Julia Child: Just a Pinch of Prejudice

One of Julia’s longtime ambitions was to attract more men to the food world. In France, where cooking had the status of a high art, men were the chief players whether or not they actually cooked: It was their talking, writing, and gourmandizing that put cuisine at the center of domestic and national life. In America, by contrast, cooking was traditionally defined as a female preoccupation, hence unworthy of serious attention. Julia had spent years in France trying to win the respect of male culinary authorities, self-appointed and otherwise, and had met with little success on account of her two handicaps: She was American and she was female.

Yet the experience didn’t turn her into a culinary feminist—quite the opposite. She was inclined to see men the way the French did: natural masters in the kitchen, born with an easy confidence at the stove, graced with an understanding of science and logic that guided them smoothly through the preparation of a meal. No matter that most American men couldn’t cook. An aura of maleness in the world of American cookery would be enough to ennoble the whole enterprise, or so she hoped. When William Rice was appointed food editor of the Washington Post in 1972, she cheered. “I’m all for having MEN in these positions; it immediately lifts it out of the housewifery Dullsville category and into the important things of life!” If improvements were under way in American cooking and eating habits, it had to be men who deserved the credit. “Thank heaven for the men in our TV audience,” she remarked in 1966. “They are responsible for stimulating interest in cooking. The women would just pass it over.”

Women were too easily intimidated in the kitchen, Julia believed; they panicked if the recipe called for three tablespoons of lemon juice and they had only two. Men were fearless—in fact, men were accustomed to bullying, she once noted, which could be a very useful trait in the kitchen.

But while she was confident that men would have a good influence on the American home kitchen, their growing visibility in the culinary profession was a touchier subject. Yes, an infusion of talented male chefs was exactly what the profession needed in order to gain stature and respectability. But the ambitious young men taking up cooking included a number of gays, and Julia feared they would soon define the profession, keeping straight men away. “It is like the ballet filled with homosexuals, so no one else wants to go into it.” She urged a few close friends in the food world to encourage the “de-fagification” of cooking, but admitted that she had no idea how to go about it—and besides, “fags” bought plenty of cookbooks, including hers. “What to do!”

What she did, in the end, was generously support the career aspirations of every gifted cook who came her way—male or female, “normal” or not. Her devotion to “real male men” ran deep, but her appreciation for good cooking ran deeper still, and at this level she was entirely free of prejudice. Richard Olney, the moody American writer living on a Provençal hillside whose expertise in French cooking impressed even the French, was a homosexual and not particularly friendly to Julia or most other people; she, in turn, never took to him personally. Yet she gave a press party when he published Simple French Food in 1974, and used all her contacts to help him promote it, simply because his work was so outstanding.

And although she distanced herself from the women’s movement in general, in her own profession she was a feminist in spite of herself. She simply would not put up with any injustice that threatened to deprive the world of a good chef. Julia funded scholarships for female culinary students, encouraged them to write to her about their progress, did a great deal of networking on behalf of young women chefs, and dispensed quantities of advice and encouragement. For her Master Chefs programs, she made a point of inviting male and female chefs in equal numbers; she worked her media connections tirelessly to help cookbook writers she admired.

Julia’s tangled sensibility about sex, gender, and food relaxed a good deal in the warmth of her friendship with James Beard, whom she loved and admired above anyone else in the American culinary world. Beard, a gay man who neither hid nor flaunted his orientation, was widely recognized as the nation’s leading authority on good cooking when Julia set out on her career. She never forgot how generous he was when she arrived on the scene in 1961, a potential rival whom he greeted enthusiastically and introduced to everybody. “I think he has done much to set the tone of friendliness among cooking types, which is so different from that sniping and backbiting that goes on in France,” Julia told her friend, food writer M. F. K. Fisher. “Jim is such a hard worker, has such a vast store of knowledge in that enormous frame. There is outwardly some bluff in him, but I think that is because he is very tender inside.” She used to say he was “cozy”—one of her favorite qualities in a man. Julia rarely commented on Beard’s homosexuality; she was far more concerned about the various health problems associated with his weight. Yet her homophobia came and went during their long friendship, apparently at random. “Good that people are out of the closet at last!” she noted in her journal in 1974, upon learning that an acquaintance was openly gay. “Makes things easier all around.” A year later, she was agitating to keep “them” out of the culinary business.

But by the 1980s, when the AIDS crisis began to unfold, the horror of what was happening to people she knew, and people she loved, dealt a significant blow to her longtime prejudice. “Last year my husband and I stood by helplessly while a dear and beloved friend went through months of slow and frightening agony,” she told a crowd at the Boston Garden in 1988 during an AIDS benefit sponsored by the American Institute of Wine and Food. “But what of those lonely ones? The ones with no friends or family to ease the slow pain of dying? Those are the people we’re concerned about this evening. And food is of very special importance here. Good food is also love.”

Her politics, her passions, and her fundamental decency were coming together at last. Some time after that, when a woman friend told her she was in love and about to marry another woman, Julia blanched for a second and then congratulated her warmly. What was important was the team.

Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from the forthcoming book Julia Child by Laura Shapiro. Copyright © 2007 by Laura Shapiro.