Julia Carolyn Child (née McWilliams; August 15, 1912 – August 13, 2004) was an American chef, author, and television personality. She is recognized for having brought French cuisine to the American public with her debut cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and her subsequent television programs, the most notable of which was The French Chef, which premiered in 1963.
Child was born Julia Carolyn McWilliams on August 15, 1912, in Pasadena, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. Her father was John McWilliams Jr. (1880–1962), a Princeton University graduate and prominent land manager, and her mother was Julia Carolyn ("Caro") Weston (1877–1937), a paper-company heiress and daughter of Byron Curtis Weston, a lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. She was the eldest of three, followed by a brother, John McWilliams III, and a sister, Dorothy Cousins.
Child attended Polytechnic School and Westridge School from 4th grade to 9th grade in Pasadena, California. In high school, she was sent to the Katherine Branson School in Ross, California, which was at the time a boarding school. As a youth, she played tennis, golf, and basketball.
Child also played sports while attending Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, from which she graduated in 1934 with a major in history. At the time she graduated, she planned to become a novelist, or perhaps a magazine writer. Following her graduation from college, Child moved to New York City, where she worked for a time as a copywriter for the advertising department of W. & J. Sloane. She was still hoping to become a novelist. Child joined the Junior League of Pasadena in 1935 after returning home from college. While a member, she contributed to the League's magazine and helped create children's plays.
While Child grew up in a family with a cook, she did not observe or learn cooking from this person, and she would not learn until she met her husband-to-be, Paul, who grew up in a family very interested in food.
Child joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1942 after finding that at 6 feet 2 inches (1.88 m), she was too tall to enlist in the Women's Army Corps (WACs) or in the U.S. Navy's WAVES. She began her OSS career as a typist at its headquarters in Washington, D.C., but, because of her education and experience, was soon given a position as a top-secret researcher working directly for the head of OSS, General William J. Donovan.
As a research assistant in the Secret Intelligence division, Child typed over 10,000 names on white note cards to keep track of officers. For a year, she worked at the OSS Emergency Sea Rescue Equipment Section (ESRES) in Washington, D.C. as a file clerk and then as an assistant to developers of a shark repellent needed to ensure that sharks would not explode ordnance targeting German U-boats. When Child was asked to solve the problem of too many OSS underwater explosives being set off by curious sharks, "Child's solution was to experiment with cooking various concoctions as a shark repellent," which were sprinkled in the water near the explosives and repelled sharks. Still in use today, the experimental shark repellent "marked Child's first foray into the world of cooking."
During 1944–1945, Child was posted to Kandy, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where her responsibilities included "registering, cataloging and channeling a great volume of highly classified communications" for the OSS's clandestine stations in Asia. She was later posted to Kunming, China, where she received the Emblem of Meritorious Civilian Service as head of the Registry of the OSS Secretariat.
For her service, Child received an award that cited her many virtues, including her "drive and inherent cheerfulness". As with other OSS records, her file was declassified in 2008. Unlike other files, Child's complete file is available online.
While she was in Kandy, she met Paul Cushing Child, who was also an OSS employee. The two later married on September 1, 1946, in Lumberville, Pennsylvania, later moving to a house in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Paul, a New Jersey native who had lived in Paris as an artist and poet, was known for his sophisticated palate and had introduced his wife to fine cuisine. He joined the United States Foreign Service, and, in 1948, the couple moved to Paris after the State Department assigned Paul there as an exhibits officer with the United States Information Agency. The couple had no children.
Child repeatedly recalled her first meal at La Couronne in Rouen as a culinary revelation. Once, she had described the meal of oysters, sole meunière, and fine wine to The New York Times as "an opening up of the soul and spirit for me." In 1951, she graduated from the famous Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris and later studied privately with Max Bugnard and other master chefs. She joined the women's cooking club Le Cercle des Gourmettes, through which she met Simone Beck, who was writing a French cookbook for Americans with her friend Louisette Bertholle. Beck proposed that Child work with them to make the book appeal to Americans. In 1951, Child, Beck, and Bertholle began to teach cooking to American women in Child's Paris kitchen, calling their informal school L'école des trois gourmandes (The School of the Three Food Lovers). For the next decade, as the Childs moved around Europe and finally to Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1961, the three researched and repeatedly tested recipes. Child translated the French into English, making the recipes detailed, interesting, and practical.
In 1963, the Childs built a home near the Provence town of Plascassier in the hills above Cannes on property belonging to co-author Beck and her husband, Jean Fischbacher. The Childs named it "La Pitchoune", a Provençal word meaning "the little one", but over time the property was often affectionately called simply "La Peetch".
Avis DeVoto was an American culinary editor, book reviewer, and cook. In 1952, DeVoto received a letter from Julia Child, at that time living in Paris, responding to one of her husband Bernard's recent magazine columns on how he detested stainless steel knives; Child thought he was “100% right”. DeVoto's reply to the letter initiated the correspondence and lifelong friendship between the two women. DeVoto and Child would not meet in person until 1954, but during those first two years they exchanged around 120 letters, which were eventually compiled into a book, As Always, Julia (2010).
DeVoto served as an early reader and editor for Child's forthcoming cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and her editorial connections would help Child and her co-authors Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck sign a contract with Houghton Mifflin in 1954. When the publishing company rejected the book, DeVoto helped push for
the Alfred A. Knopf editor Judith Jones to accept it for publication. Jones would become Child's advocate for the rest of her career.
The three would-be authors initially signed a contract with publisher Houghton Mifflin, which later rejected the manuscript for seeming too much like an encyclopedia. When it was finally published in 1961 by Alfred A. Knopf, the 726-page Mastering the Art of French Cooking was a best-seller and received critical acclaim that derived in part from the American interest in French culture in the early 1960s. Lauded for its helpful illustrations and precise attention to detail, and for making fine cuisine accessible, the book is still in print and is considered a seminal culinary work. Following this success, Child wrote magazine articles and a regular column for The Boston Globe newspaper. She would go on to publish nearly twenty titles under her name and with others. Many, though not all, were related to her television shows. Her last book was the autobiographical My Life in France, published posthumously in 2006 and written with her grandnephew, Alex Prud'homme. The book recounts Child's life with her husband, Paul Cushing Child, in postwar France.
The French Chef and related books