Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're stuffed on turkey, wearing aprons gollotle gravy on the sides of our mouths, and it's stuff you should know.
That's right. Happy Thanksgiving for those who celebrate Thanksgiving here.
In the US, and happy belated Thanksgiving to our Canadian listeners who celebrate it early.
That's right. And since we're talking about Thanksgiving, we wanted to mention you know, we have been working with co ED, the Cooperative for Education for many, many years since they took us down to Guatemala, and they're you know, if you haven't heard us talk about them, I'd be surprised. But their mission is to help eradicate poverty through education
and largely through the children of Guatemala. It's a great organization that we've been working with for a long long time, and we're working with them again this year.
Yeah. They see too that kids who would almost certainly otherwise not have gotten any real education at all, get a really great education for fairly cheap too. They're a really, really great effective charity, which is why we've been working with them for so long. And one of the ways we work with them every year is to raffle off a chance to hang out with us online.
Yeah, virtually, that's how we do things. But we've done this for a few years in a row now like a zoom a co ed zoom hangout and it's always super fun. We look forward to it. And this is
how you can do that. You can join the Cooper for Education for twenty bucks a month and you can collectively sponsor students in the Rise Youth Development Program And twenty twenty six, more than twelve hundred students are going to start school in rural Guatemala through this program and that's their biggest class ever and they really count on us and you guys to help make that happen.
Yeah, you can also give any nation that you like. They're happy with that. But do this by December nineteenth and you will be entered into a chance to hang out with us. I think in January at some point. And also just a little fyi, giving Tuesday is December second, so that could be a good day to do it too. And whenever you're ready, go to Cooperative for Education dot org slash sysk and you can make your donations there.
That's right. Twenty bucks a month can really go a long way. And just to brag a little bit about the stuff you should know, Army, since we've been working with co ED, over one point four million dollars and charitable contributions have come from the stuff you should Know Army sponsoring a total of one hundred and seventy two RISE students over that time.
So cool. Thanks you guys for me supporting co ED. So well, that's right. Well, Chuck, I say we get cracking with our episode today because I'm excited about this one. We're talking about Julia Child, arguably one of the most well known cooks chefs of all time.
Yeah, but I have to step out real quick because I've got the dickens out of my finger.
That was pretty good. Actually I wasn't even gonna try it. But that was a dead on Julia's Child.
Well, that was a dead on. Dan Ackroyd as Julia Child.
I think you topped him, to tell you the truth.
Yeah, you know, if you grew up in the seventies, in the eighties and even into the nineties, and you ever surfed around your cable TV to and cross PBS, there was a good chance that the wonderful Julia Child came into your life in some way. I remember watching her a little bit when I was a kid even and just thinking like, who is this giant, tall woman that talks funny cooking in front of my face?
But you were never intimidated by her, were you?
No? I mean, she was always just so friendly and gregarious. I just had an instant liking.
Yes, she was a very very likable person. But even if you're not familiar with Julia Child and you live in the United States and you like decent food that's not processed, you owe an enormous det to Julia Child because you can argue that she almost single handedly introduced America to real food through French cuisine. Yeah.
I mean, these days, it's taken for granted that you know, farmed a table and ingredients that matter, and food preparation and sort of taking pride and cooking at home like that is just so commonplace. But that was not the case when Julia Child was coming into things. She really revolutionizes and sort of rocked America's culinary world.
Yeah, like this was the time when she came around, when people were making jello molds with like ground beef in them, like that was nice. That was like showing off for a dinner party kind of stuff.
Yeah, for sure.
So we'll talk about all the impacts she had and why she was so beloved. But to start, we'll go a little further back toward the beginning. And if you've ever heard her speak, you really did do a pretty good impression. A lot of people think that she was British, and she was not British. She was American. She was born in Pasadena. Apparently her accent was one of those mid Atlantic accents that she was taught growing up in private schools and private college, Smith College in Massachusetts.
Yeah, she was Julia McWilliams. That's how she was born, and didn't have British parents either. They had some money though. Her parents were pretty well to do. Her dad was a financier and her mom was an heiress of a paper company. So she grew up with the cook in the house. But it wasn't that that did it. As you'll see, she had quite a circuitous route to becoming the most famous cook in the world and had a pretty interesting life up until that point.
She really did like a surprisingly interesting one. She was apparently a disaster in the kitchen and really didn't start cooking until I think she was in her forties, maybe late thirties. I saw that the closest brush she had with being a gormand and a host was when she was the chair of the refreshment committee for the senior prom and the fall dance one year at Smith College.
And that's not really much of an exaggeration. That really probably is the closest she came to being a foodie before she got into cooking later on in life.
Yeah, she was a history student. She was going to be a writer. And like I said, she was tall. She was six foot two, and she was athletic. She played basketball, she played tennis, she played golf. She graduated in nineteen thirty four and moved to New York and was you know, I said, she wanted to be a writer. She was an advertising copywriter for Sloan's, which was a burn at your company. So that was her first gig.
But she was always a well liked person. She was very like I said, gregarious, That wasn't just a TV persona very very sociable people really seemed to like her her whole life. She was a life of the party. But she wasn't like just you know, even though she loved her wine. She wasn't just some some souse at the party. She was apparently pretty you know, responsible human early on.
Like if she put a lampshade on her head, she remembered doing it the next time.
It was on purpose, yeah, exactly.
She also had a really great work ethic, which served her well throughout the rest of her career. But really from the outset helped her because when World War two broke out, She's like, I want to become a spy. So she joined the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, the direct predecessor of the CIA, and worked directly under no less than wild Bill Donovan, the guy who founded the OSS.
Yeah, he was a general and apparently that she didn't you know, have a whole lot of like direct interaction with him. But it was a a very big gig for her. It was pretty menial work. Even though it was a job of you know, responsibility that she was put in. It was kind of pre computer work, like they needed human beings to do stuff that computers would do.
So she would type up profiles on note cards of OSS officers just to keep sort of in the file cabinet before they had you know, computers to do that kind of thing, along with several other women that she worked with. And like I said, she was charming. You said, she had a great work ethic, and she got promoted like several times through that job.
Yeah, and she actually was promoted to become a member of the Emergency CEE Rescue Equipment Section, which was tasked with coming up with a shark repellent because sharks were a problem for down pilots shipwrecked sailors. I think at least twenty sailors had been attacked by sharks since the beginning of the war, and this is only a couple of years. So they needed some sort of shark repellent that would keep sharks away, but that was also highly portable.
Apparently shark repellent did not exist to this point, and the shark repellent they came up with was so effective it's still the shark repellent that's used today.
Yeah. They would also you know, bump into c mines that were supposed to hit German U boats and detonate those which is no good for the cause or for the shark obviously.
Yeah, so you son of them?
So man, what a line. So she was in the test kitchen essentially trying to come up with a shark repellent. Obviously had a lot of different tries on this. I think there were over one hundred different attempts at this recipe, and what they came up with ultimately was a mix of decayed shark meat, organic acids, and what was the copper acetate was sort of the main ingredient that capped it all off.
Yeah, copper acetate. They figured out with black dye mimics the scent of a dead shark, and I guess sharks don't like to go near other dead sharks. And they figured out how to bake it, basically make this into a little cake, you know, a cake meaning like a little puck, not a cake like a birthday cake, right, And you could attach it to your life vest and it would apparently keep shark's way for six to seven hours.
It's not bad, no, And she very facetiously but also charmingly, referred to that shark repell and as her first big recipe.
You say it like her?
I okay, my first big recipe.
Oh that's perfect. That's also sounds like half of your Halloween characters.
Yeah, it really was pretty bad. Wait, hold on, let me do it andsly bar first.
Per We had one person that wrote in and said they couldn't get through it.
I know, I felt kind of bad for him.
Oh that's right. From forty four to forty five, I think these were her last two years in the OSS. She served as chief of THESS Registry and was sent to some pretty far away places. She went to China and Ceylon which is modern day Sri Lanka, and had some really top notch security clearance. It was you know, she really worked her way up the ladder in the OSS.
I saw that she had top secret, the highest level security clearance for that assignment, which is it's just nuts.
One thing that we'll see later on is that she's basically always considered herself a feminist, and that's a good example that she worked her way to the top of the OSS to have the highest possible security clearance during the forties at a time when women were not really I know that women worked a lot to support the war effort, but that seems like an unusual position for a woman at the time.
Yeah, for sure, you know, due to her hard work. One of the biggest things that happened though, in the OSS was that she met her future husband, Paul Child. He was an officer and I say that not you know, and like, oh, she met her husband there, so that's
what matters. But she met her life partner and love of her life who helped nurture her career and serve her and they, by all accounts, they just seem like this really really wonderful couple, like the kind that you always, you know, want to be in yourself, that kind of relationship, you know.
Yeah. I saw from basically every source that talked about it that they were the envy of their friends.
Yeah.
So yeah, they stayed together. They were married for almost fifty years, from nineteen forty six until Paul died in nineteen ninety four.
That's right. And the takeaway here is is they landed in France at one point in nineteen forty eight as part of his assignment in the USS. And when they were in France, they and you know, it's that sliding doors thing. Had they not gotten station in France, who knows if we ever would have gotten Julia Child. Yeah, because he was a foodie and she wasn't. And he said, hey, I'm going to take you out to a real French meal and see what you think. So he took her
to this very famous restaurant. How do you pronounce that, Josh, La Couron la Choron, which is the Crown. This is in the Normandy region along the river there in northern France and it has been a restaurant since the thirteen forties, so it is legit. Some people claim it's the oldest inn in all of France.
That's pretty cool, so they know what they're doing with French cuisine, which, by the way, if you don't really understand French cuisine, and I don't really claim to, I appreciate it, but it's not like that's what you mean, and I are making on Tuesday night at Rome yet because I got her cookbook recently and I'm really about it. But just to kind of like a little back of the envelope sketch of it, French cuisine French cooking was the first cuisine in the world to be recognized as
a World Heritage by UNESCO. That's how distinct and important French cuisine is, and this is the moment when Julia Child was introduced to it, this lunch at La Couron.
Yeah, and as I understand it, French cuisine, I've watched a lot of Top Chef over the years, all of it. In fact, French cuisine is very humble, a very basic ingredients. It's not this fancy thing you think of, you know, French food if you don't know much about it, as being like super super fancy. But it's actually very humble, with very basic ingredients, but really quality ingredients, really perfect technique,
real fats, real butters, real cream. That's French cuisine. Basically, it's like impeccable technique, you know, paired with very simple, humble but very well sourced ingredients. Well put, I hope.
So made by frenchies. You forgot that part.
Yeah, generally so.
At this lunch in nineteen forty eight, her first French meal, she had oysters, all right, pule fume wine, which is the official savat okay, and soul Moniere Mounier means Miller's wife. So, like you were saying, humble, simple dishes, it's a soul fish that's floured and made with capers, lemon, butter, parsley, and not much more. And she said that that first true culinary experience. There's a few quotes I think we
should trade off with. She said that it was an opening up of the soul and spirit for me that first meal. It changed her life quite literally.
Yeah. She also said it was a kind of coming to Jesus and what else.
She said, it was the most exciting meal of my life.
Yeah. And then that dish that dover soul that you know you it's fried fish, you flower some soul, fry it up in some butter, put some I think. I think the lemon and parsley and capers is part of any what is it the miniere, mouniere moniere, I think moniere. That's basically what it is. But a very simple dish, and that became one of her, you know, one of her big signature dishes.
Yeah. Put a little ketchup on there. You're in hog heaven.
Oh man, you and my daughter.
So because she was moved by she likes ketchup. Huh.
Oh, God is so annoying.
She's very cool, I know. But in common it gets.
Her to eat some stuff she would normally eat.
Uh.
So that's good.
I guess like broccoli.
No, she didn't put it on brocle She don't like brocoli, but.
She eats I don't like broccoli either. Does she hate peas.
Too, No, she loves peas. She in fact, she eats frozen peas as a snack.
Well they're really that's probably like that distinction erases all of the similarities because I hate peas so much. Oh yeah, I hate them so much, chuck.
Yeah, she loves sushi now, which was a big surprise for us.
That's awesome.
She just kind of started eating it when I got it, and uh, because I think she likes stealing my food. M So it started as a joke and then now she's just eating it.
Do you remember what kind she eats? Is it like California hotels or gear Man?
Like, yeah, Nacgeary and just any kind of crazy role I get, Julie.
Man, that's awesome.
That's great soy sauce.
Though you're not supposed to eat much soy sauce if any with it.
I don't care supposed to her not. I'm telling you what I like.
Oh that's fine. I'm just saying like she's actually she could go to Japan, right, now and they wouldn't bat an eyelash at her for it.
Hey, you think I don't remember our sushi episode. I didn't know.
We did the black Hole episode twice.
That's a good point, all right, So where are we? Julia Child has eaten this meal. It blew her mind because she was raised on American food, like you said, was not a foodie, and not only American food, but in recent years post war American food, which is when stuff started to get really sort of mass produced and not very good, like very processed, and this French food just blew her mind.
Yeah, so she wanted to understand how that could happen, right, Yeah, So she started taking cooking classes and again like she's a total novice here, and I think she's again in the late thirty So this is nineteen forty eight. She's about thirty six at this time, and her life has just changed, like she's just figured out what she wants to do in life. So she starts taking classes, ends up enrolled in the Cordon Bleue in nineteen fifty one.
That same year, she founds her own cooking school that she runs out of her own kitchen with her who would become long longtime collaborators Simone Beck and Louise at Bertol, and they founded the school called Lecole de Toois Gormond, which means the School of the Three Gourmands.
That's right. I didn't get this verified, but I did read somewhere that she was either the only woman in her class at La Cordon Blue or one of only two. Maybe m It just you know back then, and you know, there's still a lot of sexism in the in chef's kitchens and restaurants. It's come a long way, but for many, many years it was a profession of white men. Yeah, you know, I feel like that's something we say a
lot on the show, but that's the case. Within ten years of being at Locordon Blue, she had sold her best selling cookbook that you just bought. I guess, did you get the og?
Yeah?
Yeah, what's the name of.
That, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
That's right, seven hundred plus pages. And then about fifty years after she enrolled at Licordon Blue, her actual kitchen that she cooked in would be in the Smithsonian Museum of American History as a permanent exhibit. Pretty neat, pretty amazing.
I say, we take a break and we'll come back and we'll talk about that cookbook that I got, because it was groundbreaking, to say the least.
All right, learn and Stuff with Joshua John stuff fishin up.
So Chuck. You said, you mentioned the Mastering the Art of French Cooking, this cookbook that Julia Child maade with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertol, and it was designed specifically for America, for the United States, to introduce them to French cooking. And up to this point, cookbooks were basically like, take a little handful of flour and throw it at you know, the elf that's helping you, and put a little oil in there and fold it together and voila like.
They were not very helpful, and they assumed that you already had some sort of training, maybe apprenticeship something like that. The Mastering the Art of French Cooking did the exact opposite because, having not that long ago in a total novice, Julia Child realized what people who are being exposed to this new way of cooking, new foods, new techniques, new ingredients,
would need to know, and that was essentially everything. So they laid out everything that you would need to know to make these recipes in this cookbook training anyone who bought this cookbook on French cuisine.
Yeah, like, you know, a recipe might have said, Julian these carrots and then put them in butter, and she would say, well, what if they don't know what that means, here's how you, Julianne, right, And not only that, but here's the kind of knife that's ideal for that kind of thing.
And butter too.
Yeah, and the boy she talked a lot about butter. Yes, but like, here are the tools, here are the techniques, and here's how you do all of these for these five hundred and twenty four recipes. And it really just sort of it broke down a wall in that it demystified, you know, sort of high class cooking because she's like, this is something that you can do in your kitchen. Yeah, you know, sheboygan exactly.
Oh, sheboygan went nuts for this. Of course, all the men grew up pencil thin mustaches and war berets. The women all wore pencil pencil pants.
Pencil pants, pencil skirts.
Now what are the little short almost clam diggers, but they were much more salt. I thought they were pencils something.
Oh, I don't know. Maybe I know what you're talking about though.
Culottes No, no, I don't think those are French. I think those those no country will claim those.
Uh. The coach of the Falcons wearsos, which is probably why it sucks so bad.
It's crazy.
So on the book, you know, where she's demystifying the process and talking about quality ingredients and quality fresh herbs and high quality butters and good meats, you would think that'd be like a slam dunk because they would say,
no one's ever done anything like this before. But it got rejected, you know, like most success stories in the book world, there's usually like, yeah, I got rejected by like eight publishers, and she got rejected quite a bit before she finally landed with an editor named jud The Jones at Alfred Knopp Publishing.
Yeah. So Judith Jones was already a legend by this time because just a few years before she kind of discovered this obscure French book and recognized how important it was and had it translated into English and published it as the Diary of am Frank. So she was the editor who got the Diary of a Frank out to
the English speaking world. So she already had a pretty great nose for this kind of thing, and she recognized that in mastering the Art of French cooking, not that it would be as important necessarily as the Diary of Am Frank, but not necessarily that it would be that far behind as far as changing the world goes, or at least the United States.
Yeah, man, we should do a short stuff on Judith Jones. Okay, can you imagine, like walking into any publishing event, She's like, by the way, Diary Van Frank and the art what it meant the mastery of French cooking?
What is it mastering the art of French cooking?
You? Yeah? She would say it better than that, she'd say both those those are mine.
Those We should also do an episode on Anne Frank sometime.
Yeah. I'm surprised we have it.
Actually I am a little bit too.
Yeah, let's 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 had spent five years on the bestseller list, but I couldn't find any other place to verify. It's still worth mentioning.
But we were on there for two weeks.
We sure were, Buddy, I think more than that, actually, I think it was due. Okay, 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. Of 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 popular in the United States at the time. So French wine kind of became a thing.
Yeah, and the first volume was so successful. A few years later, I think nine years later, in nineteen seventy, they released volume two to had another two hundred and fifty seven recipes and apparently you can spend up to ten k Actually I saw more than that to buy assigned volumes one and two together.
Oh 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 was 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 helped write it. So 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 nineteen fifties with her husband Paul, came back to the States in the sixties. I believe they had come back before on some if you want to say, visits, maybe some
forced visits. When her husband Paul was called for the blacklisting 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.
Right, 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 a little hot plate and saw tape in her tools and her eggs, and everyone loved it.
Everyone was like writing into the station saying, like, this woman that you had on cooking that omelet was funny and gregarious and 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. A lot of people say, the fact that cooking shows are so widespread today you can essentially thank Julia Child for that too, and thank the French Chef. It had a ten 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 sixties to the early seventies.
Yeah, we had a TV show for a year.
We did. We became the most widely known koochs in the world, if not at least the United States.
One thing I'm learning is it to compare our career to Julia Child's humbling experience.
You were a spy for that little while, or you pretended that 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 death and heart appearing community.
Yeah, open captioning. I saw where it was for everybody. Everyone read it.
But yeah, oh is that what close captioning means?
Yeah, where you have to select it to sw 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 appetite, 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 therese She'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 too, realized that she wasn't infallible and therefore they didn't need to worry about not being infallible too, Like, mistakes are part of it. You just learned from them. Yeah, but like that was 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 messed something up in life, period, but
especially in the kitchen. And she was like, no, it's okay to mess up and 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, Juli. Your 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 like take over the kitchen as something that you love doing and that's for yourself.
Right. I saw a Bustle magazine describer as a vamp, which I'm not familiar with, but they based on context, it seemed like it was a good thing.
What does that stand for? All right? Well, Josh just told me if air what it stood for, and 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. Let this in. Pick the turkey up off the floor, kind of brushed it off and put it in the oven and baked it like nothing ever happened.
Apparently I would do that.
Well, yeah, we did a whole episode on the five second rule.
Yeah, 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, that 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. It's something did happen, but it morphed into like the most spectacular version of itself. No, it wasn't. Snope stated it back to at least nineteen eighty nine, but she wants. 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. Yeah, and she said, like 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, 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 seventies through the eighties into the nineties. I believe she had twelve Emmy nominations total and seven wins. And by the time she got into the nineteen nineties, they were shooting that show in her home kitchen in Cambridge. Her husband Paul designed this kitchen that was like part kitchen, part TV studio, and you know, just so they could in
time at home, and he was heavily involved. Apparently at times he was on the floor with Q cards and he helped design the original patch for the three Gormands 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 us 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, learn and stuff with Joshua John stuff.
You shine up, all 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 at 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 can 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, Like, yes, you want herbs, but you want the herbs to compliment it. You don't want the ribs to cover up. You don't want to use a bunch of a one on your soul muniere. Like you let the thing stand on its own.
You let the fish taste like fish. Like that was kind of like a like a sub 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 a one.
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 and maybe a squirt of lemon. Even telapia yeah. But despite all this, she was not a food snob. She was very approachable. She loved in and out Burger. She used Helman's mayo and her tuna salad. Apparently she like Costco hot dogs even.
I don't blame her.
I never had one.
What's 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. 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, they're 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.
In 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, a 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. At the time America, Americans were drinking the stuff that's now on the bottom shelf of grocery stores.
Yeah, the jug wine.
Yeah. So not only did she reintroduce America to wine, she normalized 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 was started 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. Yeah.
I think that happened in the seventies when California started making good wine on par with the French 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 themouth parts in the gin, so it's much more of amooth than gin.
Yeah. It's also lower ABV, so you don't kick yuh're 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 long standing rumor that sometimes fans would confront with. They were like, I remember that time you drank some 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 kicking wine out of her glass. But she said I would never do that on television.
Right, Yeah. And you know I opened with the dan Ackroid bit if you didn't know what I was doing. It was a very famous SNL skitch from back in the day in seventy eight where dan Akroid portrayed Julia Child where he cut the dickens on up his finger and you know, blood's just going everywhere. Of course, they have the blood pack just squirting blood all over everything. And he was a big fan apparently, and that was
a real incident. I think about a month before that sketch where she was working with Jacques Papin 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 the videotape of and would show people sometimes and then at a really particularly fun enthusiastic dinner party, she might act it out like words for her 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. You 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 and that she was serving him. Kind of a version in this one of a tartar what do you called, Yeah, a of a steak tartar. 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. She was like, well, maybe next time I can serve something you like or something like that.
Well, she used in a seedling tour 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 you'd ever seen.
Sure. One other thing we mentioned too that we have to touch on is she was known for her love of butter. She 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 butter. And her whole thing was like, yes, she 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 ten times a day. Right, Yeah, And she had she quote she quoted Oscar Wilde, which I thought was great, but she said everything in moderation, including moderation.
Yeah, that's a great quote. I got a little kitchen tip if you're 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. Sure, and it adds just a little unctuousness that olive oil won't give you.
I love that. Yeah, and don't forget the A one.
My friend Clay still loves that stuff so well.
It's it's classy.
Yeah, I mean it's a very specific taste. I love that tart, tangy A one. 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 cook but bo but these were her two classics, and put together is seven hundred and eighty one 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.
Yeah, 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. Yeah, it was a really good movie though. Amy Adams played Julie Powell, who very sadly passed away a few years ago at the young age of forty nine, 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. And it's a wonderful movie from Nora Ephron. But in that movie, she's cooking all the recipes. And one, 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 buff Bogagnon, which is essentially a beef stew with red wine. But again, 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 Beeborgangnon is. What else keish lorraine, which everybody knows you can get keish lorraine at the grocery store by the slice. Yeah, because Julia Child introduced it to the United States with her cookbook.
That's right, very again, very simple clean recipe. Bacon, onions, egg cream, a few cheeses, some spices of course, eggs.
Well, I 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 blanchet 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, if they don't like smoky flavors, I guess.
Or But the problem is is the bacon smoke smokin This is going to take over like that's all you're gonna taste, whereas you're not. If you can get rid of that smoky flavor, then you're you're in hog heaven. As she always said.
I don't mind. I like that apple with and I also cook it in the oven. I think that is the best way to cook bacon, agreed. And they on a baking feet.
With the little elf laying on it to keep it flat.
Uh 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.
Uh yeah, cassoulet that best of bean feast is everyday fair for a peasant, but ambrosia for a gastronome. Though it's ideal consumer is at three hundred pound blocking back, who's been splitting firewood NonStop for the last twelve hours on a sub zero day in Manitoba.
And like, if you look at pictures of the caselet, it's like, I want one so bad.
Yeah, it looks really good.
And what about chocolate Moose.
Yeah, that's another one that apparently she made a mistake on air. It didn't set correctly, and you know that moose has to set. But good chocolate moose is out of this world.
Yeah. I couldn't find the episode, but apparently a nineteen ninety two WAPO article mentioned it. But supposedly it is surprisingly easy to make and the outcome is just amazing. I saw light airy, silky smooth. It 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, how to fold it, how to win the egg whites,
and just get it just right. And yeah, yeah, every time I hear chocolate moose, I think of chocolate moose from top secret.
Oh yeah, he's great. This is good movie. Rip 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. If 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 a crusty on top and that delicious oniony broth in 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. But man, it is so it's really good.
Don't you just get one of those Lipton packets?
Yeah, out of the cayn that's how I do it.
Well, you take one those Lipton packets and you put it in a turkey burger. That's what you do.
Uh. 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 ojou, you know, the dry oju packet, a packet of ranch dry ranch mix, pepperccini, and like maybe one other thing and a roast and you put in a slow cooker and it's supposed to be a knockout dish. And I can't wait to try it.
Man, we got you got to watch Julia and Julie and Julia and then start cooking that stuff and let me know how it goes.
Okay, Yeah, I definitely plan to make some stuff, so I'll let you know for sure, all right.
Uh. Sadly we're at the end of this episode.
Uh.
And Julia Child met the end of her life at the almost age of ninety two. I think she was just a couple of days short of her ninety second birthday when she passed away at her home at the time in Monticito, California, in August two thousand and four of liver failure.
Yeah, l Ain Ducasso, 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.
And that's sad, that's brutal.
Yeah.
So she's actually buried in one of the more interesting places I've ever heard of. Had you heard of the Neptune Memorial Reef before?
No? That sounds kind of cool though.
Yeah. So they took her cremated remains mixed 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 a Key Key Biscayne in Florida. And on the headstone, again made from her cremated remains, there's a plaque with a knife and a fork inscribed on it and 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.
That's right. Our berets are off to you.
Let's see, we talked about Julia Child. You took off your brain. Yeah, that means it's time for listener mail.
All right. So this is from Nathan Weinger and 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 loves it. He says, I love nerd math. So I did some calculations using my trustee search engine. I found out there are over twenty six hundred episodes of stuff you should know. We're just going to use twenty six hundred to make it simply. So okay, all told, the average length is forty five minutes,
which that makes me feel good because that's what we'rehooting for. Yeah, he said, I'm going to He said that seems low though, so I'm going to adjust it up to fifty five. I think these days is forty five. They used to be longer, so that's probably what he's witnessing. At average conversational speed, humans speak about one hundred and thirty 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 spectacular and hint or kaifex. 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 twelve font, which is point one sixty seven inches.
I'd love this stuff. So based on all that, we can get inches per word, one inches per minute a speech, one hundred and thirty inches per episode, seventy one to fifty total episode inches, eighteen million, five hundred ninety thousand in total episode feet, which is one point five four
nine one sixty seven feet. That equates so one episode of stuff you should know equates to the depth of two hundred and thirty eight thousand, three hundred and thirty three Olympic swimming pools, a bit short of Josh's estimate of ten to fifteen million, and for the sake of transparency and Chuck's liking, that is seven point seven four five and change million, big max at an average of two point five interest per Burger.
Wo Man, who is this?
This is Nathan Wenger or Winger? Okay, I'd say Winger.
I think it's Winger in the tradition of Kip Winger.
Well, it's w E though, so that's Nathan. He's in Carmel, Indiana. That's a lot of work to go through names.
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 Max 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 Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
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