Julia Child, star of The French Chef and author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in a rare Canadian television interview from November 1993. She is 81 years old, 30 years into the most influential cooking show in television history, and promoting her 8th cookbook, Cooking with Master Chefs.
The same month, she became the first woman inducted into the Culinary Institute Hall of Fame. Eleven months from now, Paul, the husband she met while working for the OSS in Ceylon during World War II, will be gone. She has no idea.
What Dini gets from her is not a cookbook pitch. It’s Julia Child explaining how she ended up in the filing room of a spy agency because she had “no qualifications whatsoever except an eagerness to help,” and why she believes nutrition has “reared its ugly head” over the simple pleasure of eating well. When asked to name her perfect dinner, she doesn’t hesitate: oysters, foie gras, a little caviar, duck, potatoes Anna, a great big gooey chocolate dessert, and appropriate wines with everything.
CHAPTERS
0:00 “The most famous chef in the world”
0:44 Cooking with Master Chefs: 16 of America’s top chefs in home kitchens, and why this book “ain’t for Fluffies”
2:02 The one tablespoon of tomato paste call, and why some people get terribly nervous cooking
3:08 That distinctive voice, and growing up in Pasadena
3:36 The OSS, World War II, and having “no qualifications whatsoever except an eagerness to help”
4:23 “If any of you girls try any funny business, you’ll go home on the next boat”
4:39 Meeting Paul Child in the OSS (the real reason she and her lady friends joined)
5:01 Paris, the diplomatic service, and discovering French food before nutrition “reared its ugly head”
6:00 The American Institute of Wine and Food, Robert Mondavi, and “moderation in all things”
6:45 Thousands and thousands of cookbooks, the Schlesinger Library, and a master’s degree in gastronomy
8:03 The monkfish story: five rows of teeth, a little flagpole, and “I had a boyfriend like that”
9:40 Julia Child’s perfect dinner: oysters, foie gras, caviar, duck, potatoes Anna, and a great big gooey chocolate dessert
ABOUT THE DINI PETTY SHOW
The Dini Petty Show was a Canadian daytime talk show that aired on CTV from 1989 to 1999. Broadcast from Toronto, the show ran for ten years and featured in-depth conversations with Hollywood legends, music icons, politicians, and cultural figures. Dini Petty’s warm yet probing interview style earned the show multiple Gemini Award nominations and a loyal audience across Canada.
This channel is the official archive of The Dini Petty Show. Most of these interviews have not been seen since their original broadcast. New conversations from the vault are uploaded weekly.
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1 Comment
sometimes I think her and Roald Dahl might've been the same human being…