Julia Child, la Grandes Gourmande

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Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here, too, and we're stuffed on turkey, wearing aprons, got a little gravy on the sides of our mouths

Speaker 2 and it's stuff you should know.

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Speaker 2 That's so cool. Thanks, you guys for supporting co-ed so well that's right

Speaker 2 well um chuck i see we get cracking with our episode today because i'm excited about this one we're talking about julia child

Speaker 2 arguably one of the most well-known cooks chefs of all time Yeah, but I have to step out real quick because I've cut the dickens out of my finger.

Speaker 2 That was pretty good, actually. I wasn't even going to try it, but that was a dead on Julia Child.

Speaker 3 Well, that was a dead on Dan Aykroyd as Julia Child.

Speaker 2 I think you topped him, to tell you the truth.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you know, if you grew up in the 70s and the 80s and even into the 90s and you ever surfed around your cable TV to and crossed PBS, there was a good chance that the wonderful Julia Child came into your life in some way.

Speaker 3 I remember watching her a little bit when I was a kid even, and just thinking like, who is this giant tall woman that talks funny

Speaker 3 cooking in front of my face?

Speaker 2 But you were never intimidated by her, were you?

Speaker 3 No, I mean, she was always just so friendly and gregarious. I just had an instant liking.

Speaker 2 Yes, she was a very, very likable person.

Speaker 2 But even if you're not familiar with Julia Child and you live in the United States and you like decent food that's not processed, you owe an enormous debt to Julia Child because you can argue that she almost single-handedly introduced America to real food through French cuisine.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 3 these days it's

Speaker 3 taken for granted that, you know, farm to table and ingredients that matter and food preparation and sort of taking pride in cooking at home like that is just so commonplace.

Speaker 3 But that was not the case when Julia Child was coming into things. She really revolutionized and sort of rocked America's culinary world.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Like this was the time when she came around when people were making jello molds with like

Speaker 2 ground beef in them.

Speaker 2 Like that was nice. That was like showing off for a dinner party kind of stuff.
Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 So we'll talk about all the impacts she had and why she was so beloved. But to start, we'll go a little further back toward the beginning.

Speaker 2 And if you've ever heard her speak, you really did do a pretty good impression. A lot of people think think that she's British, and she was not British.
She was American. She was born in Pasadena.

Speaker 2 Apparently, her accent was one of those mid-Atlantic accents that she was taught growing up in private schools and private college, Smith College in Massachusetts.

Speaker 3 Yeah, she was Julia McWilliams. That's how she was born.
and didn't have British parents either.

Speaker 3 They had some money, though. Her parents were pretty well-to-do.
Her dad was a financier, and her mom was an heiress of a paper company. So she grew up with a cook in the house,

Speaker 3 but

Speaker 3 it wasn't that that did it. As you'll see, she had quite a circuitous route to becoming the most famous cook in the world and had a pretty interesting life up into that point.

Speaker 2 She really did, like a surprisingly interesting one. She was apparently a disaster in the kitchen.

Speaker 2 and really didn't start cooking until I think she was in her 40s, maybe late 30s. I saw that the closest brush she had with being a gourmand and a host

Speaker 2 was when she was the chair of the refreshment committee for the senior prom and the fall dance one year at Smith College. And that's not really much of an exaggeration.

Speaker 2 That really probably is the closest she came to being a foodie before she got into cooking later on in life.

Speaker 3 Yeah, she was a history student. She was going to be a writer.
And like I said, she was tall. She was six six foot two, and she was athletic.
She played basketball. She played tennis.
She played golf.

Speaker 3 She graduated in 1934 and moved to New York and was, you know, I said she wanted to be a writer. She was an advertising copywriter for Sloan's, which was a furniture company.

Speaker 3 So that was her first gig.

Speaker 3 But she was always a well-liked person. She was very, like I said, gregarious.
That wasn't just a TV persona.

Speaker 3 Very, very sociable. People really seemed to like her her whole life.

Speaker 3 She was the life of the party, but she wasn't like just, you know, even though she loved her wine, she wasn't just some sals at the party.

Speaker 3 She was apparently pretty, you know, responsible human, even early on.

Speaker 2 Like if she put a lampshade on her head, she remembered doing it the next day. It was on purpose.
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 She also had a really great work ethic, which served her well throughout the rest of her career, but really from the outset helped her because when World War II broke out, she's like, I want to become a spy.

Speaker 2 So she joined the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, the the direct predecessor of the CIA, and worked directly under no less than Wild Bill Donovan, the guy who founded the OSS.

Speaker 3 Yeah, he was a general. And apparently she didn't, you know, have a whole lot of like direct interaction with him, but it was a very big gig for her.

Speaker 3 It was pretty menial work, even though it was a job of

Speaker 3 responsibility that she was put in. It was kind of pre-computer work, like they needed human beings to do stuff that computers would do.

Speaker 3 So she would type up profiles on note cards of OSS officers just to keep sort of in the file cabinet before they had, you know, computers to do that kind of thing, along with several other women that she worked with.

Speaker 3 And like I said, she was charming. You said she had a great work ethic, and she got promoted like several times through that job.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and she actually was promoted to become a member of the Emergency Sea Rescue Equipment Section,

Speaker 2 which was tasked tasked with coming up with a shark repellent because sharks were a problem for downed pilots, shipwrecked sailors.

Speaker 2 I think at least 20 sailors had been attacked by sharks since the beginning of the war, and this is only a couple of years in.

Speaker 2 So they needed some sort of shark repellent that would keep sharks away, but that was also highly portable. Apparently, shark repellent did not exist to this point.

Speaker 2 And the shark repellent they came up with was so effective, it's still the shark repellent that's used today. Yeah.

Speaker 3 They would also, you know, bump into sea mines that were supposed to hit German U-boats and detonate those, which is no good for the cause or for the shark, obviously. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 you son of a.

Speaker 3 So, oh man, what a line. So she was

Speaker 3 in the test kitchen, essentially, trying to come up with a shark repellent.

Speaker 3 Obviously, had a lot of different tries on this. I think there were over 100 different attempts at this recipe.

Speaker 3 And what they came up with ultimately was a mix of decayed shark meat,

Speaker 3 organic acids,

Speaker 3 and what was the

Speaker 3 copper acetate was sort of the main ingredient that

Speaker 3 capped it all off.

Speaker 2 Yeah, copper acetate, they figured out, mixed with black dye, mimics the scent of a dead shark. And I guess sharks don't like to go near other dead sharks.
No, who would?

Speaker 2 And they figured out how to basically make this into a little cake.

Speaker 2 You know, a cake meaning like a little puck, not a cake, like a a birthday cake.

Speaker 2 And you could attach it to your life vest, and it would apparently keep sharks away for six to seven hours. It's not bad.
No.

Speaker 2 And she very facetiously, but also charmingly referred to that shark repellent as her first big recipe.

Speaker 3 You say it like her?

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 My first big recipe. Oh, that's perfect.

Speaker 3 That also sounds like half of your Halloween characters. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It really was pretty bad.

Speaker 2 Wait, hold on. Let me do it nasally.
Our first past.

Speaker 3 We had one person that wrote in and said they couldn't get through it.

Speaker 2 I know. I felt kind of bad for them.
Oh, that's right.

Speaker 3 From 44 to 45, I think these were her last two years in the OSS.

Speaker 3 She served as chief of the OSS registry and was sent to some pretty faraway places. She went to China and Ceylon, which is modern-day Sri Lanka, and had some really top-notch security clearance.

Speaker 3 It was, you know, she really worked her way up the ladder in the OSS.

Speaker 2 I saw that she had top secret, the highest level security clearance for that assignment, which is

Speaker 2 just nuts.

Speaker 2 One thing that we'll see later on is that she's basically always considered herself a feminist, and that's a good example that she worked her way to the top of the OSS to have the highest possible security clearance during the 40s at a time when women were not really.

Speaker 2 I know that women worked a lot to support the war effort, but that seems like an unusual position for a woman at the time.

Speaker 3 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 3 Due to her hard work. One of the biggest things that happened, though, in the OSS

Speaker 3 was that she met her future husband, Paul Child. He was an officer, and I say that not, you know, and like, oh, she met her husband there.
So that's what matters.

Speaker 3 But she met her life partner and love of her life who

Speaker 3 helped nurture her career and serve her.

Speaker 3 And they, they, by all accounts, they just seem like this really, really wonderful couple, like the kind that you always, you know, want to be in yourself, that kind of relationship, you know?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I saw from basically every source that talked about it that they were the envy of their friends. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So, yeah, they stayed together. They were married for almost 50 years from 1946 until Paul died in 1994.
That's right.

Speaker 3 And the takeaway here is, is they... landed in France at one point in 1948 as part of his assignment in the OSS.

Speaker 3 And when they were in France, they, and you know, it's, it's that sliding doors thing. Had they not gotten stationed in France, who knows if we ever would have gotten Julie a child.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Because he was a foodie and she wasn't. And he said, hey, I'm going to take you out to a real French meal and see what you think.
So he took her to this very famous restaurant.

Speaker 3 How do you pronounce that, Josh?

Speaker 2 La Couronne.

Speaker 3 La Couronne, which is the crown.

Speaker 3 This is in the Normandy region along the river there in northern France. And it has been a restaurant since the 1340s.
So it is legit. Some people claim it's the oldest inn in all of France.

Speaker 2 That's pretty cool.

Speaker 2 So they know what they're doing with French cuisine, which, by the way, if you don't really understand French cuisine, and I don't really claim to, I appreciate it, but it's not like that's what you me and I are making on Tuesday night at home.

Speaker 2 Yet, because I got her cookbook recently and I'm really excited about it.

Speaker 2 But just just to kind of like a little back of the envelope sketch of it, French cuisine, French cooking was the first cuisine in the world to be recognized as a world heritage by UNESCO.

Speaker 2 That's how distinct and important French cuisine is. And this is the moment when Julia Child was introduced to it, this lunch at La Couron.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and as I understand it, French cuisine, I've watched a lot of Top Chef over the years.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 3 All of it, in fact. French cuisine is very humble, a very basic ingredients.
It's not this fancy thing.

Speaker 3 You think of French food, if you don't know much about it, is being super, super fancy.

Speaker 3 But it's actually very humble with very basic ingredients, but really quality ingredients, really perfect technique,

Speaker 3 real fats, real butters, real cream.

Speaker 3 That's French cuisine, basically. It's like impeccable technique.

Speaker 3 you know, paired with a very simple, humble, but very well-sourced ingredients.

Speaker 2 Well put. I hope so.
Made by Frenchies. You forgot that part.

Speaker 3 Yeah, generally.

Speaker 2 So at this lunch in 1948, her first French meal, she had oysters,

Speaker 2 poulet-fumé wine, which is the official Sauvignon Blanc,

Speaker 2 and Sol Meunière.

Speaker 2 Meunière means miller's wife. So like you were saying, humble, simple dishes.
It's sole fish that's floured and made with capers, lemon, butter, parsley, and not much more.

Speaker 2 And she said that that first true culinary experience, there's a few quotes I think we should trade off with. Okay.
She said that it was an opening up of the soul and spirit for me, that first meal.

Speaker 2 It changed her life quite literally. Yeah.

Speaker 3 She also said it was a kind of coming to Jesus. And what else?

Speaker 2 She said it was the most exciting meal of my life.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And then that dish, that Dover soul that, you know, you,

Speaker 3 it's fried fish. you flour some sole fry it up in some butter put some I think I think the lemon and parsley and capers is part of any what is it the meignuere

Speaker 3 Meuniere Meuniere, I think any meuniere. That's basically what it is.
But a very simple dish and that became one of her, you know, one of her big signature dishes.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you put a little ketchup on there, you're in hog heaven.

Speaker 3 Oh man, you and my daughter.

Speaker 2 So because she was moved by she likes ketchup, huh?

Speaker 3 Oh God, it's so annoying.

Speaker 2 She's She's very cool. We have a lot in common.

Speaker 3 It gets her to eat some stuff she wouldn't normally eat.

Speaker 3 So that's good, I guess.

Speaker 2 Like broccoli?

Speaker 3 No, she didn't put it on broccoli. She doesn't like broccoli, but she eats.

Speaker 2 I don't like broccoli either. Does she hate peas, too?

Speaker 3 No, she loves peas.

Speaker 3 In fact, she eats frozen peas as a snack.

Speaker 2 Well, really, that's probably

Speaker 2 like that distinction erases all the similarities because I hate peas so much. Oh, yeah.
I hate them so much, Chuck.

Speaker 3 Yeah, she loves sushi now, which was a big surprise for us.

Speaker 2 That's awesome.

Speaker 3 She just kind of started eating it when I got it. And because I think she likes stealing my food.

Speaker 3 So it started as a joke, and then now she's just eating it.

Speaker 2 Do you remember what kind she eats? Is it like California rolls or nigiri? No, man.

Speaker 3 Like, yeah, nigiri and just any kind of crazy roll I get, she'll eat.

Speaker 2 Man, that's awesome. That's crazy.

Speaker 2 You're not supposed to eat much soy sauce, if any, with it.

Speaker 3 I don't care if it's supposed to or not. I'm telling you what I like.

Speaker 2 Oh, that's fine. I'm just saying, like, she's actually, she could go to Japan right now and they wouldn't bat an eyelash at her for it.

Speaker 3 Hey, Ethan, I don't remember our sushi episode.

Speaker 2 I didn't know.

Speaker 2 We did the black hole episode twice.

Speaker 3 That's a good point.

Speaker 2 All right. So where are we?

Speaker 3 Julia Child has eaten this meal.

Speaker 3 It blew her mind because she was raised on American food. Like you said, was not a foodie.

Speaker 3 And not only American food, but in recent years, post-war American food, which is when stuff started to get really sort of mass-produced and not very good, like very processed.

Speaker 3 And this French fruit just blew her mind.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So she wanted to understand how that could happen, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah. So she started taking cooking classes.
And again, like, she's a total novice here. And I think she's, again, in her late 30s.
So this is 1948. She's about 36 at this time.

Speaker 2 And her life has just changed. Like, she's just figured out what she wants to do in life.
So she starts taking classes, ends up enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu

Speaker 2 in 1951. That same year, she founds her own cooking school that she runs out of her own kitchen with her,

Speaker 2 who would become longtime collaborators, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertol.

Speaker 2 And they founded the school called Le Court des Trois Gourmand, which means the school of the three gourmands.

Speaker 3 That's right. I didn't get this verified, but I did read somewhere that she was either the only woman in her class at Le Court en Bleu or one of only two, maybe.

Speaker 3 It just, you know, back then, and, you know, there's still a lot of sexism in

Speaker 3 chefs' kitchens and restaurants. It's come a long way, but for many, many years, it was a profession of white men.

Speaker 3 You know, I feel like that's something we say a lot on the show, but that's the case. Within 10 years of being at Lecorde Bleu,

Speaker 3 she had sold her best-selling cookbook that you just bought, I guess. Did you get the OG? Yeah.
Yeah. What's the name of that?

Speaker 2 Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Speaker 3 That's right. 700-plus 700-plus pages.

Speaker 3 And then about 50 years after she enrolled at Le Court on Bleau, her actual kitchen that she cooked in would be in the Smithsonian Museum of American History as a permanent exhibit.

Speaker 2 Pretty neat.

Speaker 3 Pretty amazing.

Speaker 2 I say we take a break and we'll come back and we'll talk about that cookbook that I got because it was groundbreaking to say the least.

Speaker 4 All right.

Speaker 4 Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles.

Speaker 2 Stuff you should know.

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Speaker 2 So, Chuck, you said you mentioned the mastering the art of French cooking, this cookbook that Julia Child made with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertol.

Speaker 2 And it was designed specifically for America, for the United States, to introduce them to French cooking.

Speaker 2 And up to this point, cookbooks were basically like: take a little handful of flour and throw it at, you know, the elf that's helping you, and put a little oil in there, and fold it together, and voila.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Like, they were not very helpful, and they assumed that you already had some sort of training, maybe apprenticeship, something like that.

Speaker 2 The mastering the art of French cooking did the exact opposite because, having not that long ago been a total novice, Julia Child realized what people who are being exposed to this new way of cooking, new foods, new techniques, new ingredients, would need to know.

Speaker 2 And that was essentially everything. So they laid out everything that you would need to know to make these recipes in this cookbook, training anyone who bought this cookbook on French cuisine.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Like, you know, a recipe might have said, Julianne, these carrots, and then put them in butter.
And she would say, well, what if they don't know what that means? Here's how you, Julianne. Right.

Speaker 3 And not only that, but here's the kind of knife that's ideal for that kind of thing.

Speaker 2 And the butter, too.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And the butter.
Oh, boy. She talked a lot about butter.
Yes, it did.

Speaker 3 But like, here are the tools. Here are the techniques.
And here's how you do all of these for these 524 recipes. And it really just sort of.

Speaker 3 It broke down a wall in that it demystified,

Speaker 3 you know, sort of high-class cooking because she's like, this is something that you can do in your kitchen. Yeah.
You know, Sheboygan.

Speaker 2 Exactly. Oh, Sheboygan went nuts for this.
Of course. All the men grew pencil-thin mustaches and wore berets.
The women all wore

Speaker 2 pencil pants. Pencil pants? Yeah.
Pencil skirts? No, what are the little short, almost clam diggers, but they were much more Sevelt. I thought they were pencil-something.

Speaker 3 Oh, I don't know, maybe. I know what you're talking about, though.
Coulottes?

Speaker 2 No. No.

Speaker 2 I don't think those are French. I think those, those don't, no country will claim those.

Speaker 3 Oh, the coach of the Falcons wears those, which is probably why he sucks so bad.

Speaker 2 That is crazy.

Speaker 3 So on the book, you know, where she's demystifying the process and talking about quality ingredients and quality fresh herbs and high-quality butters and good meats, you would think that'd be like a slam dunk because they would say no one's ever done anything like this before.

Speaker 3 But it got rejected, you know, like most success stories in the book world. There's usually like, yeah, I got rejected by like eight publishers.

Speaker 3 And she got rejected quite a bit before she finally landed with an editor named Judith Jones at Alfred Knoppf Publishing.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so Judith Jones was already a legend by this time because just a few years before, she'd kind of discovered this obscure French book

Speaker 2 and recognized how important it was and had it translated to English and published it as the Diary of Anne Frank.

Speaker 2 So she was the editor who got the diary of Anne Frank out to the English-speaking world. So she already had a pretty great nose for this kind of thing.

Speaker 2 And she recognized that in Mastering the Art of French cooking.

Speaker 2 Not that it would be as important necessarily as the Diary of Anne Frank, but not necessarily that it would be that far behind as far as changing the world goes, or at least the United States. Yeah.

Speaker 3 God, man, we should do a short stuff on Judith Jones.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 3 Can you imagine like walking into any publishing event? She's like, by the way, Diary Diary of Anne Frank and

Speaker 3 the art,

Speaker 3 the Mastery of French cooking? What is it?

Speaker 2 Mastering the Art of French cooking, yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, she would say it better than that. She'd say both of those.

Speaker 2 Those are mine. Those are mine.

Speaker 2 We should also do an episode on Anne Frank sometime.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I'm surprised we haven't, actually.

Speaker 2 I am a little bit too.

Speaker 3 Yeah, let's do that.

Speaker 2 So one of the other things that made the cookbook finally successful when it did get published, and boy, was it successful.

Speaker 2 I saw in one place that it spent five years on the bestseller list, but I couldn't find any other place to verify it. It's still worth mentioning.

Speaker 3 We were on there for two weeks.

Speaker 2 We sure were, buddy. I think more than that, actually.
I think it was two. Okay.
Let's say two and a half. We'll split the difference.
But Frenchiness was very chic at the time.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 There was a French chef in the White House kitchen. Of course, you had, you mentioned Audrey Hepburn and wearing those French clothes, French designers, Jackie Kennedy was as well.

Speaker 2 Pencil pants.

Speaker 3 Pencil pants, that French wine was starting to be a thing at a time when, you know, again, now wine is so popular, but it wasn't that hugely

Speaker 3 popular in the United States at the time. So French wine kind of became a thing.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And the first volume was so successful a few years later, I think nine years later in 1970, they released volume two, which had another 257 recipes. And apparently you can spend up to 10K.

Speaker 2 Actually, I saw more than that to buy assigned volumes one and two together

Speaker 2 of the first edition.

Speaker 3 That's awesome. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, they became Bibles for cooks in America. And again, this, it wasn't like people were already primed for this.

Speaker 2 This is what made people primed to consider cookbooks Bibles in their kitchen in the United States.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And you know, Judith Jones?

Speaker 2 Also the Bible. That's right.

Speaker 2 She helped write it.

Speaker 3 So Everyone's probably saying like, yeah, this book's great, but what about television? Because that's where I remember her from my childhood.

Speaker 3 Here's where we get to TV, because she moved around Europe during the 1950s with her husband Paul, came back to the States in the 60s.

Speaker 3 I believe they had come back before on some,

Speaker 3 I don't know if you want to say visits, maybe some forced visits

Speaker 3 when her husband Paul was called for the

Speaker 3 blacklisted McCarthy hearings.

Speaker 2 So that was a thing.

Speaker 3 I don't think he got in trouble, though, right?

Speaker 2 No, they were friends with a woman who was a suspected communist in the government and they wanted to know about her.

Speaker 3 Right. So they brought him in.
But they ultimately landed for good in Cambridge, Mass.

Speaker 3 And when she was, you know, promoting her cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, I finally got it.

Speaker 3 She went on PBS at WGBH there in Boston for a book review show called I've Been Reading Ellipses.

Speaker 3 And she was just doing a little demonstration on how to make an omelette She brought everything with her, you know, her little hot plate and saute pan, her tools and her eggs and everyone loved it everyone was like riding into the station saying like this woman that you had on cooking that omelette was funny and gregarious and we just loved her and we also learned something and so they said hey we should give you your own tv show yeah within a year the french chef her first cooking show was on the air on w gbh

Speaker 2 and this is at a time where cooking shows were not a thing right a lot of people say the fact that cooking shows are so widespread today you can essentially thank julia Child for that too.

Speaker 2 That's right. And thank the French chef.
It had a 10-year run, and because it was a PBS joint, other PBS stations around the United States picked it up.

Speaker 2 It made its way to Europe and the UK via the BBC. It became a really big show very quickly.

Speaker 2 And Julia Child became the most widely recognized chef in the entire world, at the very least in the United States, during this period, the early 60s to the early 70s.

Speaker 3 Yeah, we had a TV show for a year.

Speaker 2 We did, and we became the most widely known kooks in the world, if not at least the United States.

Speaker 3 One thing I'm learning is that to compare our career to Julia Child's

Speaker 3 ensembling experience.

Speaker 2 You were a spy for that little while, or you pretended that you were at parties.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's right. She won an Emmy and a Peabody Award for that show.

Speaker 3 And this is just a little feather in her cap, I think. It was the first TV show in the United States to feature closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing community.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Open captioning, I saw where it was for everybody.
Everyone read it, but yeah.

Speaker 3 Oh, is that what closed captioning means?

Speaker 2 Yeah, where you have to select it to show.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I didn't know that either. So I guess it was open captioning, but yes, that didn't exist on TV until then.

Speaker 3 I'm just learning so much because of you, my friend.

Speaker 2 Hey, right back at you, buddy.

Speaker 3 So, you know, the TV show was a big hit. She, because she was just so lovable and she wasn't patronizing and she,

Speaker 3 you know, had her closing phrase, bon appetite. And she would just, she would get in there and get dirty and make mistakes.

Speaker 3 And like, she would want people to leave the, you know, the editors to leave the mistakes in there. She's like, that's part of cooking.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's a big deal.

Speaker 2 Because it also not only made her approachable, it made the people watching who were trying these recipes too, realize that she wasn't infallible and therefore they didn't need to worry about not being infallible too.

Speaker 2 Like mistakes are part of it. You just learned from them.
Yeah. But like that was, she made it way more approachable to people by doing that.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And I also read that this is from, I believe, the woman who made the documentary about her, Julia, which is really, really good.
Okay.

Speaker 3 That another reason that she left the mistakes in was especially for women because she felt like

Speaker 3 women felt like they needed to always feel bad when they messed something up

Speaker 3 in life, period, but especially in the kitchen. And she was like, no, it's okay to mess up.
And while you're in that kitchen, like,

Speaker 3 you know, it was kind of an opposition in a way to like the feminist movement of the time, which is like, get out of the kitchen.

Speaker 3 Julie, your child was saying, like, no, like, get in that kitchen and own it and cook for you and learn to make stuff that you want to make and not just like maybe what your husband and kids are yelling at you to make.

Speaker 3 Like, like,

Speaker 3 take over the kitchen as something that you love doing and that's for yourself. Right.

Speaker 2 I saw a bustle magazine describe her as a bamph, which I'm not familiar with, but they, based on context, it seemed like it was a good thing.

Speaker 3 What does that stand for?

Speaker 3 All right. Well, Josh just told me all fair what it stood for, and I agree.

Speaker 2 My joke.

Speaker 2 So you mentioned mistakes. There's actually some famous mistakes that she made.
One was she was pulling a a cake from the oven

Speaker 2 and apparently it fell flat on camera. She said something like, well, that didn't work out.

Speaker 2 Can you say it?

Speaker 2 Well, that didn't work out. Very nice.

Speaker 2 And then everybody knows that she once dropped an entire raw turkey on the floor on camera, left this in, picked the turkey up off the floor, kind of brushed it off and put it in the oven and baked it like nothing ever happened.

Speaker 2 I would do that.

Speaker 2 Well, yeah, we did a whole whole episode on the five-second rule.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but I mean, for a raw thing like that, I know it sounds gross, but you can wash that thing off and bake it and it's fine. Yes.

Speaker 2 You don't have a cooking show. No, exactly.
So, yes, the fact that she did this, well, I should say not the fact, because that's actually an urban legend, a rumor.

Speaker 2 It's something did happen, but it morphed into like the most spectacular version of itself.

Speaker 3 So it wasn't a turkey?

Speaker 2 No, it wasn't. Snopes dated it back to at least 1989.
But she once,

Speaker 2 the closest they could find, was that she was flipping a potato pancake and flipped it out of the pan onto the countertop and it crumbled. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And she said, like, I think she said, when you're in the kitchen, nobody can see you. And she pushed it back together and put it back in the pan and cooked it.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I love that because that's how it goes when you're cooking in your house.

Speaker 2 You know? Yeah.

Speaker 2 I've never not flipped a potato pancake onto the countertop.

Speaker 3 She had

Speaker 3 a string of successful cooking shows after that first one, all the way from the 70s through the 80s into the 90s. I believe

Speaker 3 she had 12 Emmy nominations total and seven wins.

Speaker 3 And by the time she got into the 1990s, they were shooting. that show in her home kitchen in Cambridge.
Her husband Paul designed this kitchen that was like part kitchen, part TV studio. And,

Speaker 3 you know, just so they could spend time at home. And he was heavily involved.

Speaker 3 Apparently, at times he was on the floor with cue cards and he helped design the original patch for the three gourmands that when she worked with the other two chefs. And so they were really

Speaker 3 sort of a power couple working together to enrich her career.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Chuck, I say we take our second break and come back and talk about why Julia Child is so beloved. All right.
We'll be right back.

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Speaker 2 Uh, all right. Why was Julia Child so beloved?

Speaker 3 I feel like we've already made a case, but let's talk about it some more.

Speaker 2 All right. I mean, we've covered some of it, but not all.

Speaker 2 A big one is that she introduced fresh ingredients to America. This is really kind of, we hit on this, but it's worth saying.

Speaker 2 This is a time when people were using canned soup as an ingredient, not just the canned soup, right? So everything was very processed. And she insisted on fresh ingredients.

Speaker 2 Like there was no way around it. You had to use these, or else these things weren't going to turn out very well.
But at the same time, she also said, like, you need to let the food stand on its own.

Speaker 2 Like, yes, you want herbs, but you want the herbs to complement it. You don't want the herbs to cover up.
You don't want to use a bunch of A1 on your Sol Muniere.

Speaker 2 Like, you let the thing stand on its own. You let the fish taste like fish.

Speaker 2 Like, that was kind of like a sub text, I guess, of introducing fresh ingredients, teaching people to enjoy the thing that they were cooking rather than the thing that they were were cooking plus, again, A1 sauce.

Speaker 3 Yeah, exactly. And that technique, you know,

Speaker 3 if you cook a piece of fish perfectly, you don't need anything more than a little salt and pepper and butter

Speaker 3 and maybe a squirt of lemon.

Speaker 2 Even tilapia.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 But despite all this, she was not a food snob. She was very approachable.
She loved In-N-Out Burger.

Speaker 3 She used Hellman's Mayo in her tuna salad.

Speaker 3 Apparently she liked Costco hot dogs even.

Speaker 2 I don't blame her.

Speaker 3 I've never had one. What's

Speaker 2 great? They're like a...

Speaker 3 What's different, though?

Speaker 2 Isn't it just a hot dog?

Speaker 2 Yes, it's just a hot dog. But do you know how every once in a while your school lunch would give you something that you're like, this is amazing? Yeah.
That's like their hot dogs.

Speaker 2 They have their own taste, and it's an amazing taste, but they are on par with like a school lunch type hot dog. In the best way.
I got you.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's where people go to Costco just to eat the hot dogs.

Speaker 2 And the pizza's not bad, too, but it's worth going to just for the hot dogs, which technically, in a weird way, gives it one Michelin star.

Speaker 3 Well, you know, buddy, our friend Joe Garden,

Speaker 3 a friend of the show, former writer of The Onion.

Speaker 3 Joe lives there in Woodstock, and he posts pictures on his Instagram eating those Costco hot dogs.

Speaker 2 See, he knows what's going on. Joe always knows what's up.
He's got his finger on the pulse of Julia Child.

Speaker 3 That's right.

Speaker 2 So she also reintroduced America to wine.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 At the time,

Speaker 2 Americans were drinking the stuff that's now on the bottom shelf of grocery stores.

Speaker 3 Yeah, the jug wine. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So not only did she reintroduce America to wine,

Speaker 2 she normalized it by doing the same thing she did with mistakes. She drank wine on camera as part of her show.

Speaker 2 On some episodes, apparently she would start to get a little tipsy.

Speaker 2 She never got drunk or sloppy or anything like that. But the fact that she was drinking this wine, and by the way, pretty good wine,

Speaker 2 made Americans realize what they were drinking was just bottom-of-the-barrel stuff. And let's see what else we've got.

Speaker 2 And as a result, California wine became super dominant, essentially in part from her normalizing it.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think that happened in the 70s when California started making good wine on par with the French.

Speaker 3 you know, according to everyone but the French.

Speaker 3 She also liked beer. And this sounds very gross to me, but she enjoyed something called an upside-down martini, which is you swap the vermouth parts in the gin.
So it's much more vermouth than gin.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's also lower ABV, so you don't get quite as trashed as quickly.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but man, that's kind of one of the good parts about a martini, right?

Speaker 2 For sure.

Speaker 2 She also had a really great sense of humor.

Speaker 2 Apparently, another long-standing rumor that sometimes fans would confront her with, they were like, I remember that time you drank wine directly out of the bottle on one of your episodes.

Speaker 2 And that apparently never happened either. Again, it was just the extreme version of what she was actually doing, which is drinking wine out of a glass.

Speaker 2 But she said, I would never do that on television. Right.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And, you know, I opened with the Dan Aykroyd bit.

Speaker 3 If you didn't know what I was doing, it was a very famous SNL skitch from back in the day in 78 where Dan Aykroyd portrayed Julia Child.

Speaker 2 where he cut the dickens out of his finger.

Speaker 3 And,

Speaker 3 you know, blood's just going everywhere. Of course, they had the blood pack just squirting blood all over everything.
And he was a big fan, apparently.

Speaker 3 And there was a real incident, I think, about a month before that sketch, where she was working with Jacques Pepin on Tom Snyder's Tomorrow show, where she had cut herself pretty bad.

Speaker 3 And I guess that was the inspiration for that.

Speaker 2 She also apparently was very proud of that sketch and thought it was hilarious. So she kept a videotape of it and would show people sometimes.

Speaker 2 And then at a really particularly fun, enthusiastic dinner party, she might act it out like word for word by heart. Can you imagine? Oh, I would have loved to have seen that.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Incredible. She was also super charming and funny on TV appearances, but particularly Letterman.
You can watch compilations of her on Letterman. She could hold her own against Letterman, no problem.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you sent me that one clip. I actually think I remember seeing that in high school, but

Speaker 3 Letterman was,

Speaker 3 you know, I love Letterman.

Speaker 3 I felt like he was not being too kind about the food.

Speaker 2 Sometimes he's cranky.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so I felt a little bad for her in that she was serving him kind of a version in this one of a

Speaker 2 tartare. What do you call it?

Speaker 3 Yeah, of a steak tartare, but it was with ground beef and melted cheese, and he just sort of kept making fun of it, and then he spit it out.

Speaker 3 And at the end, I think she said something that kind of made me feel bad. She was like, well, maybe next time I can serve something you like or something like that.

Speaker 2 Well, she used an acetylene torch to melt the cheese, which is pretty hilarious. I had the impression that they didn't have the equipment she needed to make a burger, so she made the most out of it.

Speaker 3 Oh, interesting.

Speaker 3 Well, using a torch is very commonplace in kitchens now, but Dave made it. I guess back then it was unusual because Dave was like, thought it was the weirdest thing you'd ever seen.
For sure.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 One other thing we mentioned, too, that we have to touch on is she was known for her love of butter.

Speaker 2 She taught America to cook all through the decades where America started to become health conscious and fat-free and all that stuff.

Speaker 2 And so she would become criticized for pushing things like real butter on people.

Speaker 2 And she would say things like, well, if you're afraid of butter, use cream instead, which is at least as bad as butter.

Speaker 2 And her whole thing was, like, yes, you shouldn't just be gorging yourself on butter all the time. But if you're going to make a meal, use the real butter.
and enjoy every bite of it.

Speaker 2 Like, that's the point is enjoying every single bite of this stuff, not enjoying every single bite until you start eating mindlessly because you eat this 10 times a day, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah. And she had, she quoted, she quoted Oscar Wilde, which I thought was great.
But she said, everything in moderation, including moderation.

Speaker 3 That's a great quote. I think so, too.
I got a little kitchen tip. If you're health-conscious and you're thinking, like, I don't want to use a lot of butter, I use olive oil or whatever.

Speaker 3 Use that olive oil, but you can also throw in like one pad of butter in with that olive oil.

Speaker 3 You can mix those two things, and it's great. And it adds just a little unctuousness that olive oil won't give you.

Speaker 2 I love that. Yeah.
And don't forget the A1.

Speaker 3 My friend Clay still loves that stuff.

Speaker 2 So, well, it's classy. Yeah.

Speaker 3 I mean, it's a very specific taste. I love that tart-tangy A1.
I just don't use it.

Speaker 2 So, Chuck, we talked about volumes one and two of Mastering the Art of French cooking.

Speaker 2 We should say, in addition to the string of successful TV shows, she had a bunch of cookbooks, but these were her two classics and put together 781 recipes between the two of them.

Speaker 2 But if you go onto food sites and you look up something like Julia Child's Best Recipes, some of them kind of

Speaker 2 percolate to the top where you're like, you see them on just about every list. And I think that we should go over a few of those starting now.

Speaker 3 Yeah, for sure. If you've ever seen the movie Julia and Julia, did you see that?

Speaker 2 I haven't. I heard it was great.

Speaker 3 It's really good. That is the story of a woman named Julie Powell, who

Speaker 3 I think was sort of felt lost in life and wanted to dive into this project of cooking every recipe.

Speaker 3 I think she had a blog or something, maybe. It was a really good movie, though.
Amy Adams played Julie Powell, who very sadly passed away a few years ago at the young age of 49. Oh, wow.

Speaker 3 And Meryl Streep, I don't know if she won the Academy Award. I know she was nominated for playing Julia Child.
So it sort of tells those two stories.

Speaker 3 together. And it's a wonderful movie from Nora Efron.
But in that movie, she's cooking all the the recipes. And

Speaker 3 the big, big one from the book that she was most well known for that she really wanted to master out of the gate was the Bouffe Bourguignon,

Speaker 2 which is essentially a beef stew with red wine. But again, you take some deceptively simple ingredients and put them together in the right way.
It's going to produce a smash hit dish.

Speaker 2 And that's what beef Bourguignon is. What else? Quiche Lorraine, which everybody knows.
You can get quiche Lorraine at the grocery store by the slice

Speaker 2 because Julia Child introduced it to the United States with her cookbook.

Speaker 3 That's right. Again, very simple, clean recipe.
Bacon, onions, egg cream, a few cheeses, some spices, of course, eggs.

Speaker 2 Just real quick about bacon. Remember, I said that she didn't want to cover up the taste.
She wanted to let things to stand on their own.

Speaker 2 One of the things she talks about in mastering the art of French cooking was that with American bacon, you have to blanch it first to remove the smoky flavor.

Speaker 2 So you actually lightly boil it for a little bit until you get the smoky flavor off, and then you start to use bacon, which I think is actually a huge tip for a lot of people out there, believe me.

Speaker 3 If they don't like smoky flavors, I guess.

Speaker 2 But the problem is, is the bacon smokiness is going to take over. Like, that's all you're going to taste.
Whereas you're not, if you can get rid of that smoky flavor,

Speaker 2 then you're in you're in hog heaven, as she always said.

Speaker 3 I don't mind it. I like that apple would, and I also would cook it in the oven.
I think that is the best way to cook bacon. Agreed.

Speaker 2 On a baking sheet. With the little elf laying on it to keep it flat.

Speaker 3 What about a cassoulet? That's a very classic French dish.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's pork and beans, poultry, sausage. There's a dark brown crust on the top of the whole thing.
She had a great quote about that.

Speaker 3 Yeah, cassoulet, that best of bean feast is everyday fare for a peasant, but ambrosia for a gastronome. Though its ideal consumer is a 300-pound blocking back

Speaker 3 who's been splitting firewood non-stop for the last 12 hours on a sub-zero day in Manitoba.

Speaker 2 And like, if you look at pictures of the cassoulette, it's like I want one so bad.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it looks really good.

Speaker 2 And what about chocolate mousse?

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's another one that apparently she made a mistake on air.

Speaker 3 It didn't set correctly. And you know that mousse has to set.
But good chocolate mousse is out of this world.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I couldn't find the episode, but apparently a 1992 WAPO article mentioned it.

Speaker 2 But supposedly, it is surprisingly easy to make, and the outcome is just amazing. I saw light, airy, silky, smooth.
It says the endless meal.

Speaker 2 And it's just a few ingredients, including rum, chocolate, coffee. And she teaches you these techniques of how to make it, how to fold it, how to whip the egg whites, and just get it just right.

Speaker 2 And yeah. Every time I hear chocolate mousse, I think of Chocolate Mousse from Top Secret.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 He's great.

Speaker 3 This is a good movie. R.I.P.
Val Kilmer.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. I forgot about that.

Speaker 3 And then, of course, French onion soup. I know that you and I both talked on the air about our love for French onion soup.

Speaker 3 If it's on a menu,

Speaker 3 there's two things in my life. If it's on a menu, I will get it.
One is French onion soup, and the other is a French dip sandwich.

Speaker 2 You love the French?

Speaker 3 Two of my favorite things. And it's not on, you know, the most menus.
So when I see it, I order it.

Speaker 3 And that French onion soup, crusty on top, and that delicious onion-y broth, and the bread, it's just one of life's treats. Have you ever made it? I've never made it myself.

Speaker 2 I should try that. It's really good.
All it takes is patience. It's not hard, but it takes a while for everything to come together.
It takes a while to like genuinely caramelize the onions.

Speaker 2 But man, it is so worth it. It's really good.

Speaker 3 Don't you just get one of those Lipton packets?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Out of the can. That's how I do it.

Speaker 3 Well, you take one of those Lipton packets and you put it in a turkey burger. That's what you do.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's supposed to be pretty good. I've not had that.
I found a recipe for a roast that has a packet of au jus, you know, the dry au jus packet, a packet of ranch, dried ranch mix,

Speaker 2 pepperuccini, and like maybe one other thing in a roast, and you put it in a slow cooker, and it's supposed to be a knockout dish, and I can't wait to try it. Oh, man.

Speaker 3 You got to watch Julia and Julie and Julia

Speaker 3 and then start cooking that stuff and let me know how it goes.

Speaker 2 Okay. Yeah.
I definitely plan to make some stuff, so I'll let you know for sure. All right.

Speaker 3 Sadly, we're at the end of this episode,

Speaker 3 and Julia Child met the end of her life at the almost age of 92. I think she was just a couple of days short of her 92nd birthday when she passed away.

Speaker 3 at her home at the time in Montecito, California in August 2004 of liver failure.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Elaine Ducas, who I think is the only three-star Michelin chef in the world, said today the entire community of cooks is sad and feels like orphans.

Speaker 2 Oh man. I know.
Isn't that sad? That's brutal. Yeah.
So she's actually buried in one of the more interesting places I've ever heard of. Had you heard of the Neptune Memorial Reef before?

Speaker 3 No, that sounds kind of cool though.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So they took her cremated remains, mixed it together with some concrete, and formed a headstone out of it, put it underwater.

Speaker 2 I I can't remember how deep it is, but this is an acre-long underwater cemetery off of Key Biscayne in Florida.

Speaker 2 And on the headstone, again, made from her cremated remains, there's a plaque with a knife and a fork inscribed on it and a quote from her, fat gives things flavor. I love it.
Yep.

Speaker 3 That's pretty fun for a scuba diver to see, I bet. For sure.

Speaker 2 So R.I.P. Julia Child, and thanks for everything.

Speaker 3 That's right. Our berets are off to you.

Speaker 2 Let's see. We talked about Julia Child.
You took off your beret.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that means it's time for listener mail.

Speaker 3 All right. So this is from Nathan Winger in Carmel, Indiana.
And Nathan went through the trouble of calculating how many Olympic pools deep and how many Big Macs we are.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 3 As a show.

Speaker 3 He loves it. He says, I love nerd math, so I did some calculations.
Using my trusty search engine, I found out there are over 2600 episodes of stuff you should know

Speaker 3 We're just gonna use 2600 to make it simple. He says okay

Speaker 3 All told the average length is 45 minutes, which that makes me feel good because that's what we're shooting for. Yeah

Speaker 3 He said I'm gonna he said that seems low though, so I'm gonna adjust it up to 55. I think these days it's 45.
They used to be longer, so that's probably what he's witnessing. Okay

Speaker 3 at average conversational speed, humans speak about 130 words a minute. So you guys do a great podcast, and as pros have honed your conversational skills to not be fast nor slow.

Speaker 3 So, I'm going to stick with that median figure. Thanks.

Speaker 3 The average number of letters per English word is five, but since you often talk about subjects that require words like spooktacular and hincher kaifect,

Speaker 3 I'm going to up your average to six. And finally, we're going to convert your speech into inches based on the size of a standard size 12 font, which is 0.167 inches.

Speaker 2 Man, I love this stuff.

Speaker 3 So, based on all that, we can get inches per word, one inches per minute of speech, 130, inches per episode, 7,150, total episode inches, 18,590,000, and total episode feet, which is 1.549,167 feet.

Speaker 3 That equates, so one episode of stuff you should know, equates to the depth of 238,333 Olympic swimming pools. Wow.

Speaker 3 A bit short of Josh's estimate of 10 to 15 million. And for the sake of transparency and Chuck's liking, that is 7.745

Speaker 3 and change

Speaker 3 million Big Macs at an average of 2.5 interest per burger.

Speaker 2 Woo! Man, who is this?

Speaker 3 This is Nathan Winger or Winger. Okay.
I'd say Winger.

Speaker 2 I think it's Winger in the tradition of Kip Winger.

Speaker 3 Well, it's WE, though. So that's Nathan.
He's in Carmel, Indiana. That's a lot of work to go through, Nathan.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Nathan, I could tell you're a true fan with that little trusty search engine aside. I caught that.

Speaker 3 I love it.

Speaker 2 Thank you for doing that. I always wanted to know how many Big Macs we are and Olympic pools.
So thanks a lot, Nathan. And happy Thanksgiving to you.

Speaker 2 And happy Thanksgiving to all of you out there, including our Canada friends. And if you want to send us an email like Nathan did, send it off to stuffpodcasts at iHeartRadio.com.

Speaker 1 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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Speaker 3 That's why season five of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition from Ruby Studio and Argenix shares powerful first-hand stories from people with conditions like MG and CIDP.

Speaker 3 Hosted by Martine Hackett, these conversations dive into what resilience really looks like through setbacks, breakthroughs, and finding strength in community.

Speaker 3 Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 3 Support for the show today comes from public.com. You're thoughtful about where your money goes.

Speaker 3 You've got core holdings, some recurring crypto buys, maybe even a few strategic options plays on the side. The point is, you're engaged with your investments, and Public gets that.

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Speaker 2 Paid for by Public Investing. All investing involves risk of loss, including loss of principal.

Speaker 2 Brokerage services for U.S.-listed registered securities, options, and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc., member FINRA and SIPC. CryptoTrading provided by ZeroHash.

Speaker 2 Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash disclosures.

Speaker 8 This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something. Do you know the symptoms of moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea or OSA in adults with obesity?

Speaker 8 They may be happening to you without you knowing.

Speaker 8 If anyone has ever said you snored loudly or if you spend your days fighting off excessive tiredness, irritability, and concentration issues, it may be due to OSA.

Speaker 8 OSA is a serious condition where your airway partially or completely collapses during sleep, which may cause breathing interruptions and oxygen deprivation. Learn more at don'tsleeponosa.com.

Speaker 8 This information is provided by Lilly, a medicine company.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast,

Speaker 2 guaranteed human.