Yeah, yeah, my French is still good enough to know it's homage, not fromage, but Julia would have appreciated the cheese! I was a big fan of Julia Child for her whole long career. When the French Chef first came on TV in black and white on Channel 2, I was in Junior High in Braintree going to school over an intercom due to a bad case of rheumatic fever. My mother was a really good cook of typical Yankee fare, but Julia's French recipes were a revelation. I was fascinated by Julia's state presence, enthusiasm, and can-do attitude.
Home didn't suddenly turn into a French restaurant. Mom tried some of Julia's recipes, but what happened was a renaissance of recipe sharing among all the mom's in the neighborhood. Everyone was trying out new things some inspired by Julia and others not. This was the time when I was finally old enough to help out in the kitchen so I started to learn to cook because of Julia. She certainly gave me my life long love of trying unusual ethnic restaurants although surprisingly I never developed a liking for French nouvelle cuisine.
The only person left out of the Julia Revolution was Dad who never lost his love for simple, boring dishes-probably part of his English-Irish heritage. Great for roasts, steaks, baked chicken, bad for vegetables. It took years to get him to eat frozen peas instead of canned ones. Luckily for family harmony about 20 years after we moved to Easton, Dad took a job working nights. So while he was eating deviled ham or sardines at work, I got to take Mom to a great variety of restaurants.
Meanwhile, Julia kept PBS afloat, helped launch a bazillion other TV chefs and was ultimately responsible for whole cable channels! Amazing!
Here's a website that lists Julia's top 100 recipes out of the 3700 she published. How many do you remember? Unfortunately, it's just a list-no recipes. Over at PBS there is much more: recipes, streaming videos of shows that haven't aired in decades, and tributes from other chefs. Happy Birthday, Julia.
Welcome
A curiosity shop is a place of odds and ends in a wide range of categories. One never knows what one will find on any visit, and that is the goal of this blog. Here you'll find postings on doings around Easton, the world's environment, history, recipes, fly fishing, books, music, and movies with many other things thrown in as well. Hope you enjoy it and keep coming back.
She was always one of my answers to "if you could have lunch with any three people, who would they be?"
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