Child’s Play

In the summer of 1988, my mother walked in the kitchen to find me standing in a drawer to reach the counter. In my right hand was a meat cleaver. In my left, a ripe banana, which I was meticulously julienning, skin and all. Over the din of chopping, I was delivering this sing-songy instructional narrative: "And then you just chop it up, until it's reaaal creamy." I was not yet 3.

In a kind of panic-induced slow motion, my mom snatched the four-inch blade out of my hands, scooped up my "real creamy" goo, and shooed my studio audience (my sister, then 18 months, whose chubby fingers were nearing the blade). I protested: "But Julia Child does it!"

Ahead of this weekend's Julie and Julia, the Meryl Streep biopic, a lot has been made of Child's transformative power in the culinary world: how she ushered our meals away from inelegant Swanson's TV dinners and Marshmallow Fluff and toward home-cooked, Americanized cuisine classique. I was too young to feel that catalyzing effect in real time; though I cook frequently, it's the 40th, and not the first, edition of Mastering the Art of French Cooking (MtAoFC) that's on my desk right now, christened with bacon grease and thyme sprigs. I became a Julia Child fan in the late 1980s, watching her in syndication on PBS (she was on right after Sesame Street). But having missed the moment has made me appreciate Child in a totally different way: as a cook second, and an entertainer first—one whose screen presence was so potent, it could penetrate the playground set.

As I've gotten older and expanded my cooking repertoire beyond pulverized fruit, it's become remarkable to me how Child managed to entertain her audience while preparing incredibly complex food. She is not Nigella Lawson, Ina Garten or Giada de Laurentiis—female celebrity cooks who specialize in the simple, clean, modern cooking that is today's culinary ethic. Child made intensely difficult, technically arduous dishes on her show—she was not about simple, clean, or easy, but you'd never know it from her onscreen persona. You'd watch her babble while beating a soufflé; joke while deboning a duck; gesticulate while yanking a toothy monkfish from an aquarium. It's like texting while doing flips on a trapeze. (God love her, but of course  Sandra Lee can carry on a conversation while making her famous Kwanzaa Cake. The ingredients are Kwanzaa candles and store-bought cake.)

How hard is it for us laypeople to make Julia Child dishes and still be bubbly, gracious hosts? Excruciatingly hard—I know because I played Julia Child for a day. I popped into my office dining room's kitchen with groceries, MtAoFC, and that kind of doofy optimism that attends cluelessness. Within minutes I'd hacked open my thumb. Within an hour, the kitchen had a surprise visit from the health department—just as I was hoisting a raw chicken over the floor with my bare, gloveless hands (it's a miracle they didn't shut us down). Within seven hours, I'd caved and asked for help, so NEWSWEEK's executive chef, John Richards, bailed me out with some pâte à choux expertise. (He met Child twice in her life: the first time, the 90-something legend tottered over to tell him that his pâtisserie recreation of the Eiffel Tower—constructed entirely out of thin sheets of chocolate—was a job well done. That beats my credentials).