DVD set shows how Julia Child paved way for today's TV chefs

Would Julia Child make it on today's food TV shows? I wondered this as I viewed a three-disc DVD set called "Julia Child! The French Chef" (WGBH Boston, $39.95).

The first disc is a biography, with clips, photos and commentary by people such as Ruth Reichl, editor of Gourmet magazine; Boston chef Jasper White; and Judith Jones, the editor who talked publisher Alfred Knopf into publishing Child's first book, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking."

There are some fun anecdotes from Child's youth, as well as the tale of how she met her future husband, Paul, while working for the Office of Strategic Services in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) during World War II.

He remarked in a letter to his twin brother that she was "a sloppy thinker" and that her "gasping and giggling" mannerisms got on his nerves. But gradually, they fell in love. A couple of things stand out in the DVDs: Child was not a natural-born cook. She didn't know her way around a kitchen until she was well into her 30s, and she had to work at it. And her greatest champion was Paul, a sophisticated gourmet who encouraged her attempts to cook, write her first cookbook and to pioneer the first TV cooking shows.

I was reminded of a telephone interview I had with Child a year before her death in 2004. She told how she and her co-author, Simone Beck, embarked on a do-it-yourself tour when her first book came out. They went from city to city, demonstrating their recipes to interested groups. Then, while they received their audience and signed books, Paul Child washed the dishes.

The other two discs contain 12 episodes of Child's PBS television series "The French Chef," some in black and white. There's not a lot of glitz or glamour. Child is unpretentious, energetically slapping around huge hunks of raw beef, pounding butter with a rolling pin to soften it, and putting her whole body into hand-beating egg whites in a copper bowl.

With her matronly height and warbling voice, how would she fit in with today's carefully scripted episodes?

She didn't have the sophisticated air of Martha Stewart, the beauty of Sandra Lee or Giada di Laurentiis, the "Bam!" of Emeril or Rachael Ray's perkiness.

Some of her attention-getting attempts seem a bit amateurish — clanking two frying-pan lids together like cymbals when she compared coq au vin and chicken fricassee or doing a riff on the Three Bears when showing loaves of brioche.

But the shows are packed with solid, timeless information. You see step by step how to make such classics as quiche Lorraine, pot au feu and petits fours.

Thanks to "Saturday Night Live" and other parodies, the public often assumed Child was a klutz. But watching the shows, you realize she's actually very nimble on technique — cracking and opening an egg with one hand without ever losing any bits of shell in the bowl, or skillfully using a pastry bag.

I never saw Child's shows when they originally aired; I was a kid and probably too busy watching "My Three Sons" or "Leave It to Beaver."

But I recently had an e-mail conversation with Marge Aten of Clinton, a Deseret Morning News reader who regularly watched Child. I asked her how Child's shows compared to today's crop of TV chefs.

"Give me Julia Child any day," Aten said. "She was a great cook and entertaining to watch."

And she paved the way for everyone who followed.

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E-mail: vphillips@desnews.com