Bon appetit!
If you’ve got a taste for cooking shows, the online TV platform Twitch is offering up a heaping helping. It began streaming a 201-episode marathon of Julia Child’s cooking show “The French Chef” on Tuesday.
Twitch made gentle painting instructor Bob Ross trend when it played 403 episodes of his PBS show, “The Joy of Painting,” back to back in October.
“Although I came to love Julia Child through her seminal cookbook, ‘Mastering The Art of French Cooking,’ it was in watching — obsessively, over and over, every episode — her first television show, ‘The French Chef,’ that I came to understand just why I loved her,” “Julie & Julia” author Julie Powell, who cooked through the entire cookbook, wrote in an email.
“If Julia’s voice in ‘MtAoFC’ is the ghost of Obi Wan Kenobi, advising and encouraging from beyond, her chortling, exhorting presence on ‘The French Chef’ is Obi Wan in the flesh, whole and wise, and a lot funnier than Alec Guiness.”
If you don’t have the time or, frankly, the Oreo stash to stay glued to a screen for the whole Julia Child marathon, here are some other ways to get your fill of the woman who popularized the classic French style of cooking in America.
1. Watch or read ‘Julie & Julia’
Powell’s 2005 memoir chronicling her attempt to cook all 524 recipes in Child’s most famous cookbook over the course of a year — to sometimes disastrous, often inspiring results — made the bestseller lists. Meryl Streep steals the show as Child in the 2009 film version of the book, with a sweet depiction of the relationship between Child and her husband, Paul (Stanley Tucci).
2. Visit the Smithsonian’s Julia Child exhibit
The National Museum of American History display re-creates her kitchen precisely as it appeared in 2001, when Child donated the room from her Massachusetts home to the museum.
3. Crack open Child’s cookbooks
The 1961 cookbook “Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1” was a game-changer in how Americans approached the kitchen. It can be scary, “but learning to love the process, and accept the mistakes as well as the triumphs, is a lesson that applies to far more than soufflés and chickens dropped on the floor,” Powell said.
4. Watch Dan Aykroyd as Julia
Aykroyd sends up Child in a classic 1978 “Saturday Night Live” skit in which she bleeds out but never breaks character after a kitchen accident.
5. Read her memoir, ‘My Life in France’
In her memoir, Child writes about her move to France, following Paul’s career, and her deep dive into French cooking. Speaking no French and not knowing much about the country, she decided to take classes at the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu cooking school, from where she graduated in 1951. And then she wrote “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” which changed American kitchens forever.
