When Julia Child moved to Paris in 1948, she didn’t know a lick of French. For the then-36-year-old expat wasn’t yet the Julia Child—the one who would go on to single-handedly bring French cuisine to the masses with her seminal cookbooks and cooking shows. The Pasadena native grew up with a family chef and barely knew how to scramble an egg. But when her husband Paul accepted a government job promoting French-American relations through the arts, Child packed her bags for Paris and never looked back.
“Surrounded by gorgeous food, wonderful restaurants, a kitchen at home—and an appreciative audience in my husband—I began to cook more and more,” Child wrote in her posthumously-released 2006 memoir, My Life in France. “I fell in love with French food—the tastes, the processes, the history, the endless variations, the rigorous discipline, the creativity, the wonderful people, the equipment, the rituals…”
Those years in Paris marked a crucial period of transformation for Child. She discovered a deep admiration for French cuisine, found her true calling as a chef at Le Cordon Bleu, and met future collaborators like the legendary cooking teacher Simone Beck. She may not have initially spoken the language or known any Parisians, but it didn’t take long for the city to imprint on her as it has so many others.
“Those early years in France were among the best of my life,” Child wrote. “I had such fun that I could hardly stop moving long enough to catch my breath—I loved the people, the food, the lay of the land, the civilized atmosphere, and the generous pace of life.”
Child remains an indelible figure in the public’s imagination, continuing to inspire a new generation of aspiring chefs and wannabe Francophiles. Meryl Streep earned an Oscar nom playing Child in 2009’s Julie & Julia, an adaptation of My Life in France centered around her pre-fame years in Paris. The English actress Sarah Lancashire currently plays Child in the Max original series Julia, which picks up where Julie & Julia left off with the publication of 1961’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Child’s wildly influential first cookbook. Regardless of how you first encountered Child—via Streep and Lancashire’s interpretations, reruns of The French Chef, or that infamous Saturday Night Live sketch—it’s impossible not to fall for her charms.
