Primary Source #3: Julia Child's Coq Au Vin

What a 1964 episode of The French Chef revealed about the evolution of the medium

Mar 12, 2024

As I count down to the end of my dissertation journey over the next six weeks, I’m sharing one of my favorite primary sources per chapter for your reading enjoyment, to encourage you to give it a look and consider each source’s implications. This week, a snapshot from a portion of my second chapter, which puts Julia Child and The French Chef in the context of the period.

I know that some might consider it sacrilege to say that Julia Child was anything less than a total genius, especially when her arrival in the American culinary landscape broke the mold for what food content could be. And perhaps her television show, The French Chef, would have been a break-out success on any station, in any time-slot, in any era of culinary culture. But historians like to focus on the conditions that transform content into culture, and in my dissertation, I try to put Julia in the context she deserves—debuting on an educational station that was ready to experiment with the medium of television, in a city that was ripe for gastronomic reinvention (see “Recommended Reading” for my favorite source on this), in front of a local audience of highly educated, sophisticated, and influential women. In short, as much as Julia Child was a phenomenon in her own right, her success was absolutely shaped by the historical conditions of her debut on the culinary scene.

This chapter was the first one I drafted for my dissertation, and the one that I had to reimagine critically during the revising process. I spent much of my first draft setting up the evidence of the historical conditions at WGBH-TV, in Boston, and among the Cantabrigians, and dedicated almost no time to Julia herself. To be honest, I wasn’t sure I had anything new to say—so many brilliant scholars have already contributed so much to our insights on Julia, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and The French Chef, and Julia herself wrote a definitive account of her career in My Life in France. I cited all of these authors and many, many more ad nauseum, but realized that without observing Child myself, watching her with fresh eyes in light of the context I had established, it would be clear just how much she was an innovator of the form because of, rather than in spite of, the many people who made her work and her success possible.

After thinking about the conditions shaping the reception of her show, I sat down and watched, for the first time in a long time, a full episode of The French Chef, a 1964 episode on coq au vin that revealed how the choices made by Child and the show’s camera operators bridged a gap between the known-knowns of gourmet cuisine and the skills required of a home cook. The episode began with a “cold open,” which immediately launches viewers into the pedagogical takeaway, translating the framing text of a recipe headnote into a visual enticement to prepare the dish. The camera fades in on a close-up of a countertop covered with ingredients—the professional setup of a kitchen known as mise-en-place. Julia’s voiceover comes warbling in as the camera pans from left to right: “To the delicious aroma of sizzling bacon, add chicken and garlic and herbs and mushrooms and onions and red wine … and what do you have? Coq au vin, one of the most delicious chicken dishes you’ve ever put in your mouth.” By beginning with the sensory, then moving to the visual (tapping each ingredient with a spatula as it is named), and finally to the reveal of the dish’s name, she offers an invitation rather than a mandate to learn.

She then transitions to the reasons why the dish should be prepared, first acknowledging that viewers might have a basic familiarity with the dish from their past visits to French restaurants, giving them credit for their sophisticated dining tastes. In enumerating the dish’s best qualities—”it’s easy to do and a great party dish”— after laying out its inherent pleasures and sophistication, Julia already signals to viewers that she values their tastes, time, and emotional investments in what they cook. Her demand is not to have viewers become enlightened by their encounter with a new dish, but newly engaged in the pedagogy of home cooking. She’s not speaking to a bunch of plebs, but to a deeply informed and sophisticated audience.

Even from a twenty-first-century viewer’s perspective, Julia is unusually active and descriptive throughout the program and eager to fill viewers in on the logic of her process. Before browning the chicken in rendered bacon fat, she explains that she blanched the bacon first “so to remove all of the bacony smoky taste. … because if you didn’t, the dish would taste like bacon, and it’s supposed to taste like chicken in red wine.” During this explanation, the camera cuts from the close-up on her hands holding up a piece of chicken and stirring the blanched bacon, then back to a medium shot to capture her disdainful expression at the thought of a dish tasting inappropriately like bacon. In this fashion, the camera facilitates Julia’s pedagogical approach: to give the reader a sense of how to handle cooking materials in their home kitchen, with a firm footing in clear and justifiable culinary logic. This is an educational program through and through.

As she cooks, Julia offers details that take viewers far beyond the dish in question, giving them a foundation in the principles of French cooking rather than a single recipe to replicate. For example, she explains that chicken purchased from an American store would likely be “sawed apart” rather than cleanly disjointed, making it “rather hard to brown and rather hard to eat.” As she points out the bones left in each piece of sawed-apart chicken, viewed in close-up, Julia suggests that viewers learn to “fix it up at home,” making it “easier to brown and easier to eat.” Her muscular demonstration of how to take apart a chicken—with good sharp knives, “because you just can’t do anything in cooking if you don’t have them”—invites readers to seize knowledge that would free them from the constraints of the grocery store. “None of this you have to do,” Julia concedes, “but I think it makes a prettier chicken, and it’s much easier to eat.” In this fashion she was speaking back to countless women who for decades had felt as though they were being held hostage by the whims of the American consumer marketplace, and had to accept the inferior products offered to them by local retailers. By treating the labor of cooking as a means of self-determination, Julia signals that she values the home cook’s time as well as their talents.

As Julia prepares to brown the chicken, the camera shifted to a wide shot, showing the electric frying pan full of blanched bacon lardons. She immediately recognizes and acknowledges a mistake, saying she should’ve taken the bacon out of the pan before adding the chicken. Still, she proceeds to scoop it out without a moment’s hesitation, adding that “it will eventually go back in the pan,” proof that her process is far from absolute and requires a degree of improvisation. Throughout the demonstration, she shifts seamlessly between three pans, juggling the chicken, pearled onions, and mushrooms without hesitation. As she does so, she tells viewers that, in cooking the vegetables, they should aim for a “covered sweat” (“or sueur as they say in France”). Though her translation is technically correct, its descriptiveness matters far more: Julia uses an evocative phrase in English to provide viewers a degree of sensorial familiarity, and an all-important visual indicator for them to use as they replicate the dish on their own stovetops.

Lastly, and perhaps the most significant proof of her power as a WGBH-TV star, Julia is not afraid to play to the camera. As she adds a dash of brandy to the pan and set it aflame, Julia acknowledges that it’s not “something you have to, and I don’t know if it does much except make people feel good, but it’s sort of fun, and it’s part of the classical recipe.” By validating the emotional response to food, and demonstrating the pageantry inherent to a collaborative pedagogical model, Julia signals her affinity with the popular cooking programs of the day. On some level, she always knew that she belonged to a larger canon of culinary culture, and believed that cooking had to keep an audience’s attention to be appreciated. Her choices, however, were not just about what looked good, but also what viewers should have in their culinary arsenals. Though she cautions that the flaming brandy is only worthwhile if using good French cognac (lest they try this “awful rotgut stuff that says ‘brandy’ but tastes terrible”), she knows that anyone reproducing her recipes at home would be keen to add a flambé to their repertoire. With that single flame, Julia proves that The French Chef is entirely at home at WGBH-TV—representing highly advanced culinary skills while offering some pageantry and experimentation that only the best station could support. She concludes on a note of false modesty, shrugging and saying, “That’s all there is to it. It isn’t really very complicated, although I think just the name coq au vin sounds as though it were.”

It might not be clear from this single episode, but embedded in Julia’s instructive dialogue was a subtle critique of the food media landscape she hoped to change. “I think a lot of people get awfully mixed up,” she said, “because they don’t know how the chicken is put together, and they get confused when they have this piece left over for them.” By underlining the idea that the home cook’s confusion was not due to innate stupidity or laziness, but a simple lack of information, Julia endorsed the idea that there is a direct link between the formal pursuit of culinary knowledge and the personal enjoyment of food. Her goal was to teach viewers not only how to get a dish on the table, but was to become freshly and actively engaged with one’s culinary education. In that short aside, Julia and WGBH-TV offered a mission statement as to how their show would be from other cooking shows, and by leading with an approach that honored rather than dictated to viewers’ tastes and interests, they demonstrated what televised culinary pedagogy could achieve.

I’d love to hear what you notice as you watch The French Chef, and how you think it fits into the cooking shows that came before and after it…stay tuned for next week, when I look at the science-centric culture of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s!

French Fries and Martinis

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