Similarly, Child followed the publication of her first cookbook with the creation of The French Chef in 1963.
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In 1946, he hosted I Love to Eat, the first national cooking show in TV history, before going on to lead his own culinary classes, which eventually became the James Beard Cooking School. Before Child was published, Beard had already produced a number of cookbooks. Not only that, but their careers aligned in unexpected ways. They both sort of commanded attention in the room and they found comfort in each other in this, sort of, outside space.” The two outsiders became such good companions, they even dubbed themselves “Jiji,” which was short for Julia and Jim. According to the PBS documentary James Beard: America’s First Foodie, “They were both outsized figures.
And that was because “they share so much,” Goldfarb says. and East 59th Street, he also took her to a lavish food and wine tasting at The Four Seasons the following day.Īn admirer of the French cookbook, it wasn’t long before Beard became fast friends with Child. As John Birdsall writes in The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard, he not only threw a dinner party for her at Chef Dione Lucas’ restaurant, The Egg Basket, which was located near Bloomingdale’s on the corner of Lexington Ave. In fact, the earlier part of their evening together in the episode could have easily happened in New York City, where Beard had hosted Child, when she returned from France to promote the release of Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 1961. “I thought, ‘How great would it be for Julia to meet a drag performer as her?’ And then we were trying to figure out, ‘Well, who would bring her there? How would it happen?’ And then we got James, who’s favorite city in America, and maybe the world, is San Francisco,” Goldfarb explains. What Goldfarb does know to be true is that all the series’ components spoke to real moments in Child’s life, from the chef being embraced by the counterculture to her well-documented friendship with Beard. It could have happened, but we don’t know if it necessarily did.”
“But it’s based in fact,” he quickly adds, explaining that the episode, like the entire season, “is all based on facts, but it’s sort of like the Amadeus version of Julia’s life. When it comes to this moment between “the two huge American food icons,” Julia creator and writer Daniel Goldfarb tells T&C, “their fun weekend in San Francisco, that’s all fiction.” It’s one of those moments that begs to be Googled: Did Julia Child and James Beard, the openly gay pioneering chef whose notoriety spawned the annual culinary James Beard Awards, spend all night partying with drag queens? But the results won’t pull up an archived news story or entry from one of the many biographies written about Beard or Child.
As the evening progresses, Child meets an adoring fan and drag queen named Coco, who is dressed just like the chef and pulls her idol up on stage for a rendition of Frank Sinatra’s “It Had to Be You.”