PROFILE: Julia Child

This weekend I have stayed with my mom and sister while Shaun has gone up to PE to watch a few of the soccer games. Although I hate it when he goes away for any reason, I have enjoyed catching up on some chick flicks - one of which is 'Julie & Julia'. This is my reason for the newest profile of the popular TV chef, author and amazingly diverse, Julia Child.

She was born Julia McWilliams, on August 15, 1912, in Pasadena, California. Julia attended San Francisco's elite Katherine Branson School for Girls and then went on to Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Afterwards, she moved to New York, where she worked in the advertising department of the prestigious home furnishings company W&J Sloane. In 1941, at 6 feet 2 inches, she volunteered as a research assistant for a government intelligence agency which sent her to Sri Lanka, India and eventually China where she met her husband, Paul Child. In August 2008, the National Archives de-classified 750,000 pages of personnel files. The documents revealed that Child was, in fact, a spy during World War II. She served with the Office of Strategic Services, the huge spy network created by President Franklin Roosevelt and forerunner of today's CIA.

In 1948, when Paul was reassigned to the U.S. Information Service at the American Embassy in Paris, the Childs moved to France. While there, Julia developed a penchant for French cuisine and attended the world-famous Cordon Bleu cooking school. Following her six-month training—which included private lessons with master chef Max Bugnard—Julia banded with fellow Cordon Bleu students Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle to form the cooking school L'Ecole de Trois Gourmandes (The School of the Three Gourmands). With a goal of adapting sophisticated French cuisine for mainstream Americans, the trio collaborated on a two-volume cookbook titled Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961). Published in the U.S., the 800-page book was considered a groundbreaking work and has since become a standard guide for the culinary community.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Julia made regular appearances on the ABC morning show Good Morning, America. Her other endeavors included the television programs Julia Child and Company (1978), Julia Child and More Company (1980), and Dinner at Julia's (1983), as well as a slew of bestselling cookbooks that covered every aspect of culinary knowledge.




Paul, who was ten years older than Julia, died in 1994 after living in a nursing home for five years following a series of strokes in 1989. In 2001 she moved to a retirement community in Santa Barbara, California, donating her house and office to Smith College, which later sold the house. She donated her kitchen, which her husband designed with high counters to accommodate her formidable height, and which served as the set for three of her television series, to the National Museum of American History, where it is now on display. Her iconic copper pots and pans were on display at COPIA in Napa, California, until August 2009 when they were reunited with her kitchen at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, DC.

On August 13, 2004, Julia Child died of kidney failure at her assisted-living home in Montecito, two days before her 92nd birthday. Child ended her last book My Life in France with "..thinking back on it now reminds that the pleasures of the table, and of life, are infinite - toujours bon appétit!"