15 things you probably didn't know about Julia Child (2024)

Advertisem*nt

Julia Child had multiple nicknames growing up, including "Juke," "Juju," and "Jukies."

Born Julia McWilliams, Child was the oldest of three children. Her parents, John McWilliams Jr. and Julia Carolyn Weston, provided a privileged upbringing for their children.

According to Biography.com, McWilliams was a Princeton alumna and an early investor in California real estate, while Julia's mother was the heiress to a paper company and the daughter of a Massachusetts politician.

Advertisem*nt

Julia Child was over 6 feet tall.

When she attended the elite Katherine Branson School for Girls in San Francisco, she was already 6 feet 2 inches tall — the tallest girl in her class, according to Biography.

In 1942, Child attempted to join the military, but they turned her away for being too tall — the Women's Army Corps required recruits to be no taller than 6 feet tall.

Advertisem*nt

Growing up, Child wanted to be a writer, not a chef.

According to Biography, when Child enrolled at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, she had aspirations of becoming a famous author.

She even submitted multiple manuscripts to The New Yorker and wrote short plays in her spare time. However, none of her early work was published.

Advertisem*nt

Julia Child later worked as a central intelligence assistant during World War II and developed a shark repellant used in war.

After graduating, moving to New York, and being fired from her job in the advertising department of home furnishings company W. & J. Sloane, Child moved to Washington, DC.

Once she arrived, she began volunteering as a research assistant for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a newly formed government intelligence agency that would eventually become the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). According to History.com, in her interview notes, the following was written about her: "Good impression, pleasant, alert, capable, very tall."

During her time at the OSS, Child developed a shark repellant and facilitated the communication of important, top-secret documents between US government officials and their intelligence officers.

Advertisem*nt

While she was famous for French cooking, she also loved Chinese food.

While living and working on wartime assignments in China during World War II, Child fell in love with the local cuisine.

"American food in China was terrible...The Chinese food was wonderful, and we ate out as often as we could," Child once told The Wall Street Journal. "That is when I became interested in food. I just loved Chinese food."

Advertisem*nt

Julia Child fell in love with French food — and her soulmate — late in life.

Julia Child's story goes to show that it's never too late to discover your passion in life. She married her husband, Paul Child, after meeting through the OSS at the age of 34, which was considered unusually late in life in the 1940s.

According to Biography, after Paul was given a job at the American Embassy in Paris, the two moved to France and Julia Child's love for French cuisine grew.

"The whole experience was an opening up of the soul and spirit for me ... I was hooked, and for life, as it turned out," she said.

Advertisem*nt

In 1950, Julia Child attended Le Cordon Bleu cooking school.

After moving to Paris, Child began taking cooking lessons at one of the most prestigious culinary schools in the world, Le Cordon Bleu in Paris.

She trained for six months in the art of French cooking, during which time she took private lessons from chef Max Bugnard. According to Biography, after she graduated, she started her own cooking school along with two other Le Cordon Bleu students, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, called L'Ecole de Trois Gourmandes or "The School of the Three Gourmands."

Advertisem*nt

It took Child nine years to finish her first — and most famous — cookbook, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking."

Child worked alongside Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle to begin writing the cookbook that would change her life forever and bring French cuisine into American households.

The book was eventually published in 1961 after multiple rewrites, years of testing and retesting recipes, and setbacks. The book quickly became a bestseller.

Advertisem*nt

The first dish Julia Child cooked on screen was an omelet.

To promote her new book, Child appeared on a live TV program and demonstrated how to cook an omelet. Viewers quickly fell in love with the cheery, personable chef with the unique voice, and Child was soon offered her very own show, "The French Chef," on a Boston educational television station.

The program ran for 10 years, after which Child continued to star in multiple other TV shows and publish more cookbooks.

Julia Child's signature dishes include beef bourguignon, French onion soup, and coq au vin.

One of the very first episodes of "The French Chef" featured Child cooking beef bourguignon. The dish, which takes more than six hours to prepare, would eventually become practically synonymous with Child.

Advertisem*nt

Child famously loved butter — during the filming of her "Baking with Julia" series, she used a total of 753 pounds of butter in her dishes.

Child perhaps loved it so much that when she had a rose named after her, she chose a bright, butter-colored one, according to PBS.

"The only time to eat diet food is while you're waiting for the steak to cook," Child famously said.

In 1993, Julia Child became the first woman inducted into the Culinary Institute of America's Hall of Fame.

Child starred in eight television cooking series and published 11 cookbooks. For 40 years, she was considered America's leading chef and one of the first-ever celebrity chefs.

Advertisem*nt

President George W. Bush presented Julia Child with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2003.

The prestigious honor came just two years after Child was awarded France's highest honor, the Legion of Honor.

Advertisem*nt

Child's last meal before she passed away was homemade French onion soup.

Just two days before her 92nd birthday in 2004, Julia Child died of kidney failure at her assisted-living home in Montecito, California.

She kept a relatively active lifestyle up until a month before her death, frequenting farmers' markets and eating at restaurants multiple times per week, according to the LA Times.

"In this line of work ... you keep right on till you're through ... Retired people are boring," she once said.

However, when Child began experiencing health issues, she was forced to slow down. According to the LA Times, her last meal was a bowl of homemade French onion soup prepared by her longtime assistant, Stephanie Hersh.

"She was the grand dame of cooking," cookbook author Marion Cunningham told The Times. "She brought more people to the kitchen that had never thought of going into the kitchen. She has never been matched on television. She was humorous. She could just arrest your attention. Whatever that magic is, she had it, and it is so rare."

Advertisem*nt

However, you can still visit her kitchen at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

The kitchen from her Cambridge, Massachusetts, home was deconstructed and moved to the museum in 2001, three years before Child's death. Visitors to the museum can take photos of the cheerful kitchen, which the chef called the "beating heart and social center of her household."