Mastering Julia
The life of culinary giant Julia Child continues to feed our fascination
SEVERAL NEW PROJECTS – and our pandemic nesting tendencies – have put Julia Child on the cultural menu again. In late 2021 there was Julia, a mouthwatering documentary available on digital platforms from the filmmakers behind the Ruth Bader Ginsburg doc, RBG, which offers a comprehensive look at the late American chef’s fascinating life and legacy. Now, a new eight-episode HBO series, also called Julia (on Crave, March 31), traces how the insouciant host of The French Chef, who stood a gawky six-foot-two, became an unlikely TV star at 50 and altered the landscape of American food and the course of television.
Like the backstage drama Being the Ricardos, the series revolves around the production of her influential show. Episodes retrace Child’s early TV career, beginning in 1962, when a lastminute appearance on a Boston public TV station talk show to promote her first cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, proved so popular that it spawned the
Emmy- and Peabodywinning
educational culinary program, and won the hearts of home cooks across the country. The story is anchored by the loving marriage between Julia (Sarah Lancashire) and Paul Child (David Hyde Pierce), and her friendship with Avis DeVoto (Bebe Neuwirth), Child’s culinary editor and longtime confidante.
Warming Up Julia Child (out April 5) goes even deeper to explore six key relationships that shaped Child’s legendary career, in a book that Pulitzer-nominated author Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz says is about friendship and collaboration.
Child’s continuing appeal, fuelled by reruns of The French Chef or streaming Nora Ephron’s 2009 movie Julie and Julia, is rooted in the reassuring belief that anyone can cook, and it doesn’t have to be perfect. Child often made mistakes on-air, like flipping a potato pancake onto the stove top, and ad libbed them into selfdeprecating moments that endeared her to viewers. “If you’re alone in the kitchen, who is going to see?” she said, scooping it up with her hands and patting it back into the pan.
The chef, who died in 2004, would likely be amused by the new reality cooking competition, The Julia Child Challenge (airing on Food Network March 22), but heartened that the winner will follow in her footsteps to Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, where she learned to cook and her passion for food was ignited. As Child would say, bon appétit!