The Julia Child Project: The Cold War, France, and the Politics of Food

Relations between the US and France were at a low point in the 1960s. Although still a popular tourist destination and a cherished source of art and culture, France was becoming equally well known for other reasons. Its divisive internal politics, shaped by a spectacularly violent, and futile, effort to hold onto colonial possessions, particularly in Algeria, and its slow, plodding, postwar economic recovery, dominated current events coverage. Indeed, the same 1966 issue of Time Magazine that featured Julia Child on its cover also included an article on France’s efforts to prop up its “underdeveloped” economy.1 And it was hard to miss the unmistakable resentment of Americans and US leadership—called “Gaullism.” In one celebrated incident, Charles de Gaulle demanded that all American soldiers leave French soil. US Secretary of State Dean Rusk, reflecting many Americans’ sense that the US had earned French gratitude, responded by asking if de Gaulle would like to begin by disinterring the American soldiers who had died there during World War II. By 1968, student protests had fueled a general strike and toppled de Gaulle’s regime. In other words, the images of France encountered by Americans who were paying attention to foreign affairs—a demographic that neatly overlapped with WGBH’s audience—were of a fractious and unstable nation, desperately working to reassert global influence.

In the midst of this, Julia Child appeared on American TVs and urged people to make their asparagus “the French way.” Indeed, she encouraged “the French way” of cooking repeatedly; The French Chef was a mainstay of public television programming, an important component of families’ evening viewing and a catalyst for afternoon cooking plans. What could Child possibly have meant by this project, given that France itself seemed increasingly uninviting? Why would French cooking have taken off in the US at the moment that the French empire seemed so unstable?

Answering these questions helps appreciate a new aspect of Julia Child’s famous show. In the context of the 1960s, we can see how Child presented cooking as a unifying, ennobling force in the face of profound change: disintegrating gender and sexual norms, the “quagmire” of French and then American efforts in Vietnam and southeast Asia, and the ethnic and racial tensions that characterized life in both countries. The French Chef presented France as a trustworthy arbiter of taste, the origin point for techniques and that were truly universal. It made an argument for French culinary authority and American know-how as she and her viewers navigated a world in which French authority was increasingly strained and even the United States seemed unstable. Her promotion of French food reinforced a longstanding Cold War message—the importance of cooking itself.

Julia Child and her oeuvre are often celebrated as offering a break from politics. Most biographies frame Child as exceptional: someone who escaped the narrowness of mid-century culture, broadened career possibilities for women, taught Americans a new sense of taste, and led them to re-value food and cooking.2 These accomplishments are typically ascribed to her remarkable personality, her contagious enthusiasm, and her power to motivate people to attempt new dishes. As Laura Shapiro writes, "Julia was the only professional on screen whose appeal sprang directly from her own personality. . .."3

Undeniably, Child had a powerful personality and a commitment to making French cooking accessible. She became a media sensation and paved the way for subsequent chefs, including female chefs, to become celebrities in their own right. But neither she nor Americans’ increased attention to food and serving can be entirely explained by her unique personality and skill. In fact, Child’s career was the result of the same Cold War currents that pushed so many Americans in unforeseen directions. Her story connects two important Cold War themes—geopolitics and cooking. In so doing, she lent new significance to this seemingly inward-facing, domestic, endeavor.

Julia Child’s adult life was deeply shaped by America’s emergence a global geopolitical power. As has by now been well documented, Julia Child worked for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. This was the forerunner of the CIA. It’s not clear that she herself ever engaged in covert operations directly. Rather, she coordinated the cataloguing and distribution of information sent in by operatives and wartime government employees. Nonetheless the career was crucial for her. It allowed her to leave her father’s house and it propelled her into overseas life. Not to France—but to India and then to China. Here she learned a sense of purpose—doing paid work that clearly mattered in the world. There was little in her upper-class background to prepare for this and she took to it immediately.4

But she also took to the new colleagues she met—many of whom became lifelong friends and one of whom became her husband. Paul Child, like many employees of the OSS, had led something of a Bohemian life before the war—living abroad, working as an artist and then an art teacher, and openly having affairs. He was not smitten by Julia at first, but slowly, over the course of their work and travels, they became a couple. Paul Child and the social world of artists and intellectuals that she met propelled Julia’s career. The OSS gave Julia access to a world of intellectual excitement, with exotic food at the center of sociality and mixed-sex pleasures.

Both Julia and Paul left the OSS after the war, but kept their association with the government. Paul Child became an exhibits officer with the USIA (the United States Information Agency) and was placed first in Paris, then Marseille, then the German city of Bonn, and finally in Oslo. Paul retired in 1961 after a career of arranging and overseeing cultural events designed to shore up America’s reputation abroad.

While Paul was working in the diplomatic corps—between 1948 and 1960—Julia laid the groundwork for her culinary career. She studied at the Cordon Bleu and took private cooking lessons with one of its most prominent chefs, began a cooking school and a collaboration with other women chefs that would last most of her life. She researched, developed, discussed, revised, and fixed ways of preparing classic and everyday French food—practicing first on Paul, then with students at her cooking school, sharing recipes with friends and associates who were part of the diplomatic corps and security state, and finally modifying recipes for American cooks. She took on the manuscript that would become her signature piece, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Politics and diplomacy were the necessary, if not the sufficient, causes of her cooking career. Julia Child had access to French cooking and French food largely because of a wartime and then postwar system of diplomacy. She learned to cook, and about cooking, and about France, as a direct result of the emergence of the American security state and in the context of the social world of the workers in that state. It is hard to imagine what would have happened to Child without the war and without the postwar diplomatic apparatus. In other words, Paul and Julia’s belief in the power of culture, including cooking, was part of postwar diplomacy.

In this, they were in good company. Many State Department employees promoted cultural activities as key diplomatic endeavors. Jazz tours, art exhibits, visiting lectures by American academics—all were sponsored by American officials in the belief that art needed to stand at the center of Americans’ efforts abroad. These campaigns were powerful vehicles for diplomatic energies and ambitions throughout the State Department, even if they did not always result in more positive feelings about the United States.5

Paul and Julia reflected this belief in the power of culture. Even as Paul despaired of the constraints and the endless bureaucratic red tape and office politics that shaped every exhibition or event he organized, he and Julia pursued artistic endeavors, intellectual life, and music wherever they went. Neither ever questioned that these could and indeed should occupy positions of central importance in everyday life and in state strategies. Julia Child’s commitment to cooking was forged in this community and in this moment.

Their approach to fighting the Cold War via culture helped produce Child’s breakthrough cookbook—Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Even her recipe development reflects this. In note after note sent to her friend, editor, and muse Avis DeVoto, Child decried the excesses of McCarthyism and worried for the future of the kind of cultural diplomacy and broad-minded humanism in which Paul was engaged—in-between questions about what types of vegetables were available to American housewives. She tested her recipes on diplomatic corps workers and older friends from her days in the OSS who came to dinner and stayed for hours. This network of friends, supporters, and guests, many of them associated with the Cold War state, were the testing grounds for Child’s recipes.

They also were the testing grounds for ideas about the broader function of food. For the Childs, eating French food facilitated thoughtful social encounters and cultural experience that broadened one’s outlook. Letters and journals document both the food and also the exciting, lengthy, socializing that inevitably accompanied it.6 Paul reported in virtually every letter to his brother (and he wrote nearly every day) about what was consumed or prepared for their guests, nearly all of whom were attached to the State Department, diplomatic service or the international arts scene. After a typical January 1953 dinner party, Paul wrote “John Val Fey [a British economist] came over for dinner along with Charlie Motley and Dorothea Speyer [both embassy employees] . . . Wine, the great mellower helped and of course there was Julie's superb food. All the people were unpretentious, well-mannered, formulated and attractive in their different ways. They all like food, they all like Paris, and they all felt free to trade ideas and enthusiasms and experiences without prejudice or rancor or dogma."7 Captured in this account is a crucial moment in Julia Child’s cooking: her accessible but ambitious home cooking coming into its own alongside a politics of pluralist, liberal, internationalist Americanism. This work, these meals, mattered to that world of high politics and to the marriages, affairs, conversations, and friendships that kept it going.

Julia Child brought the case for carefully prepared, socially adventurous food to the American public in a big way. Her cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, was published by Knopf in the fall of 1961 and became a bestseller almost immediately, surpassing even her highest hopes. Later that year, she began taping pilot episodes of The French Chef—a new cooking show for the relatively new Boston public television station WGBH. Within minutes of that pilot episode’s broadcast, the station was flooded with calls demanding the recipe she had used and also demanding more episodes.8 WGBH complied and Child produced dozens of shows that were then distributed via the growing network of public television stations across the country. She wrote more cookbooks and did more television in the 1970s and 1980s. She was increasingly influential and honored among cooks, both in the US and even in France, which inducted her into L’Ordre du Mérite Agricole in 1966, and L’Ordre National du Mérite in 1976. Child has emerged as one of the most beloved of all food personalities—emblematic of what was best about elaborate meals: warmth, everyday good sense, a celebration of good taste, and joyful cooking labor.

It was her show, as much as her cookbook, that cemented this persona. Whereas Mastering the Art of French Cooking was precise, straightforward, and famously comprehensive, The French Chef conveyed spontaneity. Broadcasts were peppered with off-hand remarks that revealed Child’s thinking about the food she was preparing. Unlike the edited, polished cookbook text, the television show revealed the unbounded enthusiasm, energy and the zest Child applied to French food.

Because of its more wide-ranging themes, the show also helps us to connect Julia Child’s approach to France and to events of the 1960s and 1970s. Sometimes Child exhibited unashamed chauvinism—a privileging of French cuisine above all others (even American). This comes through most clearly in treatment of ingredients or dishes that were already familiar to her audience. In a show decrying Americans’ lack of respect for vegetables, Child explained that the problem was simply that they hadn’t learned the proper techniques. She assured viewers that they would enjoy vegetables more if prepared “in the French manner.” An episode on lobster explained how to choose and kill lobster without much acknowledging that WGBH’s audience of Bostonians might have ever prepared lobster before, let alone done it differently. In all of these cases, Child emphasized the improvement that French techniques would bring to mundane American lives. At the conclusion of one episode, Child pointed out that “if you follow this French method so that they’re beautiful to look at and tender and fresh to eat, your family will feel like honored guests.”9

Child remained attached to France as the apex of valuable cultural traditions even in the face of evidence (and dishes) that pointed to other countries’ importance. In the episode on Lasagne à la Français, Child showed little regard for the origins of, or even contemporary approaches, to the dish she was preparing. She encouraged viewers to use lasagna as a repository for whatever leftovers they had on hand, relied on a white sauce as the main binder (tomato sauce simply went over the top) and repeatedly remarked on her lack of expertise in Italian cooking—even shamelessly admitting that she could never remember the name of the Italian cheese often used (it was ricotta).10 Viewers were irate at what seemed to many a mockery of an Italian classic. So many wrote in that Child and her staff created a form letter rather than writing individual responses to each angry note. Even here, Child refused to back down from her insistence on the centrality of French cuisine: “We should be grateful to the Italians for inventing lasagna-shaped pasta, and to the French for their fine cooking methods that make such a splendid dish possible.”11 Here as elsewhere, French cuisine remained the basis from which all others were constructed.

Often though it was not explicit privileging of French food that occupied Child so much as its foreignness, its difference. She made a point of explaining herbs that were associated with Provence and Mediterranean cooking (e.g., tarragon) and urged viewers to firmer understanding of the practices of Provencal cooking, including adding garlic whenever possible. She devoted an entire episode to Bouillabaisse, introducing it as a distinctively Marseillese dish, as “loud, colorful, and authoritative” as the city’s residents.12 For Child as for her many of her viewers in the mid-1960s, French food,and all of its complexity, was introduced as a way of experiencing foreignness.13

French food also upheld a Eurocentric cultural hierarchy that Julia Child fully embraced. She forwarded an image of France as an arbiter of cultural status—of “good taste” a term I mean literally and figuratively—as a gastronomic quality that also conveyed social distinctions. She painstakingly explained the difference between haute cuisine, bourgeois food, and peasant food and while she celebrated all three versions of food, she never let viewers forget that these were carefully calibrated differences. Similarly, she always discussed the regional origins and differences of the dishes she made. And every episode closed with a scene in which Child discussed how a dish ought to be served and with what wine. This reinforced the breadth of French “taste” making clear that it extended beyond cooking. Serving, eating, presenting, and socializing also occurred around food. Each episode of The French Chef, conveyed a global cosmopolitanism, centered in detailed and concrete knowledge.

Another way of saying this is that the Frenchness of the food mattered deeply to the food she was teaching. The second series of The French Chef, broadcast beginning in 1970, reveled in presenting the French origins of food. In these, Child regularly included footage of France itself. Scenes of markets, bakers, restaurants, ports, etc. emphasized the role of tradition in French food and its food system. In the episode on Bouillabaisse, for instance, Child opened with a scene filmed in a Marseille fish market — the sort of site that would have seemed decidedly old-fashioned to many Americans who had been buying fish from retail outlets for decades. Later in the episode she returned to a scene of fish being caught; while she was sure to explain that a new and modern port was right next door, she emphasized the generations of fishermen who plied Marseille’s waters and the wheeled carts they used to transport them to the women (identified here as their wives) who sold them in the market.

This emphasis on unchanging French tradition hearkened back to the country’s reputation as a cultural touchstone for Americans. French food had long had particular cachet among restaurant goers and would-be gourmets.14 The historian Whitney Walton has argued that American students who traveled to France through the 20th century returned as emissaries of its culture. And even Americans who never traveled there were likely to have encountered allusions to French art, design, and of course also food. In this way, Child was echoing what some viewers would have long valued about France.15

However, in the 1960s and 1970s, those longstanding views of France and the value of French culture was a harder sell. The country had undergone wrenching political change. In the 1950s, wartime leader Charles de Gaulle retired from politics, and the subsequent and short-lived 4th Republic attempted to oversee a crumbling empire. Resistance by French colonists to Algerian independence movements forced the return of de Gaulle who then established the 5th Republic,—and after prolonged and bloody resistance, finally oversaw Algeria’s independence in 1962.16

Relations with the US were particularly fraught. De Gaulle’s policy of “Gaullism” was predicated on asserting France’s geopolitical authority in the face of the United States’ efforts to coordinate the defense and military policies of its European allies. De Gaulle was personally off-putting, critical of American campaigns in Vietnam, unwilling to adhere to plans for US-led NATO or indeed to any US-led international body. Long-simmering anti-Americanism in France bubbled to the surface, so much so that even Americans visiting France frequently encountered the sentiment.17 In other words, viewers of The French Chef would have encountered a very different view of France.

Viewers of The French Chef were especially likely to have had contemporary events in mind. On WGBH, the show was broadcast just after the nightly news and just before evening arts programming (e.g., Kenneth Clark’s “Civilization”). In its scheduled slot, The French Chef, was a kind of segue from the world of politics to the world of art. Both the evening time slot in which the show was broadcast and its placement on public affairs-minded educational television increased the odds that viewers would have disturbing images of political affairs and of France itself in mind.18 Both literally and figuratively, The French Chef stood between the worlds of Cold War politics and high-minded art.

Contextualizing The French Chef in the WGBH programming schedule is way to contextualize it in its historic moment. Americans who watched Child buy fish in Marseille in 1970 would likely have watched the news that night and been reminded of the disastrous effects of a war that de Gaulle and France seemed to have both caused (in their handling of Southeast Asia’s decolonization) and also criticized. Two years earlier, as Child herself was battening down the hatches in her Provence home while France’s famous “Mai 68” movement shook Paris, viewers would have seen repeated episodes from Child’s first series nearly juxtaposed with images of Parisian streets in disarray, as brick-wielding protestors demanded change. The day that the Bouillabaisse episode was first broadcast, President Richard Nixon presented a five-point plan for peace to the North Vietnamese, who quickly rejected it. France was a complex, volatile place, whether Child’s viewers wanted it that way or not.

In the context of Julia Child’s life as well contemporary events, The French Chef can be understood as about much more than new recipes and Child’s enthusiasm for cooking. Child’s cookbook and especially her television show also participated in global politics. The French Chef offered a compelling view of France’s cultural authority and the possibilities of Franco-US alliance in Americans’ kitchens. Amidst calls to boycott French wine, Julia Child offered a way of appreciating France without sacrificing American dominance. In a moment when ideas about France were omnipresent, but contradictory—valorizing “French” food even as events like decolonization and immigration challenged notions of Frenchness—Child offered a clarity of vision that centered exotic but accessible France and extensive home cooking as the sites around which Americans, and their relationship with the world, could cohere.

What makes The French Chef significant and impactful, I want to argue, is precisely this. What people saw about food and France in other places make the show instructive to us and made it important at the time. Child’s success should be explained in this context—not (only) of a reawakening of Americans’ tastes and not only the force of her own warm personality, but also a moment in which food became increasingly important, in new ways, to the markers of responsible citizenship through American life, in settings that ranged from the public to the intimate. These images on The French Chef—like images on the nightly news—asked for engagement with a broader world but positioned viewers as people who could do so from a distance, relying on American know-how and techniques. The French Chef's existence points to gourmet food and home cooking's significance in new global politics of American life.

Siting Julia Symposium
For Julia Child’s 100th birthday, the Radcliffe Institute organized a symposium of scholars, friends, and researchers. The last session focused specifically on her television work, although many will find the sessions on her life in Paris and in Cambridge also of interest.

Julia Child’s Archive
Julia Child donated her personal archive to the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute. Her collections are voluminous, including research materials, scripts from her television work, and decades of correspondence with friends, family, and business associates. These are spread over two personal collections (The Julia Child Papers and the Additional Papers of Julia Child). In addition to Child’s papers, the Schlesinger holds the papers of many of her friends and associates, including Simone Beck and Avis DeVoto.

Julia Child’s Kitchen
Child’s home kitchen was disassembled, moved, and painstakingly reassembled at the National Museum of American History. For those who can’t travel to DC, the museum has prepared an online tour of the kitchen, complete with Child’s narration, focused descriptions of the predictable and unpredictable contents of the kitchen, and a timeline of Julia Child’s life and career.

Mai-Juin 1968
In-between production of the first and second series of The French Chef, Julia and Paul Child went to their home in Provence to recuperate from a grueling schedule and so Julia could complete work on the second volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. While there, long-simmering resentment of de Gaulle became organized resistance to French universities, business, and much of its political order. A series of insurrections and a general strike kept Paul and Julia stuck in their home, and then grateful to leave France at the end of June. This collection offers powerful documentary of the spring 1968 uprisings in France and points to the growing racial diversity of French society, criticism of its political order, and frustration with cultural conservatism.]

The Battle for Algiers
An account of a Parisian police attack on pro-independence demonstrators

Americans in Paris
This website and accompanying blog, created by a college class from the University of Richmond, offer snapshots of Americans’ and America’s presence in Paris. Although Julia Child is not one of the figures described, the essays and geographic mapping helps to contextualize her in the long and sometimes complicated history of Americans’ expectations of France.

Adviser Consulted During the Creation of this Collection: Elaine Tyler May, Regents Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Minnesota, writes about 20th-Century United States History. Her books include studies of American families in the Cold War era, marriage and divorce in the Progressive era, childlessness and birth control, and co-edited collections on American popular culture in an international context, and the relationship between memoir and history.

This essay was revised by the author, December, 2025.