America Childless
Julia Child, 1912–2004
If you watched her TV shows with any regularity, you knew how to make an aspic and how to clarify a stock; how to make a cheese soufflé that doesn’t collapse and a boeuf à la mode that collapses at the touch of a fork; how to mount a hollandaise, roast a suckling pig, and even (Lord help us) make beef Wellington with buttery pastry and canned pâté.
This was old-fashioned French food, you understand, the stuff with flour-thickened sauces and quarts of cream, egg yolks beyond counting and presentations that were often fussy for fussy’s sake. Even serious cooks who loved Julia beyond reason eventually moved on to the crystalline writing of Elizabeth David, the stunningly detailed recipes of Paula Wolfert, or the sheer artistic will of the late Richard Olney, an expatriate Iowan in Provence whose clean, naturalistic flavors are as much an influence on American cooking at the moment as Hemingway was on American writing.
But no American cook has ever been loved like Julia Child.
“You can’t make a sow’s ear into Veal Orloff,” she was fond of saying. “But you can do something very good with a sow’s ear.”
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