is a lot more than just New York City, and since they hoped to raise the level of cooking across the country through their book, the intrepid authors decided to take their act on the road. Not having a lot of money, they traveled to cities where they had friends who could put them up for the night and who could help arrange book signings at local bookstores, as well as lectures and cooking demonstrations. From New York, the authors went to Detroit, San Francisco, and finally Los Angeles, where they were able to stay with Child's father and stepmother before returning back to New York.

Publicizing the book involved long hours, and far more work than they had imagined. On one typical day, after being picked up in the morning at her sister Dort's house in Sausalito, California, they went to do an interview with the Oakland Tribune, then on to the Palace Hotel in San Francisco for a radio interview, then back to Sausalito, then on to Berkeley for more meetings, back to Sausalito, back again to San Francisco to attend a cocktail party given in their honor, and then, finally, to dinner with a woman who had promised to host a book party for them in Washington, D.C., and who promised to try to get the Washington Post to do an article on Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

These 15-hour days went on for a month and a half before everyone involved finally said they had had enough. Beck returned home to France, and Child returned home to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she was greeted with the news that the work on her new kitchen was going well and that Mastering the Art of FrenchCooking had entered its third printing of 10,000 copies. To top it all off, she received her first royalty check for $2,610.85. Life, Child thought, would soon return to a more normal, quiet existence.

The quiet life, however, would have to wait. Child received an invitation from a local public television station, WGBH, to appear on a show called I've Been Reading. She was given a full half hour to sit down with the show's host, Professor Albert Duhamel, to talk about food. Afterward, with the professor's assistance, she would demonstrate some techniques from her book. So after the regular interview, Child and Duhamel moved over to the show's "kitchen," where, with a proper hot plate that she provided, Child taught her host, a man with little to no culinary experience, how to cut and chop, how to "turn" a mushroom, how to beat egg whites, and how to make an omelet. The show went well, but Child assumed that this appearance would be the end of it.

It was not. WGBH received 27 letters from people saying that they wanted to see more. "Get that woman back on television," one letter said. "We want to see some more cooking!"1 Twenty-seven letters may not seem like a lot, but to a small public television station in 1961, it was a remarkable response, indicating that, perhaps, there was an audience ready to learn how to master French cooking.

WGBH approached Child and asked her to put together three half-hour pilot (or test) programs on how to prepare French food in an American kitchen. Public television had never done anything of that nature before, and neither had Child, but she decided to take WGBH up on its offer. The publicity, she reasoned, could only help sales of her book. Besides, the reason she had written the book was to help teach people how to cook better and how to care about what they eat. What better way to spread the word than by teaching the art of French cooking on television?