The Julia Child Challenge
Season 1 Food Network (*175) 19:55 Reality
September is Julia Child month on
TV, with reality series The Julia Child Challenge launching today. The show takes us inside a replica of Julia’s famous as-seen-on-TV home kitchen, where eight home cooks compete for a chance to study at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, where Julia learnt the skills and dishes that she’d later teach the whole world in her long running TV cooking series The French Chef. The tone is more like calm and cooperative The Great British Bake Off, and less like cut-throat reality series Hell’s Kitchen.
Julia didn’t seem made for TV at the time, or even now. She was tall and plain, exuberant and confident, where the “cooking hosts” of the early ’60s were restrained, maintaining a veneer of effortless perfectionism as they dished up canned convenience foods in TV ads. Julia insisted on using only fresh ingredients that would be accessible locally to an American audience, and on using an easy to follow step-by-step process. She demystified the “kitchen secrets” of the culinary masters.
As we’ll see when The Julia Child Challenge shows excerpts from her series, Julia didn’t edit out mistakes, instead carrying on with the episode and showing how she’d save the dish – that established enormous trust with viewers. Think of her as the opposite of the glamorous but treacherous Instagram and TikTok cooking demonstrators. Head judge Antonia Lofaso adds, “I remember when she was explaining the different sizes of chicken and pulling out this sword that made no sense. That made her show entertaining.”