Julia Child, la Grandes Gourmande

25:47Yeah, I'm surprised we haven't, actually. I am a little bit, too. Yeah, let's do that. So one of the other things that made the cookbook finally successful when it did get published, and boy, was it successful. I saw in one place that it spent five years on the bestseller list, but I couldn't find any other place to verify it. It's still worth mentioning. We were on there for two weeks. We sure were, buddy. I think more than that, actually. I think it was two. Okay. Well, let's say two and a half. We'll split the difference. But Frenchiness was very chic at the time. Yeah. There was a French chef in the White House kitchen.

26:21Of course, you had, you mentioned Audrey Hepburn and wearing those French clothes, French designers. Jackie Kennedy was as well. Pencil pants. Pencil pants. That French wine was starting to be a thing at a time when, you know, again, now wine is so popular. but it wasn't that hugely popular in the United States at the time. So French wine kind of became a thing. And the first volume was so successful. A few years later, I think nine years later in 1970, they released volume two to another 257 recipes. And apparently you can spend up to 10K. Actually, I saw more than that to buy assigned volumes one and two together.

27:01Oh, wow. Of the first edition. That's awesome. Yeah. I mean, they became Bibles for cooks in America. And again, this it wasn't like people were already primed for this. This is what made people primed to consider cookbooks Bibles in their kitchen in the United States. Yeah. And, you know, Judith Jones, also the Bible. That's right. She she helped write it.

27:27so everyone's probably saying like yeah this book's great but what about television because that's where I remember her from my childhood here's where we get to TV because she moved around Europe during the 1950s with her husband Paul came back to the states in the 60s I believe they had come back before on some I don't know if you want to say visits maybe some forced visits when her husband Paul was called for the blacklisted McCarthy hearings. So that was a thing. I don't think he got in trouble, though, right? No, they were friends with a woman who was a suspected communist in the government, and they wanted to know about her.

28:05Right, so they brought him in. But they ultimately landed for good in Cambridge, Mass. And when she was, you know, promoting her cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, I finally got it. she went on PBS at WGBH there in Boston for a book review show called I've Been Reading Ellipses. And she was just doing a little demonstration on how to make an omelet. She brought everything with her, you know, her little hot plate and saute pan or tools and her eggs. And everyone loved it. Everyone was like riding into the station saying like, this woman that you had on cooking that omelet was funny and gregarious.

28:41And we just loved her. And we also learned something. And so they said, hey, we should give you your own TV show. Yeah, within a year, the French chef, her first cooking show was on the air on WGBH. And this was at a time where cooking shows were not a thing. Right. A lot of people say the fact that cooking shows are so widespread today, you can essentially thank Julia Child for that, too. That's right. And thank the French chef. It had a 10-year run. And because it was a PBS joint, other PBS stations around the United States picked it up. It made its way to Europe and the UK via the BBC. It became a really big show very quickly, and Julia Child became the most widely recognized chef in the entire world, at the very least in the United States, during this period, the early 60s to the early 70s.

29:31You know, we had a TV show for a year. We did, and we became the most widely known kooks in the world, if not at least the United States. One thing I'm learning is that to compare our career to Julia Child's humbling experience. You were a spy for that little while, or you pretended you were at parties. Yeah, that's right. She won an Emmy and a Peabody Award for that show. And this is just a little feather in her cap, I think. It was the first TV show in the United States to feature closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing community. Yeah, open captioning. I saw where it was for everybody.

30:09Everyone read it, but yeah. Oh, is that what closed captioning means? Yeah, where you have to select it to see it. Yeah, I didn't know that either. So I guess it was open captioning. But yes, that didn't exist on TV until then. I'm just learning so much because of you, my friend. Hey, right back at you, buddy. So, you know, the TV show was a big hit. She because she was just so lovable and she wasn't patronizing. And she, you know, had her closing phrase, bon appétit. And she would just she would get in there and get dirty and make mistakes. And like she would want people to leave the, you know, the editors to leave the mistakes in there.

30:47She's like, that's part of cooking. Yeah, that's a big deal because it also not only made her approachable, it made the people watching who were trying these recipes to realize that she wasn't infallible. And therefore, they didn't need to worry about not being infallible to like mistakes are part of it. You just learn from them. Yeah. But like that was it. She made it way more approachable to people by doing that. Yeah, and I also read that this is from, I believe, the women who made the documentary about her, Julia, which is really, really good. Okay. That another reason that she left the mistakes in was especially for women because she felt like women felt like they needed to always feel bad when they mess something up in life, period, but especially in the kitchen.

31:35and she was like, no, it's okay to mess up. And while you're in that kitchen, like, you know, it was kind of an opposition in a way to like the feminist movement at the time, which is like, get out of the kitchen. Julia Child was saying like, no, like get in that kitchen and own it and cook for you and learn to make stuff that you want to make and not just like maybe what your husband and kids are yelling at you to make. Like, take over the kitchen as something that you love doing and that's for yourself. Right. I saw a Bustle magazine describe her as a BAMF, which I'm not familiar with, but based on context, it seemed like it was a good thing.

32:16What does that stand for?

32:21All right. Well, Josh just told me off air what it stood for. I agree. My joke. So you mentioned mistakes. There's actually some famous mistakes that she made. One was she was pulling a cake from the oven and apparently it fell flat on camera, she said something like, well, that didn't work out. Can you say it? Well, that didn't work out. Very nice. And then everybody knows that she once dropped an entire raw turkey on the floor, on camera, left this in, picked the turkey up off the floor, kind of brushed it off and put it in the oven and baked it like nothing ever happened. I would do that. Well, yeah, we did a whole episode on the five second rule.

33:04Yeah, but I mean, for a raw thing like that, I know it sounds gross, but you can wash that thing off and bake it and it's fine. Yes. You don't have a cooking show. No, exactly. So yes, the fact that she did this, well, I should say not the fact because that's actually an urban legend, a rumor. Something did happen, but it morphed into like the most spectacular version of itself. So it wasn't a turkey? No, it wasn't. And Snopes dated it back to at least 1989. But she once, the closest they could find was that she was flipping a potato pancake and flipped it out of the pan onto the countertop. And it crumbled.

33:45And she said, I think she said, when you're in the kitchen, nobody can see you. And she pushed it back together and put it back in the pan and cooked it. Yeah. I love that. Because that's how it goes when you're cooking in your house. You know? Yeah. You I've never not flipped a potato pancake onto the countertop. She had, you know, a string of successful cooking shows after that first one, all the way from the 70s through the 80s into the 90s. I believe she had 12 Emmy nominations total and seven wins. And by the time she got into the 1990s, they were shooting that show in her home kitchen in Cambridge.

34:28Her husband, Paul, designed this kitchen that was like part kitchen, part TV studio. And, you know, just so they could spend time at home. And he was heavily involved. Apparently, at times he was on the floor with cue cards and he helped design the original patch for the three gourmands that when she worked with the other two chefs. And so they were really a sort of a power couple working together to enrich her career. Yeah. Chuck, I say we take our second break and come back and talk about why Julia Child is so beloved. All right. We'll be right back.

35:24Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion-dollar company, which would have been unimaginable without AI, and now it will happen.

35:59I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents in small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

36:40All right. Why was Julia Child so beloved? I feel like we've already made a case, but let's talk about it some more. All right. I mean, we've covered some of it, but not all. A big one is that she introduced fresh ingredients to America. This is really kind of, we hit on this, but it's worth saying, this is a time when people were using canned soup as an ingredient, not just the canned soup, right? So everything was very processed. And she insisted on fresh ingredients. Like there was no way around it. You had to use these or else these things were going to turn out very well. But at the same time, she also said, like, you need to let the food stand on its own.

37:18Like, yes, you want herbs, but you want the herbs to complement it. You don't want the herbs to cover up. You don't want to use a bunch of A1 on your sole munier. Like, you let the thing stand on its own. You let the fish taste like fish. Like, that was kind of like a subtext, I guess, of introducing fresh ingredients, teaching people to enjoy the thing that they were cooking rather than the thing that they were cooking plus, again, A1 sauce. Yeah, exactly. And that technique, you know, if you cook a piece of fish perfectly, you don't need anything more than a little salt and pepper and butter.

37:55No. And maybe a squirt of lemon. Even tilapia. Yeah. But despite all this, she was not a food snob. She was very approachable. She loved In-N-Out Burger. She used Hellman's mayo in her tuna salad. Apparently she liked Costco hot dogs even. I don't blame her. I've never had one. Oh, they're great. They're like a... What's different though? Isn't it just a hot dog? Yes, it's just a hot dog. Okay. But do you know how every once in a while your school lunch would give you something that you're like, this is amazing? Yeah. That's like their hot dogs. They have their own taste and it's an amazing taste, but they are on par with like a school lunch type hot dog.

38:37In the best way. I got you. Yeah, people go to Costco just to eat the hot dogs. And the pizza's not bad, too, but it's worth going to just for the hot dogs, which technically, in a weird way, gives it one Michelin star. Well, you know, buddy, our friend Joe Garden, a friend of the show, former writer of The Onion. Joe lives there in Woodstock, and he posts pictures on his Instagram eating those Costco hot dogs. See, he knows what's going on. Joe always knows what's up. He's got his finger on the pulse of Julia Child. That's right. So she also reintroduced America to wine. Yeah. At the time, Americans were drinking the stuff that's now on the bottom shelf of grocery stores.

39:21Yeah, the jug wine. Yeah. So not only did she reintroduce America to wine, she normalized it by doing the same thing she did with mistakes. She drank wine on camera as part of her show. On some episodes, apparently she would start to get a little tipsy. She never got drunk or sloppy or anything like that. But the fact that she was drinking this wine, and by the way, pretty good wine, made Americans realize what they were drinking was just bottom of the barrel stuff. And let's see what else we've got. And as a result, California wine became super dominant, essentially in part from her normalizing it.

40:00Yeah, I think that happened in the 70s when California started making good wine on par with the French. You know, according to everyone but the French. She also liked beer. And this sounds very gross to me, but she enjoyed something called an upside-down martini, which is you swap the vermouth parts in the gin, so it's much more vermouth than gin. Yeah, it's also lower ABV, so you don't get quite as trashed as quickly. Yeah, but man, that's kind of one of the good parts about a martini, right? For sure. She also had a really great sense of humor. Apparently another longstanding rumor that sometimes fans would confront her with.

40:37They were like, I remember that time you drank wine directly out of the bottle on one of your episodes. And that apparently never happened either. Again, it was just the extreme version of what she was actually doing, which is drinking wine out of a glass. But she said, I would never do that on television. Right. Yeah. And, you know, I opened with the Dan Aykroyd bit. If you didn't know what I was doing, it was a very famous SNL sketch from back in the day in 78 where Dan Aykroyd portrayed Julia Child, where he cut the dickens out of his finger. and, you know, blood's just going everywhere. Of course, they had the blood pack just squirting blood all over everything.

41:17And he was a big fan, apparently, and there was a real incident, I think about a month before that sketch, where she was working with Jacques Pepin on Tom Snyder's Tomorrow Show, where she had cut herself pretty bad, and I guess that was the inspiration for that. She also apparently was very proud of that sketch and thought it was hilarious, so she kept a videotape of it and would show people sometimes, And then at a really particularly fun, enthusiastic dinner party, she might act it out like word for word by heart. Can you imagine? Oh, I would have loved to have seen that. Yeah. Incredible. She was also super charming and funny on TV appearances, but particularly Letterman.

41:56You can watch compilations of her on Letterman. She could hold her own against Letterman, no problem. Yeah. You sent me that one clip. I actually think I remember seeing that in high school. But Letterman was, you know, I love Letterman. He was, I felt like he was not being too kind about the food. Sometimes he's cranky. Yeah. So I felt a little bad for her in that she was serving him kind of a version in this one of a. Tartare? What do you call it? Yeah, of a steak tartare. But it was with ground beef and melted cheese. And he just sort of kept making fun of it. And then he spit it out. And at the end, I think she said something that kind of made me feel bad.

42:31She was like, well, maybe next time I can serve something you like or something like that. Well, she used an acetylene torch to melt the cheese, which is pretty hilarious. I had the impression that they didn't have the equipment she needed to make a burger. So she made the most out of it. Oh, interesting. Well, using a torch is very commonplace in kitchens now. But Dave made it. I guess back then it was unusual because Dave was like thought it was the weirdest thing he'd ever seen. For sure. Yeah. One other thing we mentioned, too, that we have to touch on is she was known for her love of butter.

43:02she taught America to cook all through the decades where America started to become health conscious and fat free and all that stuff and so she would become criticized for pushing things like real butter on people and she would say things like well if you're afraid of butter use cream instead which is at least as bad as butter and her whole thing was like yes you shouldn't just be gorging yourself on butter all the time but if you're going to make a meal use the real butter and enjoy every bite of it. Like that's the point is enjoying every single bite of this stuff, not enjoying every single bite until you start eating mindlessly because you eat this 10 times a day.

43:41Right. Yeah. And she had, she quoted, uh, she quoted Oscar Wilde, which I thought was great, but, um, she said, uh, everything in moderation, including moderation. That's a great quote. Uh, I got a little kitchen tip. If you're, uh, health conscious and you're thinking like, I don't want to use a lot of butter. I use olive oil or whatever. Use that olive oil, but you can also throw in like one pad of butter in with that olive oil. You can mix those two things and it's great. And it adds just a little unctuousness that olive oil won't give you. I love that. And don't forget the A1. My friend Clay still loves that stuff.

44:19So, well, it's classy. Yeah. I mean, it's a very specific taste. I love that tart, tangy A1. I just don't use it. So, Chuck, we talked about volumes one and two of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. We should say in addition to the string of successful TV shows, she had a bunch of cookbooks. But these were her two classics. And put together 781 recipes between the two of them. But if you go on to food sites and you look up something like Julia Child's Best Recipes, some of them kind of percolate to the top where you're like, you see them on just about every list. And I think that we should go over a few of those starting now.

45:00Yeah, for sure. If you've ever seen the movie Julia and Julia, did you see that? I haven't. I heard it was great. It's really good. That is the story of a woman named Julie Powell, who I think was sort of felt lost in life and wanted to dive into this project of cooking every recipe. I think she had a blog or something, maybe. It was a really good movie, though. So Amy Adams played Julie Powell, who very sadly passed away a few years ago at the young age of 49. And Meryl Streep, I don't know if she won the Academy Award. I know she was nominated for playing Julia Child. So it sort of tells those two stories together.

45:39And it's a wonderful movie from Nora Ephron. But in that movie, she's cooking all the recipes. And the big, big one from the book that she was most well-known for that she really wanted to master out of the gate was The Bouffle Bourguignon. Which is essentially a beef stew with red wine. But again, you take some deceptively simple ingredients and put them together in the right way. It's going to produce a smash hit dish. And that's what beef bourguignon is. What else? Quiche Lorraine, which everybody knows. You can get quiche Lorraine at the grocery store by the slice. Yeah. Because Julia Child introduced it to the United States with her cookbook.

46:19That's right. Again, very simple, clean recipe. Bacon, onions, egg, cream, a few cheeses, some spices, of course, eggs. Just real quick about bacon. Remember I said that she didn't want to cover up the taste. She wanted to let things to stand on their own. Yeah. One of the things she talks about mastering the art of French cooking was that with American bacon, you have to blanch it first to remove the smoky flavor. So you actually lightly boil it for a little bit until you get the smoky flavor off. And then you start to use bacon. which I think is actually a huge tip for a lot of people out there, believe me.

46:55If they don't like smoky flavors, I guess. But the problem is the bacon smokiness is going to take over. Like that's all you're going to taste. Whereas if you can get rid of that smoky flavor, then you're in hog heaven, as she always said. I don't mind. I like that apple. And I also cook it in the oven. I think that is the best way to cook bacon. Agreed. On a baking sheet. With the little elf laying on it to keep it flat. What about a cassoulet? That's a very classic French dish. Yeah, it's pork and beans, poultry, sausage. There's a dark brown crust on the top of the whole thing. She had a great quote about that.

47:34Yeah, cassoulet, that best of bean feast is everyday fare for a peasant, but ambrosia for a gastronome. Though its ideal consumer is a 300-pound blocking back who's been splitting firewood nonstop for the last 12 hours on a sub-zero day in Manitoba. And, like, if you look at pictures of the Kessoulet, it's, like, I want one so bad. Yeah, it looks really good. And what about Chocolat Mousse? Yeah, that's another one that apparently she made a mistake on air. It didn't set correctly, and you know that mousse has to set. But good chocolate mousse is out of this world. Yeah, I couldn't find the episode, but apparently a 1992 WAPO article mentioned it.

48:17But supposedly it is surprisingly easy to make and the outcome is just amazing. I saw light, airy, silky, smooth, says the endless meal. And it's just a few ingredients, including rum, chocolate, coffee. And she teaches you these techniques of how to make it, how to fold it, how to whip the egg whites and just get it just right. And yeah, every time I hear chocolate mousse, I think of Chocolat Mousse from Top Secret. Oh, yeah. He was great. This is a good movie. R.I.P. Val Kilmer. Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. And then, of course, French onion soup. I know that you and I both talked on the air about our love for French onion soup.

48:59If it's on a menu, there's two things in my life. If it's on a menu, I will get it. One is French onion soup, and the other is a French dip sandwich. You love the French. Two of my favorite things. and it's not on, you know, the most menu. So when I see it, I order it. And that French onion soup, crusty on top and that delicious oniony broth and the bread, it's just one of life's treats. Have you ever made it? I've never made it myself. I should try that. It's really good. All it takes is patience. It's not hard. But it takes a while for everything to come together. It takes a while to like genuinely caramelize the onions.

49:34But man, it is so worth it. It's really good. Don't you just get one of those Lipton packets? Yeah. Out of the can, that's how I do it. Well, you take one of those Lipton packets and you put it in a turkey burger. That's what you do. Yeah, that's supposed to be pretty good. I've not had that. I found a recipe for a roast that has a packet of au jus, you know, the dry au jus packet. A packet of ranch, dried ranch mix. pepperoncini and like maybe one other thing in a roast and you put it in a slow cooker and it's supposed to be a knockout dish and I can't wait to try it. Oh man, you got to watch Julia and Julie and Julia and then start cooking that stuff and let me know how it goes.

50:20Okay, yeah, I definitely plan to make some stuff so I'll let you know for sure. All right. Sadly, we're at the end of this episode and Julia Child met the end of her life at the almost age of 92. I think she was just a couple of days short of her 92nd birthday when she passed away at her home at the time in Montecito, California in August 2004 of liver failure. Yeah. Alain Ducasse, who I think is the only three-star Michelin chef in the world, said, Today the entire community of cooks is sad and feels like orphans. Oh, man. I know. Isn't that sad? That's brutal. Yeah. So she's actually buried in one of the more interesting places I've ever heard of.

51:01Had you heard of the Neptune Memorial Reef before? No, that sounds kind of cool though. Yeah, so they took her cremated remains, mixed it together with some concrete and formed a headstone out of it, put it underwater. I can't remember how deep it is, but this is an acre long underwater cemetery off of Key Biscayne in Florida. And on the headstone, again, made from her cremated remains, there's a plaque with a knife and a fork conscribed on it in a quote from her, fat gives things flavor. I love it. Yep. That's pretty fun for a scuba diver to see, I bet. For sure. So RIP Julia Child, and thanks for everything.

51:42That's right. Our berets are off to you. Let's see. We talked about Julia Child. You took off your beret. Yeah, that means it's time for listener mail. All right. So this is from Nathan Wenger, in Carmel, Indiana. And Nathan went through the trouble of calculating how many Olympic pools deep and how many Big Macs we are. Okay. As a show. He says, I love nerd math, so I did some calculations. Using my trusty search engine, I found out there are over 2 ,600 episodes of Stuff You Should Know. We're just going to use 2 ,600 to make it simple, he says. All told, the average length is 45 minutes, which makes me feel good because that's what we're shooting for.

52:28Yeah. He said, that seems low, though, so I'm going to adjust it up to 55. I think these days it's 45. They used to be longer, so that's probably what he's witnessing. Okay. At average conversational speed, humans speak about 130 words a minute, so you guys do a great podcast, and as pros have honed your conversational skills to not be fast nor slow, so I'm going to stick with that median figure. Thanks. The average number of letters per English word is five, but since you often talk about subjects that require words like spooktacular and Hint or Kaifecht, I'm going to up your average to six. And finally, we're going to convert your speech into inches based on the size of a standard size 12 font, which is 0.167 inches.

53:07I love this stuff. So based on all that, we can get inches per word, one, inches per minute of speech, 130, inches per episode, 71.50, total episode inches, 18 ,590 ,000, in total episode feet, which is 1.549167 feet. That equates, so one episode of Stuff You Should Know, equates to the depth of 238 ,333 Olympic swimming pools. Wow. A bit short of Josh's estimate of 10 to 15 million. And for the sake of transparency and Chuck's liking, That is 7.745 and change million Big Macs at an average of 2.5 inches per burger. Man, who is this? This is Nathan Wenger. Okay. I'd say Wenger. I think it's Wenger in the tradition of Kip Wenger.

54:04Well, it's W.E. though. So that's Nathan. He's in Carmel, Indiana. That's a lot of work to go through, Nathan. Yeah, Nathan, I could tell you're a true fan with that little trusty search engine aside. I caught that. I love it. Thank you for doing that. I always wanted to know how many Big Macs we are and Olympic pools. So thanks a lot, Nathan, and happy Thanksgiving to you. And happy Thanksgiving to all of you out there, including our Canada friends. And if you want to send us an email like Nathan did, send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

54:41For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

54:54Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratliff here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people. Check out the second season of my podcast, Shell Game, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.

55:28Guaranteed human.