La Belle Georgetown

In the spring of 1957, a group of women gathered in a Georgetown neighbor’s kitchen at 2706 Olive Street, a yellow house in a quiet neighborhood at the edge of Rock Creek Park, eager to learn a few recipes with which to impress their husbands. This wasn’t any ordinary cooking class though. As their collective chatter was interrupted by the sounds of one of popular culture’s most distinctive voices, the group’s cooking class began and so with it a minor chapter in American culinary history.

Julia Child, with her husband Paul, moved to Washington, D.C., in November 1956. The couple had just completed a remarkable 8-year journey in France that started with Paul’s foreign commission in Paris and culminated with Julia’s imminent arrival as America’s first celebrity chef. While in France, Julia was transformed by the beauty and elegance of French cuisine. That transformation beautifully chronicled in her memoir, My Life in France. She found her calling in France, starting with her first meals in Paris through her days at Le Cordon Bleu and eventually her collaboration with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle on Mastering the Art of French Cooking when she perfected her craft.

The Childs returned to a home that they first purchased in 1948, just before Paul was assigned to Paris. While the stay in D.C., was brief (the Childs made Cambridge, Massachusetts home once Paul retired in 1958), that time in Georgetown proved formative for Julia Child and the success of her iconic book. After all, it was Julia’s first chance to see American grocery shopping and home cooking first hand. Those experiences and insights were critical to writing a book that helped revolutionize American home cooking.

“It is great fun being back here to live. I never could get the feel of it when we just passed through. One thing I adore is to be shopping in these great serve-yourself markets, where…you pick up a wire push cart as you come in and just trundle about looking and fingering everything…It is fine to be able to pick out each separate mushroom yourself…Seems to me there is everything here that is necessary to allow a good French cook to operate.” — Julia Child, wrote in a letter to Beck, from D.C.

Shopping in American grocery stores was not all excitement, however, for Child. She lamented the preponderance of “instant cake mixes, TV dinners, frozen vegetables, canned mushrooms, fish sticks, Jell-O salads, spray-can whipped cream, and other horrible glop” and wondered whether their book would be “hopelessly out of step with the times.”

“Why did we ever decide to do this anyway,” Julia Child wrote to Beck, after discovering that she couldn’t find crème fraiche in the U.S.

While exasperated at times, Julia Child did finish her seminal cookbook, which was published in 1961, and became perhaps the most comprehensive and accessible guide to French cooking in the U.S. (and maybe even France).

The cooking classes with the Georgetown ladies were also a joy for Child. In My Life in France, Child proclaimed that it was during this time that she became “an experienced teacher.” It was not a bad deal for the students either. The neighborhood women typically arrived at 2706 Olive Street on Monday mornings to learn from Child and then go cook lunch for their husbands. A typical menu, according to Child, might include oeufs poches duxelles (poached eggs with mushroom duxelles), sauce béarnaise, poulet saute portugaise (sauteed chicken with tomato sauce), epinards au jus (spinach), and for dessert, pommes a la sevillane
 (apples braised in butter, orange sauce).

The only remaining items of Julia Child’s time in Washington — aside from the memories — are the house (which sold last year) and her beloved Garland Stove, now part of the wonderful Smithsonian exhibit that displays her Cambridge home’s kitchen, immortalized from her television show, “The French Chef.”