Julia Child, from the OSS to PBS (episode 222)

Transcript

Music

Jake:
[0:05] Welcome to HUB History, where we go far beyond the freedom Trail to share our favorite stories from the history of boston, the hub of the universe. This is episode 2 22 Julia Child from the OSS to PBS.

Julia Child:
[0:20] Hello I’m Julia Child.

Jake:
[0:23] And I’m jake. This week, I’m talking about Julia Child’s little known first career with America’s first spy agency.
At the outbreak of World War two, president Roosevelt decided to create a single centralized agency to organize the nation’s many competing intelligence services,
not the CIA, which will come a few years later, but the Office of Strategic Services before the CIA, the OSS was America’s chief spy service and before Julia Child was a famous chef on PBS.
Young Julia Mcwilliams was recruited by the O. S. S. Where she traveled the world and fell in love with paul child and exotic food.
Keep listening to learn how she was recruited and trained, where she served in the asian theater of war and why that experience helped lead her to a Cambridge house with its now famous kitchen.

[1:16] But before we talk about Julia Childs wartime service, I just want to pause and thank everyone who supports hub history on Patreon.
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[1:56] And now it’s time for this week’s main topic for almost 40 years,
from the time she showed up at WGBH to promote her book, mastering the art of french cooking in 1962 bringing along a whisk in a dozen eggs and showing the audience how to make an omelet because she didn’t know what else to talk about to.
The last taping of Julia child’s kitchen wisdom in the year 2000 when she was 88 years old, Julia child was America’s favorite tv chef,
For much of that time, the kitchen in her house at 103 Irving Street, just outside Harvard Square was one of the stars of the show as well,
with its cheerful green cabinets, pots and pans carefully outlined on the pegboard walls and countertops set two inches higher than the building code called for,
the kitchen was as idiosyncratic as the cook and it gave the distinct impression of being lived in because it was.

[2:50] In 2001.
However, Julia Child was planning to move into a retirement community in California.
She was going to donate the house to her alma mater, smith college and the Smithsonian asked if she’d be willing to donate the kitchen to the Museum of american History.

[3:06] Curator is visited the house a few times to take an inventory and discuss the details of the donation, culminating in one final visit, where they would film an interview with the chef.
In a 2019 article, curator, Paula johnson recalled visiting the child house with their team of Washington, D. C. Based curator and a video crew based out of new york city.

[3:27] We arrived at her home on September 11 2001 just as a terrorist attacks were taking place in New York Washington, D. C.
And later on an aircraft flying over Pennsylvania.
As Julia entered the kitchen where the interview was to take place, she encountered all of us shocked and shaken and wondering how to contact our families in Manhattan in D. C.
Ever the professional Julia suggested we continue the work we came to do and recommended we take breaks whenever we needed.
The kitchen soon started feeling a bit cozier, a bit homier, a bit safer and more secure as the aroma of something cooking enveloped the room.
A pot of veal stew had been put on a low burner, and by lunchtime it was ready to eat, along with a green salad and a crusty bread with butter.

[4:16] Perhaps Julia Child learned that unflappability in the same place in time where she learned her great love and enthusiasm for food contrary to popular opinion, that wasn’t Postwar France.
But instead, while serving in America’s fledgling intelligence service in a war zone on the other side of the globe.
When the japanese bombed Pearl Harbor Julia Mcwilliams had never left the United States and she knew little about food.
In our 2004 memoir, my life in France child wrote as a girl, I had zero interest in the stove.
I’ve always had a healthy appetite, especially for the wonderful meat and fresh produce of California, but I was never encouraged to cook and just didn’t see the point in that our family had a series of hired cooks and they produce heaping portions of typical american fare.
Fat, roasted chicken with buttery mashed potatoes and creamed spinach are well marbled porterhouse steaks or aged leg of lamb cooked medium gray, not pinky red rare is the french do,
and always accompanied by brown gravy and green mint sauce.
It was delicious, but not refined food.

[5:25] At the time she was living in Pasadena California, helping to take care of her aging father.
In the wake of her mother’s death, she began volunteering as an aircraft spotter with the U.
S. Army interceptor command, guarding against an expected japanese attack that never came after that. She also pitched in with the red cross, creating a pool of experienced volunteer typists and stenographers who could help in an emergency.
However, she was left wanting to do more for her country and more to expand her own horizons in my life in France. She wrote, the war broke out and I wanted to do something that aid my country in a time of crisis.
I was too tall for the wax and waves, but eventually joined the Ss and set out into the world looking for adventure.
The wax, of course, were the Women’s Army Corps and the waves were the women accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service Navy program headed by Wellesley President mildred Mcafee that we covered an episode 16.

[6:25] After these rejections, Julia decided to move to Washington, D. C.
With the assumption that that’s where the jobs were Julius. First job in government service was far from glamorous.
She was hired by the Office of War Information, which was responsible for, depending on your point of view, either public relations or domestic propaganda to build up support for the war effort.
The agency would eventually be subsumed into the U. S. Information Agency, which, ironically was also the agency that eventually sent paul and Julia child to France In the late summer of 1942.
However, Julia McWilliams wasn’t being sent overseas, were even writing up propaganda at home.
Instead, she was pouring over press releases, radio transcripts and newspaper clippings to identify any government officials who are named in the media.
When she discovered anyone, she would pull their records to find their full names, agencies titles and other key information.
Then she typed up their details, along with a complete record of their media appearances on a white index card, and then she filed the card.

[7:33] Within just a few months, she was ready for a change and her superiors agreed.
In October 1942. Memo was placed in her service record recommending that she transferred to a brand new government agency at the present time.
MS Mcwilliams is employed at the Office of War Information as a junior clerk typist.
Where she is typing names on cards and filing those cards because of MS Mcwilliams, education and her previous experience outside the government, we feel she is better qualified to fill a more responsible position.
For this reason, we’re requesting her as a junior research assistant to work directly in Colonel Donovan’s office.
Since Colonel Donovan is the director of the Office of Strategic Services, all the work that the agency does for the Joint Chiefs of Staff must flow into and through this office,
MS Mcwilliams would be assigned the task of directly reviewing, filing and performing minor research in connection with the reports and documents flowing into Colonel Donovan’s office on a resume. She prepared around that time.
She gave us the reason for leaving her office of war information job typed over 10,000 little white cards and put in for a transfer to the O. S. S.

[8:45] The SS was the immediate forerunner to the CIA.
After Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt tasked a famous veteran of the Great War with starting a new intelligence agency.
Colonel Wild Bill Donovan returned to distinguished Service crosses, a croix de guerre, and the Medal of Honor and he received wounds from shrapnel gas and a bullet.

[9:08] The James Cagney movie, the Fighting 69th was based in part on his service in France.
When FDR called Donovan back to active duty, he used his considerable fame to start recruiting the personnel he thought he would need to set up intelligence gathering networks behind enemy lines in europe and Asia,
to parachute operatives into occupied territory, to set up covert radio stations and for developing special weapons and gear for undercover agents to use,
Donovan recruited everyone from stockbrokers to Hollywood stars and from intellectuals to mobsters.
If you need a detailed relief maps, he hired artists to paint him, and if he needed to steal enemy war plans, well, he hired a safecracker.

[9:53] It’s perhaps a testament to her intellect, that Julia Mcwilliams was recruited to work directly under Colonel Donovan.
She launched her O. S. S. Career by sorting, synthesizing and cataloging all the sensitive information that flowed into and out of the office of the agency chief of the nation’s first central spy agency.
So it’s very likely that Julia child knew where a lot of bodies were buried.
An article for the Women’s History Museum describes those first few months of service, as well as Julius first transfer within the O. S. S.

[10:25] She took a position as a junior research assistant with a secret intelligence branch of the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner to the CIA.
She was one of 4500 women who worked for the O. S. S. During the war, Child became a junior research assistant under Colonel Donovan, the director of the USS.
She was directly reviewing, filing and performing research in connection with the reports and documents flowing into Colonel Donovan’s office.
1943 Child worked as part of the Emergency Rescue Equipment Special Projects Division of the OS.
She was an executive assistant to Captain Harold J. Coolidge. The head of the division, the emergency rescue equipment division was working on everything from life jackets to signal mirrors.
One of her fellow field agents, Betty McIntosh quoted Julia about our work with the E. R. E. In the book. Sisterhood of spies.
I must say we have lots of fun. We designed to rescue kits. Another agent, paraphernalia.
I understand the shark repellent we developed as being used today for down space equipment strapped around it so the sharks won’t attack it when it lands in the ocean.

[11:34] That’s right Julia. Child’s first recipe was for a shark repellent developed by spies and used by down pilots and returned satellites.
1943. Memo to the US. Navy chief of operations describes her group’s research after trying over 100 different substances including common poisons, irritants and other chemicals.
Several gave promise, such as extracts from decade shark meat, organic acids and several copper salts.
These were finally reduced to one found more effective copper acetate.
The final product was copper acetate mixed into a cake of black dye that made it dissolve slowly in salt water.
The memo continues Models of the copper acetate repellent container have been made up in box like form with a total weight not exceeding 10 oz.
The box is approximately five by three by 1.5 inches, with an automatic latch and suspending tape, all placed in a lightweight canvas case fitted with a belt loop release.
May be affected manually or will be affected automatically by submersion in the water.
Upon release the metal boxes suspended from the case by about two ft of tape and opened into two halves containing repellent material, which is sufficient to last about 6-7 hours.
It is contemplated that the container will be attached to the life jacket on the belt or strap to the leg or the arm.

[13:01] Despite the fun she had researching rescue equipment. Julia was desperate to see the world and to expand her horizons and she knew the war could provide those opportunities,
to be deployed overseas, meant transferring to morale operations and they didn’t take many women.
Most of the women who are selected for overseas service in the O. S. S. Were fluent in languages spoken in enemy occupied countries.
We had other special skills, Julia Mcwilliams didn’t have any of those special skills, but even the morale operations division needed skilled administrators.
She could apply our expertise in information management, those little white cards that she hated so much to a branch of the U.
S. S. With the stated objective to incite and spread dissension, confusion and disorder to promote subversive activities against the enemies government by encouraging underground groups and it suppressed the morale of the enemy’s people.
To discredit collaboration ists to encourage and assist in the promotion of resistance and revolt against access control by the people of these territories and to raise their morale and the will to resist.

[14:10] She wouldn’t be parachuting into occupied France in the middle of the night.
But in the 1984 interview for the european edition of stars and stripes, Julia child described how she finally found her niche. And morale operations.
The O. S. S. Was a fascinating place to be in because he had all those people who knew anything about the Far East, anthropologists, geographers, missionaries, all kinds of people.
That’s where I met my husband, paul and Ceylon after about a year and a half or so in Ceylon, he went up to china and then I found out that I would have to go up there to which I did.
I was never anything more than in the files section.
Throughout her lifetime, Julia child would always use the claim to have been a simple secretary or file clerk to deflect attention from her wartime service.
Unlike some of her peers who would go on to write books and screenplays based on their experience in the OSS. child took her oath of Secrecy seriously.
Most of her wartime record wasn’t declassified until 2008 years after her death.
According to a morale operations field manual that was eventually declassified.
The division’s tactics were to include bribery and blackmail rumors, forgery, manipulation of individuals and underground groups, agent provocateurs, false letters, pamphlets and graphics,
and radio freedom stations posing as dissidents within occupied territories.

[15:36] It’s not clear from her service records whether Julia Mcwilliams received training at the OSS’s secretive station S but other women who are recruited into morale operations from the D. C. Area at about the same time described being whisked off to a bucolic 110 acre estate somewhere in Virginia.
Once there they underwent a battery of psychological tests.
Social evenings with the tolerance for alcohol was secretly assessed and unexplained midnight explosions outside their rooms.
To test their nerve, they got a crash course in how to handle pistols and submachine guns, grenades, and other explosives, how to search a hotel room, and how to use some basic military field equipment like shelter halves.
After her training and transferred Julius orders came in on April 29 1944,
she was being transferred to the city of Kandy that’s spelled with a K in what’s now the island nation of Sri Lanka, what was then a backwater of the british empire called Ceylon,
After a brief stop in Pasadena to see her family, she shipped off to India as part of a tight group of nine women on a troop ship carrying almost 5000 soldiers.

[16:46] The book, a covert affair, quotes Eleanor 30 to describe how late and down they were with the implements of war.
We presented a picture beyond description. Ellie wrote, referring to the ridiculous amount of military gear they were expected to wear or strapped to their bodies, everything from fatigues, gas mask kits and use it bags to steel helmets,
which I must say on one’s head, are the latest thing in chic.

[17:13] The troop ship took them as far as Mumbai. Then AC 47 cargo plane Ferried them to Colombo on Sri Lanka.
From there they rattled up into the mountains aboard a narrow gauge railway to the ancient royal city of Kandy Their headquarters would be an old tea plantation and they’d be bunking in the former queens Hotel.
However, those glamorous sounding quarters hit malfunctioning drains filled with mosquitoes carrying dengue fever As Jeanette Conan described in a 2011 article.
No sooner had the eight female recruits arrived in Kandy remote planters Oasis nestled high in the jungle covered hills of cylon straight off the boat that have buried them from California to Bombay than they had succumbed to the mosquito borne virus.
They presented quite a picture covered in an angry red rash from head to toe, and lined up in a row of cuts in the makeshift infirmary that have been set up in an old Franciscan monastery.

[18:11] Despite this rocky introduction, Julia nevertheless found that she was in her element as she wrote in my life in France.
This was as far from Pasadena as she had always dreamed of being.

[18:24] Unlike most of the U. S. Army types, R. O. S. S. Colleagues were a fascinating bunch of anthropologists, geographers, missionaries, psychiatrists, ornithologists, cartographers, bankers and lawyers.
They were genuinely interested in salon of his people. Ha ha!
I said to myself, now here’s the kind of person I’ve been missing my whole life.

[18:46] Julia was happy to be surrounded by so many new friends and among them was an artist named paul child who was making maps and setting up war rooms for the O. S. S.
They struck up a close friendship, though it would be many months before it took a romantic turn.
Kandy was beautiful. It was exotic and it would introduce Julia mcwilliams to fascinating people and unique professional challenges.
It was not, however, on the front lines of the war, the allied Southeast AsIA command was headquartered in the sleepy town with responsibility for directing the war.
In Myanmar Sumatra, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and eventually all of what was then french indochina.
Jeanette Konen wrote that the only enemy to be found in Kandy came courtesy of the local fauna.

[19:35] They’re tropical paradise came replete with huge cockroaches that scampered across their towels.
Each morning, scorpions that hidden their bags and shoes and six ft long cobra’s that came quietly through the open windows of the bamboo bushes where the team worked and made themselves at home and waste baskets, drawers and typewriter covers.

[19:54] In Kandy Julia founder niche, both personally and professionally.
Not many people had enough security clearance to be privy to her work even within the O. S. S.
Those who did know what she was up to. Were impressed. She transformed the units information processing though we’ll never know what the information she processed was in a covert affair.
Another woman who served in the U. S. S. Described visiting Julia Mcwilliams at Kandy on her way to her duty posting.
She found that Julia was also transformed, running the Kandy registry and injected Julia with a new self confidence.
Julia with her high security clearance, was in charge of the SS camps nerve center and was privy to virtually every top secret, including highly sensitive plans and operations.

[20:45] Her work in Kandy highlighted Julius highly analytical mind, putting her in high demand among U. S. S. Top secret operations in the asian theater of war.
After a few months she was transferred to the O. S. S. Station at Kunming china after Shanghai Nanjing and Wuhan all fell to the japanese.
Kunming became a major industrial center and a main base for chinese air and ground forces.
The city was within range of japanese bombers and there were occasional air raids.
But the chinese air force and the american volunteers of the flying tigers kept them mostly obey,
and Kunming the friendship between Julia Mcwilliams and paul child began to blossom into a romance as she wrote in my life in France china was where she found both her love for paul and her great love of food.

[21:37] After cylon paul was assigned to Chongqing Then Kunming china where he designed war rooms for general Wedemeyer, I was also assigned to Kunming where I fixed up the USS files.
By this point we’re becoming a couple.
We love the earth, the chinese people and their marvelously crowded, noisy restaurants and we spend a lot of our off hours exploring different types of regional foods.
Together they were closer to the action than they had been in Kandy but it was still safe enough for paul and Julia to explore the city.
As long as they stayed within its walls.
Outside the city gates were bandits, chinese soldiers who would go on a wall, rival warlords and any combination of the three.
As Jeanette Konen wrote in a covert affair, both halves of the couple found themselves at times taken aback by their surroundings.

[22:28] Paul was completely unprepared for the beauty of the medieval fortress city and visible in the distance the Blue room mountains, which were incandescent and dreamlike,
like frontier towns in the old West, Kunming was a crossroads, the end of the Burma Road at the beginning of the unknown, and there was a wild quality to the place and the people that paul found exciting.
He loved the look of china, the bustling confusion of local characters in color that passed through the Stone gates, quote,
the Mongolian ponies with loads of dust laden vegetables that plot along with their eyes, shot the tall, shaggy Tibetans and brightly costumed tribal outlanders.
Their baby’s head’s done up in silk scarves like melons and exotic bags.

[23:12] While paul couldn’t wrap his mind around the rugged beauty of the city, Julia was surprised by the way O.
S. S. Business was conducted in Kunming Julia was shocked the first time she saw one of their chinese informants being paid in opium staring in disbelief as Betty cut a thick slice from what looked like a loaf of boston brown bread,
that she then carefully rewrapped and returned to the registry safe.
Julia soon learned that opium was the preferred currency and she became adept at doling out the sticky intelligence payroll by all accounts, Julia Mcwilliams was a natural genius and information architecture.

[23:52] It’s hard to piece together from her declassified OS. S. Records and the accounts published by Jeanette Conan and other researchers.
But I think that if she’d been born 50 years later, Julia Child would have been an engineer at Google or another tech company.
Her O. S. S. Efficiency ratings hint at the innate organizational mindset that allowed her to revolutionize and streamline classified information processing.
First at the Office of War Information and later at Kandy Kunming and Chongqing 1943.
She received a rating of outstanding, which is the highest mark in attention to detail, accuracy, effectiveness and presenting ideas or facts, ability to organize work and resourcefulness After she’d been deployed to the field.
Her 1945 efficiency ratings included outstanding marks for meeting and dealing with others.
Resourcefulness, planning, broad programmes laying out work in establishing standards for subordinates, directing, reviewing and checking the work of subordinates, ability to make decisions and delegating clearly defined authority to act.

[24:57] In a covert affair.
Jeanette Conan described what Julius job was like while she was in country, Julia was on loan from Chongqing to help set up the new registry containing reports of the S. S current and planned guerilla operations.
The place was as primitive as any cavalry outpost and certainly as poorly equipped.
They lacked almost everything they needed to function, including such basic necessities as tables and chairs.

[25:26] The job itself was laborious and at times maddeningly dull accession ng cross indexing, circulating and filing that thousands of dispatches, orders and espionage and sabotage reports that flowed in from Washington and os.
S field operations all over Southeast Asia.
But it carried with it grave responsibility.
In September alone, Julia plowed through about 365 pouches from Washington which were broken down into about 600 classified intelligence inputs that had to be filed and then stored under lock and key in the registry.
After much trial and error, Julia developed what she hoped was a full proof locator system with Mastercard’s on each current field operation, including the names of all the agents and the student recruits and their various code names.
The nightmare was that the Theater Commander, Air Force and other branches all had their own systems, Julia vigorously campaigned for them to settle on one uniform procedure so that documents could be related and communications streamlined.

[26:33] And Kunming and also later when they were both stationed in Chongqing Julia and Paul spent more and more time together.
They would hike to buddhist monasteries in the foothills, spend weekends at a hot spring resort tucked away in the mountains or hire a Sampan to take them on a river tour where they could watch the local fishermen haul in the days fresh catch.
Most of all though they ate as described in Conan’s book.

[27:01] Paul did everything with Julia that other couples did without acknowledging that they were one, They planned their days off together and went on hikes in the hills, jeep to the black Dragon pool temple to collect rare stone rubbings, went sam panning at twilight on the lake,
they went on shopping trips, explored the crowded flower markets and visited out of balance chinese restaurants where they sampled the different cuisines.
If you can ease Pekinese enemies, Sichuan and Cantonese,
he applauded her adventurousness and bypassing the flown in american chow available at the Red Cross canteen to join him in these forbidden feasts,
in which they binged on steamed dumplings, crisp duck, mixed green vegetables and succulent baby frog legs swimming in sweet and sour sauce.
Invariably, the outings were followed by base salary distress or dysentery, which might as well have been on the menu and was, as a consequence a major topic of dinner table conversation among chinese and westerners alike.
Paul took pleasure in helping to educate Julius beaten potatoes palette and he looked on with real pride as she became a champion chopstick wielder.

[28:12] After Kunming the couple was transferred to chongqing, the wartime capital of china.
At times, the front lines were so close to the city that if the japanese have managed to break through, they would have been one hard day’s march from O.
S. S. Headquarters for years. The city has been the target of an intense bombing campaign, But by the time Julia and paul arrived there at the tail end of the war, the danger was receding.
In that 1984 stars and stripes interview Julia Child described her last months in the war zone.
We were almost two years in china. First in Kunming which was fascinating.
It looked very much like California with eucalyptus trees, a beautiful, beautiful town and then I had to start a register your file system up in Chongqing So I had three or four months there.
I was very lucky to have had that Chiang kai shek was there.
It was really before the Internal Civil war there then I went back down to Kunming again and then we came out through India after the bomb dropped.
We stayed about a month or so and then some of our detachment of O. S. S was going on to shanghai and I decided that it was time that I went home.

[29:24] In september 1945 Julia got orders transferring her from Chongqing to the war department. In Washington, D. C.
The SS was being formally shut down as President Truman put together the new CIA and so Julia would receive an involuntary separation.

[29:42] Paul had his orders to, so there would be another involuntary separation in the fall of 1945.
Well they had technically been in a war zone for almost two years, paul and Julius closest experience of combat came ironically, after the war was over,
after moving back to Kunming on their way to India and the boat home there last date night in china came as fighting between Chiang kai shek’s nationalist kuomintang Mao Zedong’s Communist Red Army and local warlords steadily escalated.
One evening in october, the Komen tank suddenly cracked down on the governor of the yunnan province surrounding Kunming who was trying to become an independent warlord In the fighting.
About 500 Chinese soldiers on both sides were killed while a few 100 American troops stationed inside the city kept their heads down and try not to get caught in the crossfire.
After two days, the city was declared open again, though a strict eight pm curfew was announced with just days before paul was due to leave china.
A covert affair describes how the burgeoning couple took the opportunity to enjoy a final feast at their favorite Peking restaurant in town.
They had spring rolls, longleaf cabbage in Hunan ham, winter mushrooms with beet tops and Peking duck.
They topped it all off with soup.

[31:08] Julia child would make her way back to the United States the same way she had gotten to china in the first place.
First a quick if harrowing, hop over the hump, the treacherous air route over the Himalayas from china back to India, Then by rail to Calcutta, then the slow boat back to California.

[31:27] Her service in America’s first spy agency ended with a citation issued on January 5 1946.
The day before she was officially discharged.
Dear MS Mcwilliams. It is with great pleasure that I forward to you this commendation for civilian service overseas ordered by the War Department and recognition and praise of faithful service rendered to the War Department and to the nation.
Miss Julia Mcwilliams civilian is awarded the emblem of meritorious civilian service for meritorious service is the head of the registry section of the secretariat of an important war agency of the United States Forces in the china theater.
During the period of 20 March, 1945 to 13, october 1945.
Through resourcefulness, industry and sound judgment. The important work of registering, cataloging and channeling a great volume of highly classified communications and documents was performed with exceptional speed and accuracy.
This, in addition to the accurate filing system devised and set up by MS Mcwilliams facilitated the efficient functioning of all branches of the agency.
Her drive an inherent cheerfulness, despite long hours of tedious work served as a spur to greater effort for those working with her morale in her section could not have been higher.
Her achievements reflect great credit upon herself and the Armed Forces of the United States.

[32:51] After leaving the U. S. S. Julia temporarily lived with their father in Pasadena, and she and paul carried on their romance by letter optimistic about a life.
Together with paul, she took an interest in cooking for the first time and the introduction to my life in France, she discusses how she went from a general disinterest in food to a crash course in house wife Marie.
In preparation for living with a new husband on a limited government income, I decided I’d better learn how to cook before our wedding.
I took a bride to be. She’s cooking course from to english women in Los Angeles who taught me to make things like pancakes That July of 1946.
They decided to take romantic road trip from Pasadena to Paul’s family’s cabin in Maine.
If they were still in love when they got there, they get married.
The road trip took five weeks and they got married one month after pulling into May, He was 44 and she was about to turn 34.
They spent about two years in the Washington, D. C. Area before embarking on their next adventure.

Julia Child:
[33:57] You see there is no french cookbook in english, you know I have is this joy of cooking by Irma Rombauer, which is an excellent, excellent cookbook, but it’s not french. So I did ask my friend Avis devoto.

Jake:
[34:11] The half decade between their marriage and the publication of Julius famous cookbook, on the topic of the charming film julie and Julia starring Amy Adams and Meryl Streep.
It’s also the main focus of my life in France, which you should read.
If you’d like to know more about Julia and paul. Child’s life together after their wartime service 1955, Paul was investigated by Joe McCarthy in the House Un American Activities Committee as a possible communist and homosexual.
After that, the idea of a lifetime of government service begin to turn sour.
By the late 50s, the couple had decided that Paul would retire from the US. information agency when he turned 60 in 1962.

[34:55] After over 20 years either overseas or in government service in Washington, the child’s had to decide where their us home would be, Julia was in no rush to go back to southern California.
Her editor, Avis de voto, lived in Cambridge and Paula grown up in the boston area, graduating from boston latin and playing violin in the family band to pay the rent.
The decision to continue their lives together in Cambridge came easily 1958, Paul and Julia Child were just weeks away from shipping off to Norway, Paul’s final diplomatic posting.
When Devoto told them that the perfect house was coming onto the market in Cambridge, the couple dropped everything to go and see it and immediately fell in love as described in my life in France.
It was a day of freezing rain, but we jumped on the train to boston and had a look at the big gray shingled house she had described.
It had been built in 1889 by the philosopher Josiah Royce, a native Californian like me And stood at 103 Irving Street, a small leafy by way tucked behind Harvard Yard.
The house was three stories tall, with a long kitchen in double pantry, a full basement and a garden.

[36:12] We walked through it for about 20 minutes and as Paul tapped the walls and floors to judge their soundness, I stood in the kitchen and imagine myself living there.
Another family was touring the house at the same time. Well, they talked it over in low voices.
We decided that we’d never find anything better and bought it on the spot.
We paid something like $48,000 for it. It needed updating and improving, but we were able to pay for that by renting it out while we were in Norway. Hooray.

[36:43] As a side note, the Zillow estimate for 103 Irving is over $6 million.
Now, the Irving Street house had a large loft like space on the second floor that could serve as paul’s studio, and it had a 20 by 14 ft kitchen with two pantries.
They signed a purchase and sale agreement that afternoon and then promptly steamed off to Oslo for Paul’s final posting with the State Department.

[37:09] After Paul retired from government service in 1961, the couple finally moved into their Irving Street house and started tweaking the kitchen to fit their needs.
Julia explained the details. In 1978 interview with architectural Digest magazine, the kitchen proper was our major concern because to us it’s the beating heart and social center of the household.
Although this was our ninth kitchen, we never before had the luxury of a large and well proportioned room.
We intended to make it both practical and beautiful, a working laboratory as well as a living and dining room.
Fortunately our structural changes were minor.
Architect robert Woods Kennedy suggested we moved the double sink from its cramped, an original position crowded against a side wall.
Then, since we needed more wall space, he covered up one window with pegboard, where paul worked out a stunning arrangement of copper saucepans and skeletal.
It’s the existing cupboard and drawer arrangements suited us well enough.
We later put all the drawers on nylon runners, giving room for our large, old restaurant sized gas stove shipped up from Washington.
Our wall ovens chopping block, dishwasher and refrigerator.

[38:22] Since we rejoice in the shapes, since we rejoice in the shapes of tools, cooking utensils become decorative objects, all carefully orchestrated by paul for pots and pot lids, two skillets, trev it’s and flown rings.
Even the knives are graduated according to shape and size on vertical magnetic holders.
Glass measures and earthenware pictures are hung just so while scissors hang in harmony with olive pitchers, bottle openers and nutcrackers.
We have a bookcase for dictionaries, atlases and bird lore and paintings by friends.
A painted artichoke lives over the wall ovens and a painting of eggs is over the refrigerator.
A painted valentine is glued to its door along with paul’s colorful photographs.
Such was the initial design for the kitchen and so it has remained with minor changes these 15 years in it. We receive our friends, we cook and dine, we teach an experiment.
We’ve even photographed and filmed in it.
It is certainly the most loved and most used room in the house by now, it must be the most loved room or at least the most loved kitchen in the country.

[39:35] On December 7 2001, the Boston Globe reported a truck charted by the Smithsonian, pulled up to Julia.
Childs former digs on Irving Street in Cambridge yesterday and loaded up the famous french chefs, walls, stove, refrigerator, sink counters and cabinets for relocation to and eventual reconstruction at the museum.
Stephanie Hirsch, Child’s assistant supervised the move.
She took nothing with her to California Hirsch, set of child who moved to santa barbara last month.
Child’s relatives made a sweep of the house Wednesday and yesterday.

[40:11] The Smithsonian collected and catalogued about 1200 individual objects out of the kitchen, including the appliances cabinets, the crocs labeled spooner and for khoury Julius beloved knives and nearly everything except the walls and floor.
When she moved into the California retirement community, Julia took with her a sugar bowl that she and paul had bought in England, a Peugeot pepper mill that they found in France and a green marble egg cup that she kept salt in.
Everything else went to the Smithsonian, even if it was a gadget that would hide in a drawer where nobody would ever see it.
The museum scanned a sample of the asbestos tile flooring from the Cambridge kitchen and printed a replacement.
They added fake bananas and tomatoes for ambience and opened the exhibit to the public on Julia. Child’s 90th birthday at the opening. She was the only one who was allowed to touch her cabinets and appliances without putting on gloves.
And she was the only one who could step on the reproduction floor without taking off her shoes.
She told the press it looks exactly right. It makes me homesick to look at it. I wish I could come in and turn everything on.

[41:23] To learn more about Julia Child, The spy and war veteran.
Check out this week’s show notes at hub history dot com slash 222 I’ll have links to purchase Jeanette. Conan’s a covert affair and Julia Childs memoir, My life in France.
I’ll also link to 130 pages of Julius declassified o. Ss personnel files, the field manual of the ss, morale operations division and an article by the CIA about our work on shark repellent.
There will also be links to interviews with Julia in stars and stripes and architectural digest.
If you’d like to leave us some feedback, you can email us at podcast at hub history dot com where hub history on twitter, facebook and instagram.
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Jake:
[42:55] Apple podcasts is still the most popular podcast app.
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That’s all for now. Stay safe out there listeners. And as Julia would say.

Music

Julia Child:
[43:15] BON appetit.