Julia Child's "The French Chef" by Dana Polan (review)

Julia Child became a cultural icon when I was growing up in the 1960s. Her cooking shows on the Public Broadcasting System inspired my mother to purchase her cookbooks and use her recipes to make seemingly exotic dishes like soufflé and beef bourguignon. My first academic position was at a remotely located liberal arts college in Minnesota, and I remember being invited to a fellow faculty member's home for dinner where his wife proudly served a delicious beef stew with olives and potatoes from a Julia Child recipe. I myself have prepared Julia Child's French onion soup and her chocolate and almond cake (reine de saba) for friends and colleagues. I enjoyed her memoir, My Life in France, and the film Julie and Julia, which is based in part on the memoir. I am also a fan of food writers Anthony Bourdain and Ruth Reichl, mainly because I find their light fare a perfect way to kill time on long-distance flights. So when asked to review Julia Child's "The French Chef" by Dana Polan, I thought, why not?

I soon discovered that my experience watching Julia Child on television and indulging in dishes made from her recipes did not adequately prepare me to review a book that takes a scholarly approach to the The French Chef. Polan, a professor of cinema studies at New York University, uses the history of Julia Child's television show The French Chef as a case study to explore the evolution of American television and popular culture in the 1960s and early 1970s. Polan sets the stage with two background chapters on the history of television cooking shows prior to Julia Child and the Americanization of French cuisine. The next four chapters cover the creation of the show, the technical details of its production and filming, and the history of its run. The concluding chapter analyzes the show and its popularity from the perspective of cultural theory.

Anticipating that some will question the need for a scholarly treatment of what most people regard as "just entertainment," Polan responds that "why something comes off as fun and why a particular culture needs fun when it does and in the form in which it does are already questions of a society and its values" (p. 39). Accordingly, I tried to keep an open mind. Polan makes a persuasive case that Julia Child's distinctive personality and instruction methods, and the way her camera crew captured these on film, were crucial in making an unfamiliar cuisine accessible to ordinary Americans in a non-threatening manner. At times, however, the exposition of this thesis gets mired in the details of the show's production process. Polan also has a penchant for using analogies that stretch the imagination without really adding any insight to the analysis—for example, comparing Julia Child's style of cooking instruction first to the James Bond genre of spy stories (pp. 80-82) and then to French structuralism (pp. 109-111).

What, then, does the book have to do with the study of the Cold War, other than the historical period it covers? The editor of the Journal of Cold War Studies hinted that the topic of the book is relevant to the concept of "soft power." The introductory chapter of Polan's book implicitly touches on this concept. Polan cites the argument of Serge Guilbault, in his book How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, that "postwar America, within the context of new geopolitics, needed to show the world that it had culture as well as military might on its side, and this involved a co-optation of European aesthetic traditions to its own ends" (p. 35). Applying this to Julia Child, Polan notes that "the Frenchness she offered up on television was Americanized to the core" (p. 36). In a subsequent chapter, Polan discusses the generally positive coverage in the French press of Julia Child's attempt to bring French cuisine to Americans...