For her new TV series, the French Chef comes home in style
Wow! Nifty! Eek! Gosh! Lookit! Oh boy! Those unique, familiar chirrups and chortles of gustatory delight are wafting through the kitchen once more as cameras record another salivant television series by Julia Child. The wood-notes wild, the vibrato delivery, the blue-eyed conspiratorial beam have changed little since the first segment of The French Chef went out over the Boston area's WGBH-TV on Feb. 11, 1963. Only this time, as the camera closes in on stockpot and saute pan, cleaver and colander, the mistress of cuisine is not demonstrating the joy of Gallic cooking. Dinner at Julia's, her new 13-part public television series, which will start in October, celebrates American cooking, ingredients and wines with such dishes as poached Alaska salmon, duckburger with wild rice, California fish stew, braised stuffed bottom round of beef, New Orleans crayfish bisque and an incendiary version of baked Alaska that Julia calls Mount St. Helens in Flames.
The French Chef has come home.
All of which may come as a shock to faithful Child lovers. Was it not Julia who proclaimed in 1966, "I will never do anything but French cooking!"? Her 716-page first volume Mastering the Art of French Cooking, written with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle and published in 1961, is still regarded as the definitive English-language work on classic French cuisine. Her 207-part French Chef and subsequent TV series, along with her five books and hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, earned her two prestigious awards from the French government. Indeed, Californian Child, nee Julia McWilliams, has done more than any other individual of either nation to raise Americans' standards of culinary excellence and persuade them that doing things the French way can be uncomplicated fun.
Now, like many French chefs who own and cook in restaurants in the U.S., Julia Child has been deeply impressed by the variety and ever increasing excellence of American raw materials, many of which, like goat cheese, wild mushrooms and caviar, have become generally available only in recent years. "We no longer have to kneel down and bow to foreigners," she insists. "We can be proud of what we have here."
It was certainly not beyond Julian ingenuity to whip up another series on French cookery. She could, for example, have concentrated on la nouvelle cuisine. In fact, Chef Child is not a lover of nouvelle cuisine and claims, not entirely rhetorically, that it has been the ruination of many great French restaurants. Moreover, in deciding to mine the rich resources of her own country, Julia is joining a nationwide movement toward a redefined American style of cooking that has won recognition in restaurants from Alice Waters' Chez Panisse in Berkeley to Manhattan's Four Seasons. Julia maintains that American cooking has always been nouvelle in its best sense: based on fresh ingredients, contrasting flavors and a respect for natural tastes unmasked by heavy sauces. She says, "We're lucky not to have been shackled by tradition like the French."