Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dana Polan is Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University. He is the author of The Sopranos, also published by Duke University Press, and Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film.

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Julia Child's The French Chef

Duke University Press

Contents

acknowledgments........................................................ix1 The Difference She Made..............................................12 Television Cookery B.C. (Before Child)...............................413 French Cuisine, American Style.......................................784 The Beginnings of The French Chef....................................1145 Prepping The French Chef.............................................1376 The Success of The French Chef.......................................1857 New Beginnings and the Ending to The French Chef.....................2148 Kitchen Drama........................................................231notes..................................................................249references.............................................................277further readings on TV cooking shows...................................285index..................................................................289

Chapter One

An episode of a TV cooking show begins. The first few instants of the initial shot have a bare-bones simplicity and directness and even a whiff of the generic about them. In close-up, on a baking tray on a kitchen counter, we see a large metal pot bottom side up and arranged around it a circle of baked ladyfingers. The edge of someone's hand, a woman's hand with a wedding ring on one finger, is visible at the top of the image, and in a moment the camera, by pulling back from its close-up and shifting a bit to the side, will reframe the scene to bring the hand fully into view as it picks up one of the baked goods to show off to the spectator while the credits fade in over the image. This is the beginning of "Introducing Charlotte Malakoff," episode 65 of Julia Child's The French Chef.

The shot, in black and white, offers a very limited depth of field that both renders the background soft and blurry and concentrates attention on those hands energetically going about their business. Except perhaps for the somewhat specialness of the food item being presented (Frenchified baked goods), this appears to be cooking pedagogy (and cooking television, in particular) at its most basic—pared down to its most fundamental state as the encounter of human intent, instruments (in this case, bare hands), and a foodstuff on which controlled and calculated demonstrations and transformations will be enacted and presented to an audience. It's a lot like what viewers already would have seen often if they watched daytime television in the 1950s and 1960s.

But almost from the first instant, a voice has kicked in—that notable voice, the voice of Julia Child. "Under this silver drum is Miss Charlotte Malakoff, who with the support of 'Lady Fingers,'" she declares bouncily and cheerfully, "is about to take part in an intriguing dessert drama today on The French Chef." From the start, then, we're not simply in a prosaic site of quotidian cookery. Quite the contrary: We are in a special place that is totally Julia Child's, a joyful, even wacky, world for which she sets the terms. This is a voice that commentators for years have strained to try to find words adequate to describe its special quality: Is it a breathless warble? Is it a lilting and lifting vibration? Is it shrill or sonorous? Is it composed of snorts and grunts or of eloquent enunciations? Is it vulgar or marked rather by upper-crust emphases that resonate with the speaker's social origin in the moneyed world of white-bread Pasadena, California? One is tempted to imagine that this voice is unique and inimitable except that hearing it seems to lead so many listeners to feel impelled, precisely, to imitate it. Maybe the fact that no one else has this voice makes so many people want to assay its imitation (the most famous being Dan Ackroyd's hilarious impersonation of Child on Saturday Night Live in 1978, which led a whole generation of television viewers who never had watched her shows to feel still that they knew Julia Child; of course, we now can add to the notable attempts at mimicry Meryl Streep's star turn as Child in the fractured biopic Julie and Julia, for which she was nominated for an Oscar).

In the opening scene of "Charlotte Malakoff," Child's voice qualifies the anonymous image of culinary activity and turns it into something special, something personified, something embodied. And along with that voice comes further embodiment as the camera pulls out of its initial close-up to reveal Child herself in all her larger-than-life presence of personality. A strapping, six-foot-two-inch bundle of vivacity and boundless energy and enthusiasm, Julia Child commands the scene, her posture a blend of confidence and control and a comical wavering as if she were both sure of the culinary mission before her but vulnerable to a catastrophic loss of control at any moment. This presence, this personality, along with the quite visible tensions she embodied between control and chaos, would make all the difference for American television in the 1960s—indeed, for American culture more broadly in that decade—and it's fully there on display in the first few seconds of Child's "Introducing Charlotte Malakoff."

In fact, any episode of The French Chef could serve as a reminder of why Julia Child became so key to the cultivation of modern American lifestyle and leisure culture in the latter part of the twentieth century. On the one hand, as I've learned, you only have to start showing a clip of her to students, colleagues, or friends, and the infectious laughter and enjoyment kick in. She stands for a quite particularly American embodiment of boisterous fun. On the other hand, many viewers clearly were getting something more than mere comedy by watching her: They were being offered lessons in a whole way of living and being and doing. And that too was her importance to her times.

Julia Child's pedagogy was of a generous, open sort. Against dogma, but also against mechanical and slavish obedience, Child didn't simply enumerate ingredients and recipe steps and then order her audience to follow her blindly. Instead, she took the time to clarify why things could—or in some cases, certainly should—be done as she was doing them (and why this or that variant would or wouldn't be as good). She made sure viewers knew the logic of her kitchen practices and could learn to judge them from within. Take, for instance, episode 45 of The French Chef, "Artichokes from Top to Bottom." Here, in just the first four minutes, one learns about the seasonality of artichokes, about the parts that make up the vegetable, about the best way to buy it (what to look for and what to avoid), about the different varieties of artichoke, and about the most typical way to cook them. In the remainder of the half-hour show, one also is taught the steps in cooking artichokes in non-standard ways, what not to do (for example, the water shouldn't be salted because this is bad for the vitamins contained in the artichoke and gives the vegetable a bad flavor), how to avoid discoloration (rub the artichoke with lemon), how to make artichoke dishes particularly attractive for when company is coming over (and even what plates to buy if one is doing such entertaining regularly), how to incorporate culinary etiquette into the presentation to invitees (for example, you will be "nice to your...