Note: this website is not official. This is a fan project to keep her history alive and to keep tabs of my own personal collection of her works.
Julia Child was born on August 15th, 1912 in Pasadena, California, USA. She graduated from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, USA in 1934 with a major in History. In 1942 she joined the United States' Office of Strategic Services (OSS) which through that she met her husband Paul Child during her time at a post in what is now Sri Lanka. Paul and Julia married in 1946 and were restationed to France in 1948, where Julia started finding herself fascinated and interested in the intricacies of France's cultinary culture. Specifically, she'd repeatedly cited a meal of osyters and sole meunière at a restaurant called "La Couronne" in Rouen, Normandy, France. From there, while living in Paris she enrolled in the world=renouned Cordon Bleu cooking school. She graduated from there in 1951, but not without trials and tribulations as within her memoir "My Life In France" she described facing both prejudice from the Cordon Bleu staff for being American and cited herself as initially being such a bad cook that Paul would write home to his brother saying that he feared he may not live through her cooking at first.
While enrolled at Cordon Bleu, she befriended classmates Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, who were in the process of trying to write a French cookbook aimed at Americans. Together the three of them formed "École des trois gourmandes" (The School of Three Hearty Eaters), an informal cooking school aimed towards women. Julia and Paul however were soon uprooted from Paris, and were shuffled around Europe before subsequently being sent back to the United States due to Joseph McCarthy and the rise of McCarthyism leading to the defunding and subsequent closing of OSS. Being in the United States again however gave Julia a significant advantage in the still continous effort with Simone and Louisette to write a French cookbook for Americans. She used this as a chance to take notes of what common French ingredients are and aren't available in a typical American grocery store, and in the cases where things either weren't available or were of a significant cost to the average home chef she would find a comprable localized substitute (much to the dismay of Simone and Louisette who had wanted everything to be to the T like the French methods). Soon enough, they had their finished product: Mastering The Art Of French Cooking.
The girls' first attempt at a publisher was with Houghton Mifflin, who considered the book to be much too lengthy and thought it would fail to capture someone's attention in the newly born television age. They did get a tip that this may be something that Judith Jones, who was an editor for the publisher Alfred A. Knopf would be more interested in, and the book was subsequently published by Alfred. A. Knopf in 1961. Judith Jones would be Julia Child's primary editor for the rest of Julia's life. The book was a success immediately, but there was still a desire on the publisher's side to continue and advertise the book. So Julia took to appearing on her local National Educational Television (what would later become PBS) affiliate, WGBH out of Boston, who was hosting a book review show. She figured what better way to advertise the book than to make a recipe from it! But even that was a very by-chance miracle, it turned out that both their initially planned guest as well as their backup guest had both cancelled and they needed someone to fill the airtime. So she shuffled into the studio early that morning with all her cooking goodies in hand and cooked an omlette for the show. After the airing of the episode, WGBH reached back out to Julia to tell her that much to everyone's surprise, it turned out people loved watching someone cook on television and they had received many calls after they aired her segment asking when she'd be back on.
Were this to have worked out two years earlier, there would've been a space within the studio to film the show. However, barely a year prior WGBH's entire studio had just burnt to the ground.
So the first episode was filmed in a test kitchen that a local gas and electric company(?) graciously allowed them to use. It was very stuffy, especially being in a basement, but it worked and they were able to film early episodes there. Between 1962 and 1973, they filmed 10 seasons and more episodes than the person writing this biography is willing to count at this given time and the show was, as one would probably assume, a huge success and hugely impactful on the greater history of both cooking and television in the United States. Julia Child is widely considered to be the first television chef, and her legacy of enjoying cooking and enjoying food can be felt to some extent on the modern sphere of cooking television.
Books
Shows
Home Media (That I Know Of)
*The Way To Cook was a 6 episode series released directly to VHS along with a book which contained all the recipes cooked within the 6 episodes.
This is eventually gonna link to my collection. This is a filler paragraph.