8/15/2012 9:20 PM
Today would have been TV chef and cookbook author Julia Child's 100th birthday. While most people today know her better from Dan Akroyd's spastic portrayal on
Saturday Night Live or from the recent Nora Ephron film
Julie and Julia, she was a fixture on public television for many years starting in the 1960s. She nearly single-handedly changed the ways Americans cooked. To celebrate her centenial, here are 15 things you may not have known about this larger than life figure:
- Julia Child’s husband built her a custom kitchen with extra-tall counters to accommodate her height. It can now be found in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. It contains all of her cooking tools, including her collection of 800 knives. (Source.)
- At 6’2”, Julia Child was deemed too tall to join the military. She joined the OSS instead, and went on to become the top secret researcher for the head of the organization. (Source.)
- Julia Child did not get heavily involved in cooking until she went to France after World War II. (Source.)
- Houghton Mifflin rejected Julia Child’s first cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The two-volume behemoth was picked up by Alfred A. Knopf, and became the best-selling cook book of its time. It’s now considered a standard reference for those interested in learning to cook. (Source.)
- Child was fired from the advertising department of elite furniture retailer W&J Sloane for “gross insubordination.” (Source.)
- Julia Child was paid $50 per episode for her first cooking show, which appeared on Boston Public Television. (Source.)
- What’s with that odd accent? Many people have mistakenly believed that Julia Child was English or from somewhere else in Europe. More likely, her distinctive way of talking came from the elocution classes she’d probably had while growing up as a well-to-do child in California. (Source.)
- Many food writers credit Julia Child with starting the move toward gourmet home cooking in America. As one writer said in the New York Times, without her “We’d still be wallowing in green bean casserole.” (Source.)
- Julia Child was 34 when she first married, and 50 when her first TV show aired. (Source.)
- Julia Child once considered becoming a professional basketball star, or maybe a novelist. (Source.)
- Julia Child’s first TV appearance was on a book review show to promote her first book. She brought along a whisk and a giant copper bowl and made an omelet on the air. Twenty-seven viewers wrote letters saying how much they loved her appearance, and it landed her her first TV series. (Source.)
- The title of her first show, The French Chef was chosen, in part, because it would fit on one line in TV Guide. (Source.)
- Julia Child was the first PBS performer to win an Emmy. (Source.)
- Despite common belief, Julia Child never dropped a chicken on her TV show. It was a potato pancake that went flying out of the pan. Find the video if you can; both the flub and her composed handling of the incident ("Oh, that didn't go very well.") are hilarious. (Source.)
- When asked what her guilty pleasures were, Julia Child responded, “I don’t have any guilt.” (Source.)
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