American Masters

-I've been rooting around in my icebox, and look what I found. Pig's guts and sheep's guts. See how in small kitchens, big ideas... -She is instantly recognizable because of her height, because of her voice. So she is a star. She's a major star. -Voil. -I mean, she's a businessperson, and she's a cooking professional, and she's a curious person, and she's driven by a lot of different things. -I found myself staring at a fresh beef tongue, and I said to it, "You ugly old thing, I'd like to fix you up." -She's bold. She goes straight in and investigates something that really interests her. -...is to get all the gluten molecules -- whoo -- together. Flap, flap, flap, flap. Today, we're going to do fish soup and bouillabaisse. -And we're going to start with half-boned chicken, or poularde demi-dsoss. And I'm getting a fine, fat roasting chicken like this one. -And she released Americans. She told us all that it's okay to like food. It's all right to say yum-yum at the table. -Delicious. My point of view was if I can do it, you can do it, and here's how to do it. -This is the story of one woman who changed the way that Americans cook, eat, and think about food. It's also a love story. Actually, two love stories. It all started on a trip to France in 1948. -We drove through this beautiful French countryside. I was just beside myself with excitement, seeing these ancient buildings and old churches. -Julia Child, a housewife hungry for life but hopeless in the kitchen, got the chance to eat a meal that was utterly divine. Her husband, Paul, took her to La Couronne, the oldest restaurant in France. -Wonderful restaurant. And we had oysters, the first real oysters I'd ever had of that type. And a little white wine. And we had a wonderful fish dish. And then there was a duck roasting on the spit. And it was an absolutely delicious lunch. -Crisp Pouilly-Fuiss, briny oysters on the half shell, fresh green salad. But what made the meal memorable for Julia was a classic French dish. Fish bathed in a white wine sauce with rich Normandy butter. -She talks about ordering a sole meunire, which is, of course, a classic French dish, and the pure ecstasy of not only eating that dish, but the whole ritual. And the waiter meticulously lifts one fillet off, pulls out the backbone and one whole piece perfectly and then serves the two pieces with the pan sauce. And -- And something just clicked in her. -Well, I was -- I'd wanted -- I decided I wanted to learn how to cook that food. -And for her, that was a discovery. She was not aware of those tastes. And those were very luscious time and very luscious dishes in the style of old classic French cuisine. And she really fell in love with it. -Well, I grew up in Pasadena. And the period when I grew up was in the teens and the '20s. Everyone had cooks, so we had a cook. My mother didn't cook at all. She cooked -- She could make baking-powder biscuits and some kind of a cheese dish. -I think the class Julia came from is crucial to her whole life and understanding the choices she made and her personality and the way she was, a very enlightened, upper-crust WASP society with New England roots that were very conservative and traditional, leavened by this California kind of freewheeling spirit that she had. -Julia inherited, I think, the warmth, the sense of humor, the extraversion, and just the love of being with people and drawing energy from other people. Julia and my mother, Dorothy, both have that, as did their mother. -Julia's mother, Carolyn, was a warm and indulgent presence, the voice of risk-taking and adventure. "See the world before you settle down," she would tell her children. Her husband, John McWilliams, was the voice of responsibility, the sturdy embodiment of Scottish Presbyterian stock. Julia, born in 1912, was followed by John, then Dorothy. -My mother was always very proud of her children. She always said she had 18 feet of children, because we were all tall. -Julia's father tried to impose order on his boisterous family. -I think he was very stern, very strict. In his view, women didn't work. Women didn't know about finances, and, you know, you were sent off to nice colleges so you could talk to the intelligent men who were gonna make a lot of money and support you in the way that you were brought up.

Train whistle blows

-In 1930, Julia headed to Smith College, her mother's alma mater. -When I was born, I was entered at Smith. I had to go, whether I liked it or not. And luckily I loved it. -At 6'2", she stood out as the tallest in her freshman class and confided in her diary that she felt big and unsophisticated. -For a woman of Julia's class, when she enters a school like Smith College in the '30s... it's a finishing school. One might get finished off to find a husband. -I wasn't a revolutionary, and that was the way it was. I accepted life the way it was. -Julia did what she liked best. She had a good time. -When I was a senior, I bought a wonderful Ford touring car for $25. And we drove to Holyoke and went to a speakeasy way up in the top floor of a warehouse. And I remember we all had one of everything. And we were quite sick on the way home, but we had a wonderful time. And I thought we were just horsing around at that point. -She listed her vocational choices as "no occupation decided, marriage preferable." -Julia has said quite often that she had no expectations whatsoever and that she had not imagined what she could do or what she wanted to do. -She graduated in 1934 with no distinction, no goals, and no particular plans.

Rattling

Julia McWilliams headed to the city of dreams, where the possibilities seemed endless. -She goes to New York, I think, hoping to find something that does strike her, something that captures her imagination or her passion. -She had vague notions of becoming a novelist. She applied for a job at The New Yorker. -She wanted to be a writer who would be in that blue-stocking, intellectually accomplished, and very exciting bohemian life at the same time. -But The New Yorker turned her down. She settled for a job writing advertising copy for an upscale furniture store. "I'm learning quite a bit about store management," she wrote to the Smith Alumnae magazine. Ad girl by day, party girl by night. Julia began dating the man of her dreams. Dashing, daring, and athletic, Tom Johnston was the opposite of the conservative banker her father envisioned for his daughter. Julia was smitten.

Indistinct conversations

but Tom had married his childhood sweetheart on New Year's Day. -But he finally married somebody else, which broke my heart for a little while. -Running out of prospects in New York, Julia left the city in the spring of 1937 and retreated to Pasadena. Seeking comfort and security, she moved in with her parents. Two months later, her mother died. Now two people Julia deeply cared for were gone. Julia sought solace with a busy social life, but it was a vacuous time. "All I want do to is play golf, piano, and see people," she wrote. She kept active in Junior League drama. She wrote about fashion for a soon-defunct magazine. She got a job and got fired.

Indistinct talking

By now, her girlfriends were already married, having children. Julia turned down a proposal from the heir to a huge publishing empire. "It's a sin to marry without love. I know what I want. Otherwise, always no." -Julia will say jokingly, but I think there is a kernel of truth in this, that had she done what her father wanted her to do, to marry a Republican banker, she said, "You know, I would have become an alcoholic." She would have withered away. -Julia escaped to the cottage her father had built by the sea. She wrote in her diary, "When I was in school, I felt I had unique spiritual gifts, that I was meant for something and was like no one else. Today, it has gone out, and I am, sadly, an ordinary person with talents I do not use." -I'd been out fairly late the night before, and I came down, and my father was listening to the radio and said, "Pearl Harbor has been attacked." And then all of us that I knew, everyone rushed down to Washington, 'cause we all wanted to help our country. -Julia tried to join the Navy, but the Navy turned her down. She was too tall. -I had nothing to offer, except I could type. -She would now type in the new and secret Office of Strategic Services, the OSS. Headed by William "Wild Bill" Donovan, he directed espionage and sabotage. He hand-picked his staff from the Ivy League, America's intellectual and social elite. -He was kind of a small, rumpled man with piercing blue eyes. He inspired people. He -- There was something about him that people liked to work for him. I felt lucky to be there, but I was in such a lowly position. I was a cat looking at the king, you know? After a while, they began recruiting people to go over to the Far East.

Ship horn blows

-In March 1944, at age 31, Julia McWilliams boarded a troop ship bound for India, determined to seek her fortune far away from home. -She has left comfort. She has left home and family. She has gone into a world where there was an adventure going on. -She traveled across India, eventually arriving at Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. A train carried her to the city of Kandy, near headquarters for the OSS and the Southeast Asia Command. Cleared for high security, Julia managed and processed classified information. The work was top-secret but desperately dull. After two days, she wrote, "I hate this work." In Kandy,

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00. There was time for volleyball, tennis, cocktails, and perhaps romance. -I'd heard of this wonderful man who was coming down from India, where he'd been. And, finally, I met him. It was Paul Child. -Paul Cushing Child spoke flawless French, knew literature and poetry. He was skilled in painting and photography and had a black belt in judo. At OSS headquarters, he made maps and graphs used to plot military strategy. After meeting Julia, he wrote his impressions of her to his twin brother, Charlie, describing her as a girl from Pasadena with great legs. "Julia is a nice person, a warm and witty girl. Her mind is potentially good, but she's an extremely sloppy thinker." Julia was no less critical of Paul. In her diary, she described him as "a man with an unbecoming mustache, an unbecoming nose, and hair mostly not on top." Paul wrote, "She isn't the right woman from my standpoint. She has a slight atmosphere of hysteria, which gets on my nerves, gasping when she talks excitedly, and giggling rather wildly on occasion." The girl who was a sloppy thinker and the man with the unbecoming mustache would one day fall in love... but it would take time. In 1945, Paul was transferred to China, to Kunming, the terminus of the great Burma Road. Julia soon followed. His views of her were beginning to change. "I take much comfort, and she's helped me over many a rough spot by just simple love and niceness." 10 years older than Julia, Paul began a long campaign of patient tutelage to turn her into a more worldly, more sophisticated woman. -And I think she took enormous pleasure from his willingness to teach her about the world. -Camera in hand, Paul took Julia into the countryside, introducing her to great literature, good wine, and the fine cuisine of China. But the war that had brought Paul and Julia together would now send them apart. On August 15, 1945, Japan surrendered. That same day, Paul wrote Julia a birthday sonnet. "How like autumn's warmth is Julia's face, and how like summer's heat is her embrace. Wherein, at last, she melts my frozen earth." Now they would go their separate ways, she to Pasadena, he to Washington. Back in the States, Julia began to write Paul a series of letters. "I'm in a warm, love-lust mood, wanting to have my earrings eaten. I wish you were here so I could sit in your lap, and you could tell me all about everything and why. I love you. I love you." -She was in love. And she began to turn herself into the person that he could live with for the rest of his life, 'cause she wanted to be that person. -Julia coaxed Paul to visit her in Pasadena and to meet her father. But the meeting did not go well. -Julia described her father as being very strict. And Paul, while very disciplined, was an artist. He was cultured, a liberal. He traveled. Whereas I imagine Julia thought of her father as much more rigid, much more conservative, in many ways. -Despite her father's reservations, Julia cast her lot with Paul. Paul took Julia to Lopaus Point in Maine, where his extended family gathered every summer. "We're going to get married and right away," Paul announced. On September 1, 1946, Julia McWilliams became Mrs. Paul Child. The day before, they were in a car accident. "We were married in stitches," Paul said, "me on a cane and Julia full of glass." -He saw Julia as his equal, and he always encouraged her to do and be the best that she could be. And it was a real partnership from the beginning and throughout the rest of their lives. -Julia Child, who once considered herself an ordinary person, would discover she had extraordinary talents. She would soon fall in love for the second time. -She says it was love at first bite, the first meal that she had in France. It was something she connected with, I think, really deeply, but not just the taste and the flavors, everything that goes into gastronomy, and France really spoke to her. -From her first memorable meal at La Couronne, Julia had fallen in love with a country where food was a national obsession. -The French really think of food as their patrimony, as a very important part of their culture. It is really...their birthright. You know, the birthright of every French person is to eat well and to eat great French food. -They talk about food. They talk about thinking about food. It goes on and on. I think it's so woven into the culture that it becomes something of primary importance. -Every dining experience is a collaboration. If you go into a restaurant and you read the menu with great seriousness and you show that you are intelligent about it and that you're willing to enter into the collaboration and that you understand that this is not just a meal, it's a piece of theater, your whole experience will change. -Intoxicated with France, Julia studied the language, explored the markets......and delighted in dining out. She and Paul found an apartment close to Paul's job at the American embassy. Julia headed to the most famous cooking school in the world. -So we settled in there, and then as soon as we got settled, I decided I would go to the Cordon Bleu cooking school. At Le Cordon Bleu, they had a regular course for housewives. And I didn't like that, being with a lot of housewives. But down in the basement, there were a group of former GIs, and these boys decided they wanted to be chefs. And they didn't mind if joined them.

Chopping

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And we had a great old chef, Max Bugnard, who had worked with Escoffier. So he was a wonderful teacher. He'd gone through all of the classical training necessary. -Classical French cooking ruled. That's what professionals did. And interestingly enough, it was such a codified system that once you learned it, you could go anywhere in the world and work in a hotel, and they could hand you a menu, and you could produce something that would be similar to what they had in mind. -I just loved it. I loved chefs and their complete devotion to their work. And nothing was too much trouble if it was going to produce a beautiful result. And I just loved their whole attitude about food. And then I became more and more interested in it. Because I was somebody who had been looking for a career, not consciously looking for it, but there was the career that I wanted. -Before Le Cordon Bleu, Julia had tried to cook to please her husband... with mixed results. -She had disaster after disaster. Nothing came out right. She cooked brains. They turned to mush. She put a duck in the oven. It exploded. She never knew why things didn't work. They ate at midnight because she had so many struggles and troubles. -Julia needed to understand not just what to do in a kitchen, but why and how to do it. She worked hard. But the head of Le Cordon Bleu, Madame Brassart, was convinced that Julia had no natural talent. -She tried to deny her her certificate, and Julia was quite aware that she had not made it into the -- into loved status in Madame Brassart's eyes. It made her, apparently, all the more determined to get that certificate. -It took almost a year, but Julia finally got her certificate in 1951. -Coming out of Le Cordon Bleu, she could cook. That made sense to her. And for the rest of her life as a professional cook, she was a teacher because -- because that was the thing that had been most important to her. That was what turned the corner for her was to be taught. -She wrote to a friend, "It's such fun. Really, the more I cook, the more I like to cook. To think that it's taken me 40 years to find my true passion, cat and husband excepted." She was thrilled when her teacher, Max Bugnard, called her cuisinire bourgeoise -- a top-class home cook. Soon, Julia would meet a French woman who epitomized the best of cuisine bourgeoise. Her name was Simca Beck. Smart, driven, and powerful, she was a force of nature. -It was somewhat like the meeting of titans. She was very French. She was, one might say, archetypically French woman and very sure of herself, very precise in how she spoke. -She was a real taskmaster. You really had the sense that she could reach out and rap your knuckles. She had a really loving side to her, but it wasn't immediately apparent to a lot of people. -With her friend Louisette Bertholle, Simca was writing a book on French cooking intended for an American audience. They needed an American collaborator to adapt the book. Julia was perfectly suited for the job. -What she brought to the chemistry and to the partnership was really the American perspective. -Julia wanted to take a completely fresh approach to home cooking, to break down the classical tradition step by step so that any American housewife could make great French food. -I think some people were intimidated by French food 'cause it's in a different language. And I think some people like to make it -- some people like to make things look very mysterious and complicated. And my point of view was if I can do it, you can do it, and here's how to do it. -For the next 10 years, while the State Department posted Paul from Paris to Marseille to Bonn and to Oslo, Julia devoted herself to testing, re-testing, writing, and revising the manuscript.

Keys clacking

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Julia and Simca wrote each other hundreds of letters, each with six carbon copies. Their original plan for one book escalated into a grandiose scheme for a multi-volume series. They were convinced they were writing a masterpiece, a book unlike any other. But they were very different kinds of cooks. Simca had a natural flair. Julia labored step by step. -Julia had had to learn painstakingly how to cook. And her goal in this book was to help other women learn painstakingly how to cook. So they really had two different sensibilities there. Julia wanted a real teaching book. They wanted a cookbook. As a result, there were many, many clashes and flare-ups. -Julia understood, as Simca did not, that the book had to be precise. Her husband, Paul, was an enormous influence. -I remember one phrase of his. He'd say, "Submit it to the test, Julie. Don't just go off half-cocked in ecstasy over this dish. But really submit it to the test." -Obsessed with getting the recipes exactly right, Julia spent months making eggs -- poached eggs, shirred eggs, scrambled eggs, and omelets -- until, finally, she couldn't eat another egg. "I've just poached two more eggs and thrown them down the toilet." No one had tried to write a cookbook like theirs. Julia worried that colleagues or even casual friends might steal their recipes and publish them. "What a shame about the lunch for Mrs. Fairbanks. She sounds like a big, nasty woman. But I'm so sorry you showed her the sauce chapter. We must consider all our work 'top secret,' like war plans."

Typewriter bell dings

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Julia had far less cooking experience than Simca, but she lectured Simca on proper technique. "Please learn to cut professionally with a knife." -"As for your commandments, my dear goddess, I shall try to follow them in as much as my conscience will permit." -"Who knows, we may end up on television."

Typewriter bell dings

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They submitted their manuscript to the publisher Houghton Mifflin, The book was more than 500 pages long, yet it only contained recipes for sauces and poultry, detailed instructions for trussing chickens, stuffing goose, and preparing pressed duck. -You put the body in this machine. It looks like a big cylinder. You put the body in there, and then you pour in a bottle of burgundy, go... And all the juices come out. And that makes your sauce. All of this was in that book. And Houghton -- Houghton Mifflin didn't find that particularly interesting for Americans. -Julia and Simca spent the next two years completely revising the manuscript.

Door closes

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-Ah, Simca. -Here we are. -Finally, okay. -They resubmitted the manuscript to Houghton Mifflin. Once again, Houghton Mifflin turned them down. "It's a big, expensive cookbook and might well prove formidable to the American housewife." -And they rejected it. They said, "We can't publish anything like that." They said, "Nobody wants -- They're not much interested in food." -"Black news on the cookbook front. The answer is no, neg, non, nein. Simca, I am most upset for your sake. You just managed to hook yourself up with the wrong collaborator." After seven years of work and two rejections, a friend submitted the book to the Knopf publishing house. -There was a young editor there, Judith Jones, who had lived in France and was looking for just such a book as ours. -Judith Jones was determined to publish the book, but she had to convince Alfred Knopf. -And at one point, Alfred Knopf said, "Well, I think we should give Mrs. Jones a chance." And Blanche Knopf, his wife, who was a partner in the business, who couldn't have cared less about cooking, always on a diet, just got up and left the room. But I got my chance. We had a hard time deciding what the title should be. So I said to Alfred, "Uh... We've decided on 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking.'" And he said, "Well, that's a hell of a title." He said, "I'll eat my hat if that sells." And I like to think he ate a lot of hats. -"Hooray," Julia wrote to Simca. "We're in with Knopf." Julia and Paul moved back to the States, to Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the autumn of 1961, Julia Child, now 49, held in her hands the first edition of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." It had taken nearly 10 long years to produce and weighed in at three pounds and 734 pages. The first in a total of 12 books that Julia would eventually write, "Mastering" would become one of the great culinary classics of all time, ultimately selling more than one million copies. -"Mastering" was a new kind of book in America because it took you step by step. It said, "Even if you have no preparation at all, if you follow every step here, you will come to the result, which I have made very tempting and appealing to you and you want to come to, and you'll get there." -Eager to promote the book, Julia contacted WGBH, the fledgling public television station in Boston. Armed with a hotplate, a whisk, and some eggs, Julia appeared on a book-review program and made an omelet. -They had never seen an omelet made in the French tossed way. -The audience wanted to see more. In February of 1963, WGBH launched a series of half-hour cooking programs called "The French Chef." -Something amazing happened when Julia stood up in that studio kitchen and looked into the camera. -Hello. I'm Julia Child. Welcome to "The French Chef" and the first show in our series on French cooking. -And the camera looked back at her. -Here you have your sauce. -It was meteoric. It was like the sun came out, and everybody who was watching saw it. -...in the bowl of the machine, and we're gonna see who wins. And I think maybe I'll win, because I'm bigger. Welcome to "The French Chef." I'm Julia Child. -It didn't matter what she was doing. It matter what she was telling you. Even if you couldn't care less about cooking, you never thought you'd go into a kitchen, you certainly didn't want to go out and shop for ingredients or do this trussing and tying and cutting and all of these absurdly complicated maneuvers in the kitchen, she was having fun while she was doing it, and it was fun to watch her, and you got swept up in that. -Julia got rave reviews in the local and national press. Variety reported, "She's a homey and unpretentious type who wears ordinary house frocks on the show and does what comes naturally -- licking her fingers, wiping them on her apron." -I think before Julia, we were stuck in kind of a what mother passed down, what grandmother passed down. Julia comes on the scene, and she says, "Wait a minute." -Today, we're gonna do coq au vin -- chicken in red wine. -"You can take this chicken, you can chop it up, and you put some onions with it and some little bacon lardoons and a little bit of wine, my dear, and you've got this fabulous dish." And we all said, "Yes, we want to try that!" And we did. -And as for wine, we'll have -- we're having a nice, dry white Riesling. Or you could use a ros, if you like. And that really is a meal fit for a king. -Busy, busy, busy. -Julia's message, that cooking was important, contradicted the advertising campaigns aimed at American women. -You tried salad dressings made with soup? -The ads featured Mrs. Busy Woman, a housewife much too busy to cook. -The whole message to the American housewife was, "Get out of the kitchen. We'll do it for you." I mean, the food industry had one -- Johnny One-Note -- "Cooking is demeaning." And, "You want to be free as women," and all that junk. Nothing about the pleasure of cooking. -And Julia comes along and says, "You can be an intelligent woman. You can have many important things to do, but you can also be proud of cooking, and you can cook really good food, and you can do it. And don't be fooled by the notion that by opening five cans and combining a can of tomato soup and a can of pea soup and putting a little bit of Sherry and some crab meat in it you're going to make a really great meal. You can do better than this." -There, Jenny. There is my recipe. -I think I happened to appear at the right time, just when people were ready to go into some more interesting cooking, I think. And if I hadn't come along, somebody else would have, 'cause we were ripe -- ripe for a change. And there I was. Thank heaven for me. -Inspired by the youth and glamour of the Kennedy White House, Americans were acquiring a new, more worldly sophistication. -When Kennedy was elected president, and with Mrs. Kennedy with her French roots and all that, she was loved -- they both were loved the world over. And they were that energy, that enthusiasm, that excitement, you know, in the White House. -One read about their food, and they had a wonderful French chef, Ren Verdon. And the people at that time were beginning to go abroad by plane rather than by boat. So some of that good food was seeping in. And people were just mad about it. They couldn't get over the chocolate cake, which was moist and soft. And, of course, the mousse was lovely and the Roquefort quiche, woof! Quiche took off, really. And we're gonna start out with the original Quiche Lorraine. That's spelled "L" for lollipop, "O," double "R"... -Julia was over 50. -And it's pronounced in the French manner, as though... -Her director, Russ Morash, was in his 20s. Television was in its infancy. -It was a terrible, terrible time of technical clunkiness. The cameras were like refrigerators. We had to attach poor Julia, at great personal risk and sacrifice, by cable to an audio person. And sometimes, she would touch the stove, and he wouldn't have grounded his equipment, and she'd get a shock from it. Didn't matter. Had to continue. -Behind the scenes, Paul Child quietly kept all the pieces together. -He's the stage setter. He's the set designer. And Paul is there always. You may not see him on the camera, but everything you see is part of Paul's contribution. And we see his hand everywhere. -The relationship and the connection that the two of them had together has to have been unbelievably strong. For him to have supported a woman during that era starting a career and a brand-new career, nobody had ever heard of anything like that before. And he was there beside her, making this happen. -Besides Paul, Julia worked closely with Ruth Lockwood, who became her producer, personal aid, and good friend. -We loved to make titles. I remember one title -- "Lest We Forget Broccoli." And there was another one. It was "Coq Au Vin Versus Chicken Fricassee -- Sisters Under the Sauce." It was live on tape, so whatever happened happened, which gave it a kind of breathless quality, which was rather nice. And now we're gonna take a look at the butter. God! I left it too long. This has become absolutely black. -The stakes are part of cooking, aren't they? And she was the perfect person for all of us to see, "Oh, my God, I've dropped that on the floor. Oh, my God, the souffl is falling." -You just have to have the courage of your convictions, particularly if it's sort of a loose mass like this. Well, that didn't go very well. -I think people eventually came to hope that there would be some kind of disaster, because it was so much fun to watch her get out of it, to pick up the chicken that she never dropped, even if that's not what actually happened. -Everyone says, "Well, I saw you drop that chicken on the floor." Of course, that never happened. What I did was I was flipping a potato pancake, and it went into the stove. But you can always pick it up if you're alone in the kitchen. Who is going to see? -By the end of 1965, "The French Chef" was carried by nearly 100 public television stations. -Must go around this again. -Julia won a Peabody Award, then an Emmy. -Never get upset. -Her success made her a national phenomenon. One critic called her "the most reliable female discovery since Lassie." Success brought more than fame. It brought a lovely country house in France -- La Pitchoune. La Peach, they called it, in Provence, where fields of jasmine, roses, and lavender scented the air. -It was such a peaceful existence. I can remember a huge olive tree out in front where we'd -- you'd have your coffee, caf au lait in the morning, and Julia would sit and take notes, and then they'd get in their little French car and -- zoop -- over to the open market, say, in Grasse or wherever, and just kept the flame alive in a very important way. -For the next 20 years, Julia and Paul would escape to La Peach. Julia rested, worked, and wrote. By Christmas 1967, she was busy correcting proofs of "The French Chef Cookbook," based on the television series. Paul wrote to his brother, "How fortunate we are at this moment in our lives, each of us doing what he most wants, close to each other, with excellent health and few interruptions." Only two months later, Julia wrote in her diary, "Left breast off." Diagnosed with cancer, Julia underwent a radical mastectomy. Paul was terrified that he might lose her. Julia was stoic, but released from the hospital, she crept into a bathtub and wept. -Seems nice. -With her usual determination, Julia threw herself back into work -- the second volume of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." The big challenge, the recipe for the perfect loaf of French bread. -Like so. -Paul emerged as her principle collaborator. They took two years and used 284 pounds of flour before they finally got it right. "Whatever it is, I will do it," Paul Child had said. He had acted as his wife's manager, served as her photographer, tested her recipes, proofread her books, and was content to let the light shine upon her, not on him. -They were able to work together and kind of collectively make something that was Julia Child as we know her. But Julia would never have been able to accomplish what she did without Paul, without his support, and without his actual physical presence. And certainly not as happily as she did. -By age 72, Paul was suffering from chest pains. Back in Boston, he underwent heart surgery and suffered several small strokes. He remained weak and groggy. The strokes had affected his brain. "Scrambled brain trouble," Julia called it. -She never......apologized or, you know, left him out or said, "Well, maybe he isn't up to traveling." He was always right there and still taking pictures. And... I think it was quite remarkable, and she kept that up until really he couldn't manage for himself. -As Julia cared for her ailing husband, a new generation of younger chefs was taking center stage. In the 1980s, innovative young chefs continued the culinary revolution that Julia has begun. They tossed aside European pretense and rebelled against traditional rules. -We broke the sound barrier because we threw out all these typical restaurant dishes that were kind of expected. We had the first lady of cooking, and she was just applauding everything we did. And she was like, "Go for it." -But I think that we were all kind of turned on by the energy and the potential of what food could become for this country. -20 years after "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," Julia had liberated herself from the French straightjacket. In her new television series, she emphasized American ingredients, American recipes, and American wines. She got out of the kitchen and got into places where fresh food was harvested and grown. She trawled for crabs, picked dates, and foraged for mushrooms. Julia seemed to be everywhere, even on "Saturday Night Live." -Now, you place the chicken on its stomach and cut along the backbone to the pope's nose like so. Crap! Oh! Oh! Now I've done it. I've cut the dickens out of my finger. -By the time we are treated to that outrageous Dan Aykroyd skit, Julia is a branded commodity in American life. She is an American oral tradition. -First Lady of the Kitchen. -In 1992, Julia celebrated her 80th birthday. The housewife who couldn't cook had transformed America's relationship to food. -Guest of honor. -And America embraced her as a national icon. -When she began her food ministry back in the early '60s, I dare say most of us couldn't tell a leek from a whisk, a coq au vin from a coquilles Saint-Jacques, a beurre blanc from a matre d'.

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-Here's to everybody. And bon apptit. -The accolades kept on coming. Harvard University awarded her an honorary degree. But one person was not there to applaud Julia. After four years in a nursing home, Paul Child died in the spring of 1994. That summer, his extended family gathered at Lopaus Point in Maine, where Paul had first introduced Julia to his family more than 40 years before. The older generation gathered on a ledge, the younger ones on the rocks below. As the wind and the tide carried away the ashes of the man that she had loved for so long, Julia Child was overheard to say, "Goodbye, sweetie." -Mmm. Mmm! There is nothing as good as a great hamburger. -Yes, we're doing everything from hamburgers to chateaubriand today. -We are cooking big. -Mmm! -But Julia kept on going. In her 80s, she made four new cooking series. -And then there's that smart side to her that knew that if you don't keep your face in front of the public, you can be quickly forgotten. And I think that was part of why she would do a new show and another show and even late in life, when she did these shows with master chefs when she really wasn't up to managing a whole show herself. She couldn't resist it. -Hello! I'm Julia Child. Welcome to my house and to my kitchen. -But it was time for a change. Time to move from Cambridge, where she had lived for 40 years, and return to California, the place of her birth. -And then there was probably some other kind of pull. A pull of memory, of nostalgia, familiarity. Her family used to come up to Santa Barbara for summers every year. And they'd all pile into the station wagon with the dog and the, you know -- her brother and her sister and mom and dad and drive up there. And they had a cottage on the ocean. Probably within a mile of where she's living right now. -I think that when, you know, it was time for her to move, she knew it was time to move, and she left at the height of the party. -There's no one like her, and there's no way to replace her. So it was always an honor when she'd come to your restaurant, and it always would electrify the whole restaurant. And so, you know, we miss her. Yeah. -In November 2001, Julia's Kitchen moved to Washington, D.C., to the Smithsonian Institution, the museum that houses America's treasures. -Her power as an icon in our lives is so immense that people respond to her. -This fryer, this roaster... -When you go to the exhibit, you can look at the kitchen. Everybody looks at the kitchen, and they "ooh" and "aah" about the kitchen. Then they stand in front of the video monitors and they watch the old shows. -Very nice. Kick it out and say, "Goodbye." -And they fall in love all over again. And they stand there for hours. -This denizen of the deep! -It's Julia. It's not just the food in the kitchen, it's Julia. -It's finally being understood that Julia created a revolution, that she started something very important in America. And I think it's there as both an homage to the importance of cooking and the importance of this one woman who changed the way that we eat, but also as an important reminder to us all that cooking is very elemental and very basic. And, you know, all you really need is a knife and a pot. -Well, that's all for today on the "The French Chef." This is Julia Child. Bon apptit. -"Julia! America's Favorite Chef" is available on DVD. To order, visit ShopPBS.org or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.