 Hello from the National Archives Public Programs and Education staff. My name is Sarah Lyons Davis, and I'm an education specialist at the National Archives in New York City. Welcome to the National Archives Comes Alive, Young Learners Program. Today, we meet Julia Child, portrayed by actor and storyteller Linda Kenyon. Julia Child was a well-known television personality because of her famous cooking show, The French Chef. This aired on PBS for over 25 years. She also co-authored the classic cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, thus bringing the world of cooking to many Americans watching at home. Before she was a well-known TV personality and cookbook author during World War II, Julia Child worked for the Office of Strategic Services, also known as the OSS. This was a precursor to the CIA. In the National Archives has Julia Child's civil servant personnel file, this includes information about her work. You can see the related educational activity in docsteach.org. Known then as Julia McWilliams, she began as a typist, but because of her experience in education, she was eventually promoted to a research assistant. Not only did she play a role in communications between US government officials and intelligent officers, often having access to top secret documents. She was able to travel the world while on different assignments. In 1945, while on assignment in Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, she met fellow OSS employee and her future husband, Paul Child. We'll share this image again at the end of the program. If you have a question for Julia Child, please send it to us via the YouTube chat box, then we'll try and answer it at the end of the program. National Archives staff monitors the chat box. Feel free to let us know where you're watching from today. Our programs are brought to you from the National Archives Public Programs and Education Team and the National Archives Foundation. You can find information for teacher and student programs on the National Archives website, archives.gov, under educator resources or learn about upcoming programs under attend an event and on the National Archives Facebook page. Let us now give a warm welcome to Julia Child. Let's pretend that I am Julia Child. I'm Julia Child. This isn't my kitchen. This is somebody else's kitchen. My kitchen is at the Smithsonian, at the Museum of National History, of American History is because it's such an important part, cooking and food is such an important part of history. Do you like to have fun? Do you like to eat? Do you like to cook? Do you like to be with your friends? Well, I do. I love to have a good time. And also, would you like to visit different places and meet new people? And would you like to write a book or a story? Would you like to be on television? All those things are very important to me, part of my life. I do like to have a good time when I was a kid. I'd goof around wearing my hat backwards to church, climbing on rocks, swimming, golf, tennis. I played on the basketball team at Catherine Branson School and also at Smith College, being in plays at school, playing the piano. Now I was mischievous too, but I don't want you to get me in trouble. And I don't want to give you ideas. I was always hungry, perhaps because I was growing so tall, two of the most men, six feet, two or three. There's lots of good food in California where I grew up, fresh apricots, fried meat, canned beans, mashed potatoes, cod fish balls, I ate it all. My favorite was donuts at my grandmother's house. She always had a plate of them ready when she knew I was coming over. I never learned to cook when I was a child because we were rich enough to have a cook to cook our own meals. It was only after I had my first job in New York at a furniture store that paid me $18 a week that I had to face the stove. Well, this is what we did. My roommates and I just went out and bought a bunch of frozen food and boiled it up or heated it up and then we just ate it. Later on, I learned to have a little more careful, taste things more carefully and try some new dishes like soulmenier or beau-praiseur-loft, platitouille, poulet gré à la diable, gâteau, gâteau, renne-bisaba, oh, wonderful. And then after I married poor, I knew that I had to learn to cook. It was very difficult. I would, it would be about 10 o'clock at night before we'd sit down to eat. And I was making fancy dishes too. First fancy dish I made for Paul was half-braised in red wine. It was a disaster. I'd stirred it and stirred it and turned it all to mush. Well, I made mistakes but I learned from my mistakes. That's very important. And we loved to have friends over and after a while when we moved to Paris, we went out to these wonderful restaurants and had such wonderful food and I wanted to cook those dishes at home. And I knew our cat Minette would appreciate a few leftovers. So I enrolled in a cooking school and I called no blur, the Blue Ribbon Cooking School in Paris. And there was a bunch of soldiers in my class early in the morning. Chef Bignard was a wonderful teacher. But after a while, some of the soldiers started joking around and goofing off. But Chef Bignard noticed that I really wanted to learn. So he took me aside and gave me extra instructions and me came to my apartment and gave me lessons. Don't tell Madame Brassard, the head of the school. Don't tell her. Well, I loved it. I made wonderful dishes. I made Paul fat with all my cooking. I also met some wonderful French cooks. Simon Beck and Nuisette Berthold, and they were writing a French cookbook for Americans. Well, they asked me to join them and I did. And we worked on that. And we also decided to start a little cooking school to test out the recipes. Le cul de trois gourmands, there's the button. The school of the three party eaters. And Chef Bignard taught some of the classes with us. Well, I loved to eat new food and go to new places. And when I was a child, my family would go to the shore, to the beach, to the mountains, or visit my mother's relatives at the big house in Dalton, Massachusetts, or go to pop's rice fields in Arkansas. One time we went to Tea Water, Mexico, our family, and we had Caesar salad in a restaurant and the chef just took an egg and just cracked it right over the lettuce and tossed it in. I have an egg right here. I'll show you how he did it. He just took the egg like this and cracked it and there it was. Courses salad. So, yes, after the first job that I had, I went back home and then when the Second World War started, I signed up. I tried to enlist in the military, but yes, what? They wouldn't have me. They turned me down because I was too tall. So I tried the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services and worked as a research assistant and I organized wild-billed dolphins papers and spiles and then we worked on something to keep the sharks away from explosives that were supposed to be for the submarines, for the enemy submarines. We put some bag-smelling dead shark smell in with the chemicals that went there. And then I asked for overseas duty and the OSS sent me to Calcutta, India on the Mariposa, the SS Mariposa, along with eight other women and about 3,000 men. I pretended that we were missionaries because I thought that would keep the men away but it didn't work too well. Then I was transferred to Ceylon, that's where I met Paul, and then we were transferred to Kunming, China. And after that I got engaged to Paul after the war up in Maine at his twin brother's house in Cabin, in Maine with his family. And then we got married in New Jersey and then we moved to Washington, D.C. where Paul worked for the State Department and they sent us to Paris, France and then to Marseille and then to Germany and then to Norway. And it was during that time in Europe that I was working on the cookbook. The Mastering the Art of French Cooking is what they called it, wonderful title and wonderful cookbook. It became a bestseller. Yes, a bestseller, we worked on that for 10 years and we argued and fought and tried out recipes and measured and I had some friends in America that I would send recipes to so that they could try them out on American food and the things that were, I mean, we don't have duck presses in America, for instance. And so, but that was top secret. I learned that from the OSS. Don't tell anybody, don't tell anybody about that. And so our cookbook came out and it was a surprise but there was another thing that, another ingredient that made the cookbook successful and that was the French Chef Television Show on public television. So we could bring French cooking techniques and French food and French recipes right into any American home that had a TV. It was wonderful. I really enjoyed it. This is how it happened. A good old friend of mine said, I should be on the interview show. I've been reading on Boston's public television station, WGBH. Well, the interview man usually interviewed professors and he thought that my cookbook was too practical and trivial to be on his show. So he did agree though. And so what I did is I brought a hot plate and an omelet pan and some salt and pepper and some eggs and a plate and a fork and I cooked an omelet and I gave him a bite. And he loved it and the audience loved it too. So we tried out a few shows and then on January 23rd, 1963, the first French Chef show was filmed, they called it French Chef. I'm not French and I'm not a chef, but that's what they called it. And we made beef bourguignon. It's a wonderful French beef stew with wine and mushrooms and onions and I made mistakes on the show too, but never on purpose, the audience loved that. I remember one time I was turning over a touch tatat that's a lovely upside down apple pie with a design of caramelized apples and it's on the bottom and then you turn it over and it comes on the top. And when I took it off, it all turned to mush because I used the wrong kind of apples, but it was going to taste good anyway. So I took some powdered sugar and shook it all over, put it under the broiler and I think maybe I rescued it. I made lots of mistakes, but I enjoyed doing that. I really enjoyed, it was hard work television. A lot of work and learning and trying everything out. I remember once I cooked 50 eggs and threw out most of them because Paul and I couldn't eat that many eggs, but that's how many eggs it took to get the recipe right. Now, you don't think I'm going to throw this egg away, do you? No, I'm going to make an omelette for you. Throw that here on here, it's a hide, get a little bottom of the pan and another egg, can you see me doing this? I'll put another egg in there, why not? And we'll just gather it all together with a fork and we have to wait for the butter to melt and the butter to, I mean, all around the pan make sure everything's covered. We don't want anything to stick. It's a special omelette pan and you really shouldn't even wash it, you should just wipe it out with a paper towel when you're finished. But it's not quite ready yet, but I want to say that cooking is a wonderful, wonderful way of looking at life and science and everything. Biology, the egg is a perfect example of a cell, you know, with the outer and the inner, the nucleus and everything and then there's chemistry and there's physics. If you go up in the mountains, there's the air pressure is less, so your water's going to boil faster than if you were down by the seashore. And so, and then there's art and there's nutrition and there's health and there's customs and there's economics, I mean, all kinds of things. Let's see how that butter's doing. Oh, it's bubbling up, that's good. Good news, oh, I like that, around the edge and just scrambling up a bit, see what I'm doing? I have to add the fine herbs in. Well, it's just wonderful. You want it to be a little soft in the middle, but cooked on the outside, but not burned because that makes it tough. You can go turning it over, turning it over, turning it over, turning it over. Oh, I'm making a little mess here, I'm sorry to say. Trying to do this like in the right time. And then I take a knife and we've got it like, oh, I'm making a quick mess. I'll tell you what I did, I was in a hurry and I tried to make this too fast, but it's going to be wonderful anyway. So, they're normal stove and bon appetit. Pretty good, pretty good. Well, thank you so much. That was so interesting to see and I know that I learned a lot from that. I'm sure our audience did too. If you have some time, we have some questions as well. So, it seems like people are interested in any differences you saw between the average American cooking compared to French style if there were mistakes between the two. There are several things. The French cooking is very locally, people have their local market and their local butcher and they know where everything comes from. The cheeses are fantastic. American cooking is large farms from California set all the way across the country. But in the 50s and 60s, really, it was just very plain recipes. A lot of jello salad and tuna casserole. There was a focus on economics and nutrition, but really not a focus on the enjoyment and the pleasure of food. And so, I think that the French have a real reverence for the food and that translated in their recipes and in their way of dealing with food so carefully. Interesting. As you were recording your show and kind of learning about cooking and everything that you shared with us, did you find there was a common mistake that average Americans were making compared to the French with cooking? I think Americans wanted to get it done quick and easy and conveniently. Relying on frozen food, on canned recipes like there was a cookbook called a canned recipe cookbook. And then some people got very, very involved in nutrition and wanted to eat things that really didn't taste too good. So I think that the mistakes that Americans were making was that they weren't treating food as an art or as a pleasure. Interesting. We have some great questions in the chat today. So that was really wonderful to hear. I'm ready for it, that's wonderful. So did Paul help you with the dishes? Absolutely, he helped me with the dishes. He was wonderful. A man who was in the State Department, you know, a high-up official, and then there he was washing the dishes while I was doing a demonstration. He was behind the scenes. Only thing is, one time, I made a wonderful deal, a wonderful veal stock with all kinds of wonderful things. And I was just cooking it down. He thought it was garbage and threw it out and washed the dishes. Oh, no. He was good at cooking bread, too, for the second volume of mastering the art. He did a lot of the bread research. Did you and Paul have any children? No, we didn't have any children. I had nieces and nephews. His twin brother had three children and my brother and sister both had children. So I was around children sometimes when we were visiting, but we tried, but I had some miscarriages and when I got married, I was 34 years old. So there wasn't that much opportunity to get pregnant after you've had a few miscarriages. And you mentioned earlier in our conversation about your grandmother's donuts. Did that remain your favorite food throughout your lifetime or did other favorites join that list? They were good, I'll have to say, they were very good. But, no, I think so many years was just about my favorite. That was the first thing I ate when I arrived in France and I liked it so much. I kept ordering it in every restaurant we went to. I kept ordering so many year. Paul said, you really ought to try some of the other food. And did you have a favorite dessert? Well, I think I mentioned rende saba cake. That's a chocolate cake with almonds and you cook it. There's a little flour in about three quarters of a cup of flour and you cook it until it's just a little gooey in the middle. And so then you take it out and when you cut it, it's just the most wonderful cake. Queen of Shiba cake, rende saba. Mm, that sounds delicious. It is, it's wonderful. I like to shake a little pound of sugar over it but you could put a chocolate frosting on it too. Garnache, just melt some dark chocolate and about an equal amount of cream and stir it up and put that on for frosting. And how did you learn French? Well, I did learn French a little bit at the Catherine Branson's ball and at Smith but you don't really, really learn French until you start speaking it. And I did take some Braulettes classes when we moved to France. But I found that just going to the school, the Le Corneau Bleu and being in the market and having to use it, I found that that really is what did the trick. Interesting. Well, you've certainly had a remarkable life. Lots of adventures and part of the story. I don't know if I hadn't married Paul. You've changed my life. I was headed for a track of playing golf and bridge and drinking, probably. But we enjoyed our wine. Our final question for the day. What advice do you, as Julia Child, have for young people today? I would say, do not be afraid of hard work. You can do it. And do not be afraid of making mistakes. You can learn from them. I think I made so many mistakes and I just made a mistake right here. But you can learn from it. And next time things will be better. That's really wonderful advice. Thank you. And now we'll take one last look at that DocsTeach educational activity related to Julia Child again. That activity for today's program. And that's docsteach.org. Just wanna thank Julia Child again. It was a wonderful discussion. And I hope you all can join us again on April 27th at 11 a.m. Eastern time to meet Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist known for developing the theory of relativity. Thank you all for participating in our program today.