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

From “Thirty Minute Meals” to “Iron Chef,” Americans are obsessed with watching cooking. Where did this fascination come from? As film scholar Dana Polan argues in Julia Child’s The French Chef, Julia Child and her TV show were key to the popularization of food as a televisual subject. But Child, Le Cordon Bleu graduate and co-author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961), did not invent the television cooking show. Alongside her husband and producers at WGBH, the Boston public television station, Child contributed important elements to a form that had been in place since TV’s earliest days. In one of the best chapters, Polan traces the cooking show before The French Chef (1963), explaining how early shows created the genre’s conventions, like close-ups on the host’s hands interspersed with longer shots. Child borrowed these, but added a pedagogical depth married to a deep joy in cooking that was evident in each episode, which included recipe instruction with a “conceptual” narrative “that situated each step in its contexts and saturated it with broader understanding” (127). That her show coincided with the rise of a new petite bourgeoisie that used food to demonstrate distinction and taste ensured her success.

Equally important was Child herself. Her larger-than-life persona combined with her deep knowledge of French food and the visible pleasure she derived from cooking, eating, and drinking, made her addictive to watch. As fan letters acknowledge, viewers of widely divergent backgrounds liked her spontaneity and strangeness. While she was no cultural rebel (Polan repeatedly mentions that she used industrially produced foods even if she preferred homemade), Child even appealed to people in the counterculture and avant garde who saw her as candid rather than canned.

The fact that mistakes were not edited out of the final shows helped this impression of candor. Rather than being a shellacked sitcom housewife, Child performed realness for the camera. Interestingly given her role in breaking barriers around women’s participation in haute cuisine, Child was no feminist. As she wrote to a male fan, “It’s good to know there are some enthusiastic men at the stove these days; men always have more daring and imagination than women” (97). Child embodied the gender assumptions of her age while stretching them. And, as Polan points out, such gender issues continue to structure TV cooking bifurcated between sexy female hosts and playful male cooks.

The French Chef continued until 1973 when Child retired. While Polan gestures to Child’s legacy, he does not engage with historical memory. What does the Smithsonian say about Child in their exhibit of her TV kitchen? How did the blog, book, and film Julie and Julia (2009) reflect gender and class identity? Such forays would extend the analysis, which is strongest when dealing with the prehistory of the cooking show and the specifics of The French Chef. At times, the book seems hastily written, as with an error that placed Michel Foucault at an important scholarly conference that introduced French theorists to America. However, its use of new archival sources and focus on an important figure in American postwar cultural history makes it an intriguing addition to studies of food and television.