![]() The new HBO series does little to complicate that prevailing myth in its eight episodes, although it does provide a darker edge to the life story than has been told before. The more that American gastronomy has changed, the more we are still treated to Child’s memory. To do so is to center a white, upper-middle-class perspective, translating entire cultures and cuisines into something palatable to that milieu. Female cooks who bear little resemblance to her have been routinely dubbed “the Julia Child of” their respective culinary specialties, as Mayukh Sen, author of Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America, has written previously. She is kept in the front and center of the narrative of how food and culture have advanced in the U.S., almost to the point of mythology. I am as beholden to her as anyone who grew up on her instructives, but it has become clear to me that it is long past time to tell new stories about food in this country - what it is, who cooks it, and who gets to define it - and escape from under Child’s shadow. ![]() Don’t forget to be grateful to Julia! the seemingly never-ending retellings of her story suggest. The more that American gastronomy has changed in the nearly 60 years since The French Chef was first broadcast on WGBH in Boston, it seems, the more we are still treated to Child’s memory. On March 31, a new series titled, simply, Julia - starring Sarah Lancashire in the titular role, and recounting Child’s unlikely rise to public television stardom - premieres on HBO Max. A competition show called The Julia Child Challenge, in which home cooks are tasked with completing culinary challenges inspired by Child, is currently airing on Food Network. A documentary chronicling Child’s life came out last year. Meryl Streep defined the role in the 2009 film Julie & Julia. In recent years, especially, there has been a renewed interest in reviving Child for the screen. Her role as a pivotal cultural figure has been documented, examined, and celebrated at length, over and over and over again. She was 51 years old when the show debuted in 1963, and she continued to be a presence on television and beyond until late into her eighties - through more than a dozen shows and 16 cookbooks - proving that a woman didn’t have to become invisible as she aged. The structure of cooking shows that she helped invent through her seminal The French Chef still persists today. Those two experiences are inextricably linked for me, a tale as true as it is cliché.Ĭhild left a deep mark on food culture in the United States, on scales both personal and much grander. I don’t know who I would be as a person or a writer if, at a very young age, I hadn’t watched this woman on television eating voraciously, without a shred of self-consciousness - and if I hadn’t, by extension, consumed my grandmother’s love through her own cooking. Watching episodes of her cooking shows on repeat on PBS with my grandmother, I found comfort in Child’s expressive, high-pitched voice and clumsy foibles in the kitchen. I wasn’t born a food writer, but I became one through Julia Child.
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