Slide Show: 5 Fun Facts about GBH’s The French Chef and Julia Child

For much of Julia Child’s television career, she wore the red, white and blue badge (designed by her husband Paul) of L’Ecole des Trois Gourmands (the School of the Three Hearty Eaters), the Paris cooking school she cofounded with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, coauthors of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The subsequent GBH program The French Chef was the trailblazer for the now ubiquitous how-to cooking show genre. Julia Child changed the way Americans thought about food—and television.

Julia Child and her GBH producer Russ Morash discuss a dish during a pilot show. GBH’s headquarters had been destroyed in a fire, so filming took place at a donated kitchen cabinet showroom at the Boston Gas Company. Later episodes were taped in the donated studios of the Catholic Television Center near Boston University.

The microphones that Julia Child wore on The French Chef were metal and when she’d touch the metal electric stove, she’d get a jolt of static electricity. Eventually the producers resolved the problem by putting a balloon on the microphone to blunt the flow of electricity.

The set was equipped with a mirror suspended over the cooktop, to allow viewers to see what Julia saw. Each episode required Julia to talk continuously for 30 minutes, unedited. At the time the show was in production, film editing was in its infancy, a relatively clunky process accomplished entirely by hand, involving scissors and scotch tape.

Julia and Paul Child’s donation of their kitchen contents to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History included 1,200 artifacts, 30 pots and pans and the contents of all the drawers and cabinets.