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She has already attacked with her customary zeal the problem of exactly duplicating French brioches using American ingredients. Her brother-in-law, Charles Child, recalls how she arrived at the family's summer home on Mount Desert, Me., for a two-week vacation with her regular traveling armory of knives, whisks, skillets, spoons and apron. But this time she also brought an array of bottles containing every conceivable kind of oil, except castor oil, plus half a dozen varieties of flour, six kinds of margarine, and sticks and sticks of butter. Then, for eight straight days, Julia did nothing but bake brioches, dozens at a time. When the rest of the house were awakened by a loud crash in the kitchen at 5 a.m., they knew it meant that Julia had jettisoned yet another batch. "You can't have had much of a vacation," said her brother-in-law. "Nonsense," she replied, "I've had a glorious time." And besides, she had found the perfect combination of ingredients.
French for a Lifetime. With the next volume taking up all of her time, Julia has stopped taping The French Chef, plans to wait until color comes to educational TV before resuming it, because "I'm tired of grey food." Meanwhile, the program is being run and rerun on a rapidly increasing number of stations. Encouraged by the show's phenomenal success, Boston educational station WGBH-TV plans a new program on Chinese cooking presided over by Joyce Chen, Cambridge restaurant owner, cookbook author and teacher. Already, 80 stations have inquired about carrying the show as soon as it is available.
Julia could not be more delighted. "Chinese cooking is marvelous," she says. Not that she has any intention of cooking Oriental style herself. "I will never do anything but French cooking," she says with Francophilic fervor. "It's much the most interesting and the most challenging and the best eating. There are so many wonderful French dishes; I don't think I'll ever live long enough to do them all."