She described her first experiences eating French food, particularly a pressed duck she ate the day she arrived in France. “I was hooked from then on,” she said. “The thing is I had just started in cooking. And then to have this wonderful food as they had there—because in America, we had Duncan Hines cake mixes and Jell-O. I mean, American food was very sort of like Ladies Magazine food. And then to have the French food was just wonderful. So I never turned back. I hadn’t been turned on by anything until I got into French food, and that really turned me on. Particularly, in that the chefs took it with such interest, it was a real art form with history in the background.”
Additional Interviews With Julia Child
Julia and her husband Paul Child spoke with Richard Bacon for a 1979 story in Yankee Magazine.
Child talked about her early days of cooking and how cooking has changed since the 1960s in a 1989 interview with Terry Gross for NPR’s “Fresh Air.”
Child spoke to Polly Frost for Interview Magazine in the summer of 1989. She expressed her opinions on many topics, including healthy eating, animal rights, and cooking education. “I’d like for people to be able to go to the universities and get a degree in fine arts-gastronomy,” she said. “[What’s] needed are people who can be leaders in the profession—which they can’t be without an education. You need to be very well educated in languages and history and art. You need aesthetics, as well as chemistry and other things.”
To learn more about Julia Child, read her profile on findingDulcinea.
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