In a few weeks, it will have been a full five years since the world lost Julia Child; while the timing might be coincidental, two notable tributes are currently making waves. The higher profile project is the Meryl Streep and Amy Adams vehicle Julie & Julia, in which, if you haven’t seen the constant commercials (well, at least on Philebrity’s “golden triumvirate” of Lifetime, Oxygen, and Lifetime Movie Network), writer/director Nora Ephron juxtaposes Child’s biography with the story of a food blogger cooking her way through Child’s landmark Mastering the Art of French Cooking. We’ll reserve judgment on that one until it’s released, but the early reviews have been tepid, mostly noting that the food blogger side of the equation pales in comparison to Child’s side… perhaps Ephron mistakenly felt the need to make Child more accessible by having an average-person intermediary cook her food? (Incidentally, if you’re looking for a pure Child biography, the best choice remains PBS’s American Masters: Julia Child! America’s Favorite Chef from 2004).
In addition to Julie & Julia, the August Vanity Fair contains a story called Our Lady of the Kitchen, written by Laura Jacobs. Jacobs deftly ties Child’s personal and professional accomplishments to their importance within the socio-cultural landscape of the time. Most interestingly, she posits that Child was the rightful successor to the role of America’s moral guide and matriarch (which she refers to as the “First Lady” regardless of presidential affiliation) left vacant when Emily Post and Eleanor Roosevelt passed away in the early 1960s; she also connects Child’s fulfillment achieved through her decidedly tactile, non-Puritanical handling of food to the women’s lib movement of the late ‘60s and ‘70s. By making French cuisine simple enough for anyone to cook, Child brought to the masses what had previously been the property of the elite, in effect another form of liberation. While not the most obvious choice for the then-new medium of television, Child took to it with disarming aplomb, essentially becoming the first modern “celebrity chef” and setting the stage (for better or worse) for her legions of acolytes: Martha Stewart, Emeril Lagasse, Rachael Ray, and virtually every other TV chef. Jacobs’ article is a fitting tribute to Julia Child’s enduring legacy, which, paradoxically, becomes easier to gloss over with each new Child-related project vying for the public’s attention. Even if a new chef sets a template for new media the way that Child did for television, she will always remain both an archetype and a rebel, and her story is one that deserves to be treated with Julia’s trademark mix of reverence and approachability.
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