I'd hazard a guess that if you're listening to the show, then at some
point in your life, you may have heard of the acclaimed queen of French
cuisine, Julia Child. Like many of you, I too have seen the
movie Julie and Julia, where Julia Child was portrayed by the magnificent Meryl Streep.
Like a fair amount feur of you, I too have tried cooking a
few of Julia's recipes on a lazy Sunday afternoon before the emergence of little toddler
fingers made having raw meat and sharp knives around less of an option. But
even with all of this knowledge and experience of Julia Child, I too was
amazed to find out via my friend Melissa over at Bewilderbeast's podcast, that Julia,
before her foray into the culinary world, worked as a World War two
spy, and she came up with a recipe for shark repellent. It seems
that even the most famous and lorded among us still have a few tasty secrets
up their sleeves. And today we're going to dive into this fascinating side of
one of modern cooking's most famous gourmands. Welcome to the fantastic History of food.
Strange but true stories from history that in some way involved food. I'm
your host, Nick Charlie Key. Julia Child was born Julia Caroline McWilliams on
the fifteenth of August nineteen twelve in Pasadena, California. Her family was incredibly
wealthy, as her father was a successful banker and her mother was the heiress
to the Western Paper Company of Massachusetts. It's safe to say they didn't struggle
financially, as happens with the children of the elite and wealthy. She received
the very best education money could buy and attended the Catherine Branson's School for Girls.
As you may or may not already know about her, Julia was an
incredibly tall woman, standing at six ft two inches tall or just under a
one hundred ninety centimeters. This meant she excelled in her time as the captain
of the woman's basketball team, and gave her a sturdy frame with which to
also become the president of the school's hiking club. She would go on to
attend the all female Smith College, where her most notable contribution was policing the
college's well manicured lawns, making sure that no unruly student stepped foot on them.
She herself felt that she was wasting her life somewhat, and once wrote
in her diary, I am sadly an ordinary person with talents I do not
use. She had no real ambition to make much of herself, as she
had no need for money or influence, both of which had been bestowed upon
her at birth. She went on to take a secretarial course, but left
after just a month when she was offered the job of secretary at W.
J. Sloan, a furniture company in New York City. Four years later,
she was fired after a catastrophic mix up with some important company documents.
But in a strange twist of fate, it would be the emergence of the
United States a patient in World War Two that would forever change her life.
It was September nineteen forty one, just three months before the US would officially
enter the war, and Julia wanted to make herself useful to the cause.
She began volunteering at the Pasadena chapter of the American Red Cross, where she
put her secretarial skills to good use, heading up the Department of Stenographic Services.
Stenography is still mostly used in courtrooms today, but was the method of
taking down notes and meeting minutes as people spoke in a shorthand writing style,
often using symbols to represent words or phrases in order to keep up with the
pace of the speakers. When the United States joined the war proper, Julia
was unfortunately rejected for military combat roles because of her unusual height. But this
wouldn't stop her, as for the first time in her life she had begun
to feel a sense of purpose in her work. So in nineteen forty two
she would move divisions and become a senior typist with the research unit of the
Office of War Information in Washington, and then by the end of that same
year, she would join the Secret Intelligence branch of the Office of Strategic Services,
otherwise known simply as the OSS. This was the agency that would later
become would we know today as the CIA. In another sideways move across departments,
Julia would end up working for the Emergency cea rescue equipment section of the
Navy. It was by now nineteen forty three and sharks had become a major
concern for naval operations, not least because of the media's sudden interest in it.
In reality, for the first three years of the war, they had
only been around twenty incidents of shark attacks on sailors and downed pilots who had
found themselves caught in shark infested waters. But for the media, this was
the perfect story to latch onto for its gruesome details and the almost supernatural fear
that sharks could inspire in people. Families back home began to fear sharks or
as much as they feared the Nazis. The Navy knew it had to do
something, and so it turned to the OSS for help in finding a solution
to their shark problem. Scientists had already by this point been working for years
to find a solution to scare off the toothy predators, but nothing they tried
seemed to work. A new task team was set up, which included a
scientist from Harvard named Coolidge and a Natural History Museum researcher named Henry Field.
Coolidge would ask Julia to join them in concocting something that would finally work.
Julia Child and her team would end up testing more than one hundred substances,
including common poisons, decaying shark meat, acid, and various other chemical combinations,
but it would be a full year before they would hit upon something that
finally began to show some promise. In true Julia style, they were small
cakes, but these cakes were made of copper acetate mixed with black dye.
Research showed that it was the closest thing they could reproduce to how dead sharks
smelled to other sharks, and was a lot more effective for some reason,
than when they had actually just used dead sharks in their earlier tests. The
military wasn't one hundred percent sold on the idea, but the recipe was put
into action and slowly released to soldiers in the midst of World War Two.
These copper acetate cakes were attached to sailor's life vests and were also given to
airmen to rubble themselves should they crash land in the water. There was a
feeling among the higher ups that even if it wasn't as effective as it claimed
to be, the placebo effect of it at least calmed the men down and
gave them more hope of survival than they may otherwise have had. As the
war dragged on, they began to use these shark repellent cakes for more than
just personnel uses. Hungry sharks had a nasty habit of nibbling on sea mines
intended for German and Japanese submarines as well as other naval vessels. This would,
of course result in the swift and blinding demise of the unfortunate shark,
but also meant the navy was losing mines unnecessarily at a rapid rate, so
they began coating these underwater minds in the same substance with which the cakes were
made, in order to prevent the untimely death of some hungry and inquisitive sharks.
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up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. Junior Child's time spent in the OSS helped
her flourish into the woman with a forceful personality that we have all come to
know. It was here in Hington, d c. That she left behind
her feelings of inadequacy and normalcy and built creativity and confidence in abundance. She
was awarded the Emblem of Meritorious Civilian Service for her efforts during the war,
and was recognized for her resourcefulness, industry, and good judgment. After the
war, the OSS would place her at multiple stations overseas, spending time in
China, India, and Sri Lanka, the latter of which being where she
would meet and then ultimately fall in love with her future husband, Paul Child,
a fellow OSS officer. They were soon married and packed their bags to
begin a new life together in Paris. Paul was reassigned to work for the
US Information Agency in nineteen forty eight, and it was during this time that
Julia was left to run the household. It was at this point that she
realized, with a sense of shame and horror, that because of her privileged
upbringing, she had never learned any of the basic skills of homemaking, foremost
of which was her lack of any cooking skills. She knew she wanted to
change this, and before fell head over heels in love with French cuisine.
She often recalled where it all began. Her husband, Paul, had traveled
extensively before they had met, and so had a fine appreciation for a variety
of cuisines. It was because of him that one night, early into their
stay in France, he took Julia to a fine dining restaurant in Rouenne called
La Couron French for the Crown. She describes that night as a culinary revelation
and the meal of oysters, soul munier and fine wine as an opening up
of the soul and spirit. She was hooked and wanted to not just consume
these dishes, but also to create them. She decided that the only thing
for it was to enroll in one of the most prestigious cooking schools in all
of France and quite possibly the world at the time, named La cordon Bleux.
Julia was quoted as saying that on her first day of school, all
she knew how to do was boiled the water to make a cup of tea.
She took to the school like a duck to water, and when she
wasn't in class, she spent hours wandering through the Parisian food markets, purchasing
all manner of local ingredients to experiment with at home. Once she had graduated
from La cordon Bleu, she would go on to study under a range of
French master chefs, including Max Bonard. She even joined a woman's cooking club
called La Cercle de Gomez, as it was here that fate would intervene in
her life. During one of the club meetings, she met a woman named
Simone Beck, who was in the middle of writing a cookbook aimed at an
American audience with her friend Louisette Bertoile. They brought Julia Child on initially as
a consultant for the American audience, but quickly she took to toiling away in
the kitchen, coming up with her own recipes for the first manuscript. Soon
they were offering cooking classes for American women write in their test kitchen, and
called their informal cooking classes the School of the Three Food Lovers. All the
while they were cooking, testing, writing, and updating their seminal masterpiece.
It would take ten long years before their hard work would pay off and the
book would get picked up by a major publisher. In that decade, Julia
had moved around Europe with her husband's assignments and had settled finally in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. A large part of Julia's role was translating the French recipes accurately and
simply into English, making sure that the recipes were detailed, interesting and practical.
Upon its release, Mastering the Art of French Cooking was a smash hit
and had cemented the three women into the culinary history books Forever. America was
already going through a phase of loving everything French, with a particular focus on
its cuisine, so the book landed at the perfect time to rarely explode onto
the scene. The success of the cookbook and Julia's sudden rise to a household
name quickly led to her being offered her own looking show on television. While
we are inundated with cooking shows, celebrity chefs and the like nowadays, she
was a pioneer in this field, which had not seen anything quite like it
before. She had an easy manner on camera, her trademark singsong voice,
and her commanding stature all led to her being instantly recognizable anywhere she went.
In the years between nineteen sixty three and nineteen sixty nine, she would record
one hundred and ninety nine episodes of her show The French Chef. She would
go on to write many more cookbooks, would co found institutes such as the
American Institute of Wine and Food, as well as the Julia Child Foundation for
Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts. She was famous for putting flavor and enjoyment above
any semblance of healthy dieting, which was shown most notably in her generous use
of butter in all of her cooking. The Child would end up building a
home near Provence in the French countryside, high up in the hills above Cans.
They would name their cottage La Pitchun, a local word meaning the little
One. She would go on to write cookbooks and star in many television shows
throughout the rest of her life until the ripe old age of ninety two,
when she passed away in Montecito, California. In two thousand and four.
Her final book, My Life in France, ends with some fantastic words with
which I would like to end this episode, she wrote, Thinking back on
it now, it reminds me that the pleasures of the table and of life
are infinite. To Joe's born empathy. Thank you for listening to this episode
of the Fantastic History of Food. If you'd like to get in touch,
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