Julia Child : the last interview and other conversations / Julie Child ; with an introduction by Helen Rosner.

ISBN:

9781612197333

Title:

Author:

Child, Julia, interviewee.

Personal Author:

Child, Julia, interviewee.

Physical Description:

xvi, 141 pages ; 21 cm.

Series:

The last interview series

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: It's Really a Very Easy Recipe / Martha Deane -- The Martha Deane Show October 1961 -- A Conversation with Julia Child / Sharon Hudgins -- Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies Spring 1984 -- Julia Child / Polly Frost -- Interview August 1989 -- "We Knew a Lot of Fairly Important People at that Point" / Jewell Fenzi -- The Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, Foreign Service Spouse Series November 7, 1991 -- "I'm not a Chef, I'm a Teacher and a Cook" / Michael Rosen -- Television Academy Foundation for The Interviews: An Oral History of Television June 25, 1999 -- The Last Interview / Wilbert Jones.

Personal Subject:

Child, Julia-Interviews.

Subject Term:

Women cooks -- United States -- Biography.

Cooks -- United States -- Biography.

Format:

Books

Publication Date:

2019

Publication Information:

Brooklyn, NY :

Melville House Publishing,

2019.

Available:*

Shelf Number	Material Type	Copy	Shelf Location	Status
641.5092 CHI	Recreational Reading	1	Standard shelving location	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

This delightful collection of interviews with "The French Chef" Julia Child traces her life from her first stab at a writing career fresh out of college; to D.C., Sri Lanka, and Kunming where she worked for the Office of Strategic Services (now the CIA); to Paris where she and her husband Paul, then a member of the State Department, lived after World War II, and where Child attended the famous cooking school Le Cordon Bleu. From there, Child catapulted to fame--first with the publication of Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 1961 and the launch of her home cooking show, "The French Chef" in 1963. In this volume of carefully selected interviews, Child's charm, guile, and no-nonsense advice are on full, irresistibly delicious display.

Author Notes

Julia Child was born in Pasadena, California on August 15, 1912. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from Smith College in 1934 and served with the Office of Strategic Services in East Asia during World War II. After the war, Child lived in Paris for six years, attending the famous Cordon Bleu cooking school.

After graduating from cooking school, Child opened her own culinary institute called, L'Ecole des Trois Gourmandes with her friends Simone Bech and Louisette Bertholle. She achieved critical acclaim with her first cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking which was first published in 1961 and is still in print today and helped to popularized French cuisine in America. Starting in 1963, Child hosted the first of many award winning cooking series on PBS, where she was best known for her exuberant personality and flamboyant cooking style.

Her other books include The French Chef Cookbook; From Julia Child's Kitchen; and The Way to Cook. She also filmed an instructional video series on cooking and wrote columns for various magazines and newspapers. She died of kidney failure on August 13, 2004 at the age of 91.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Excerpts

HUDGINS: What is it that makes a really good cook? CHILD: Hunger. Greed. [ laughs ] And also just the enjoyment of working with your hands. If you like hand work, then cooking is wonderfully creative work, I think. It takes all of your intelligence and all of your dexterity. It's always creative, it's always new, it's always fun. I mean, unless you don't like to eat--and some people don't. And I see no excuse for people who say, "Oh, well, I work all day, and I just can't come home and fix anything nice." It's very easy to cook. You don't have to cook anything fancy, but just get good, fresh food. It can be very simple indeed. HUDGINS: You use the terms good food and good cooking a lot, but there are some people who would say that a casserole containing Hamburger Helper, instant onion soup, and crushed potato chips is good food, meaning that they enjoy eating it. What are your own criteria for determining what good food is? CHILD: First, I think you have to learn how to eat. It took me certainly a time, living here [in France], to learn how to eat, to learn what really good food tastes like. I think that's one reason why it's very important to come to France, where cooking is taken seriously, and to taste what the real thing is supposed to be like. But I think that in America, food is getting better and better--our standards are getting better. It's interesting that in France the pleasure of cooking is not a middle-class hobby the way it is in the United States. We know very few French people who enjoy cooking at all. It's just sort of not considered. Or somebody who's had university training does not go into food the way we do in the States now. Just think of this International Association of Cooking Schools. We have over nine hundred members from all over the country--and the world--most of whom are middle-class people with educations. It's very hard running this cooking school [LaVarenne] to find any French people who know about cooking who could be useful to them. It's very difficult. Cooking is not considered a serious discipline. What we're trying to do here with the IACS--and also with our new American Institute of Wine and Food--is to have professional cooking a real discipline, on a par with architecture, music, everything else. HUDGINS: Then what accounts for such good cooking in France, in the home? CHILD: I don't think you've got such good cooking in the homes anymore. Most people don't have hired help anymore, to do the cooking. I think often they [French housewives] can do a little bit, but they usually--when they're going to have anyone for dinner--they either take them out, or they go to the charcuterie and get something. HUDGINS: So you're saying that the real traditions of French cooking exist on the professional level, in the restaurants, not in the homes. CHILD: I would think so. And I think also the foreigners who come to the restaurants are far more critical of the food than the general French person is, because if you don't cook well yourself, you're not often a very good judge of what restaurant food is like--I mean, if you're used to bought charcuterie-type stuff. I think the French--who are very chauvinistic--would be horrified by that observation, but I think probably you get more careful analysis from foreigners than from French people. Excerpted from Julia Child: And Other Conversations by Julia Child All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.