Stuff You Should Know - Julia Child, la Grandes Gourmande

Episode Date: November 27, 2025

Julia Child is one of the most recognizable names in the cooking world, but even still so many of her accomplishments aren’t widely known. And the impacts she had on American culture, whoa! Join Josh and Chuck as they savor the flavor of Julia Child!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way. Yo, yo, yo, yo, can we get Thanksgiving first? I'm hungry. What's up, y'all? It's Kadeen. And DeVal, the host of the Ellis Ever After podcast.

This holiday season, tune out the noise and tune in to Ellis Ever After. On Ellis Ever After, we get real with our crew about family, love, and marriage. And everything else in between. Listen to Ellis Ever After on America's number one podcast network, IHeart. Follow Elizabeth Rafter and start listening on the free IHeart Radio app today. Thanksgiving isn't just about food. It's a day for us to show up for one another. It's okay not to be okay sometimes and be able to build strength and love within each other.

I'm Eliyakani, host of the podcast Family Therapy, a series where real families come together to heal and find hope. I've always wanted us to have therapy, so this is such a beautiful opportunity. Listen to Season 2 of Family Therapy every Wednesday. on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Jenna World. Jenna Jamison, Vivid Video, and the Valley is a new podcast about the history of the adult film industry.

I'm Molly Lambert, and I'll be your tour guide on a wild trip through adult films. We get paid more than the men. We call the shots. In what way is that degrading? That's us taking hold of our life. Listen to Geno World on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're stuffed on turkey, wearing aprons, got a little gravy on the sides of our mouths.

and it's stuff you should know. That's right. Happy Thanksgiving for those who celebrate Thanksgiving here in the U.S. And happy belated Thanksgiving to our Canadian listeners who celebrate it early. That's right. And since we're talking about Thanksgiving, we wanted to mention, you know, we have been working with Co-Ed, the Cooperative for Education for many, many years since they took us down to Guatemala. And they're, you know, if you haven't heard us talk about them, I'd be surprised. but their mission is to help eradicate poverty through education

and largely through the children of Guatemala. It's a great organization NGO that we've been working with for a long, long time, and we're working with them again this year. Yeah, they see to it that kids who would almost certainly otherwise not have gotten any real education at all get a really great education. For fairly cheap, too, they're a really, really great effective charity, which is why we've been working with them for so long. And one of the ways we work with them every year is to raffle off a chance to hang out with us online. Yeah, virtually.

That's how we do things. But we've done this for a few years in a row now, like a Zoom, a Zoom, hangout. And it's always super fun. We look forward to it. And this is how you can do that. You can join the Cooper for Education for $20 a month. And you can collectively sponsor students in the Rise Youth Development Program. In 2026, more than 1,200 students are going to start.

school in rural Guatemala through this program. And that's their biggest class ever. And they really count on us and you guys to help make that happen. Yeah. You can also give any donation that you like. They're happy with that. But do this by December 19th. And you will be entered into a chance to hang out with us, I think in January at some point. And also, just a little FYI, giving Tuesday is December 2nd. So that could be a good day to do it too. And when I, you're ready, go to cooperative for education.org slash sysk and you can make your donations there. That's right. 20 bucks a month can really go a long way and just to brag a little bit about the stuff you should know Army

since we've been working with co-ed over $1.4 million and charitable contributions have come from the stuff you should know Army sponsoring a total of 172 rise students over that time. That is so cool. Thanks you guys for supporting co-ed so well. That's right. Well, Chuck, I say we get cracking with our episode today because I'm excited about this one. We're talking about Julia Child, arguably one of the most well-known cooks chefs of all time. Yeah, but I have to step out real quick because I've cut the dickens out of my finger. That was pretty good, actually. I wasn't even going to try it, but that was a dead on Julia Child.

Well, that was a dead on Dan Aykroyd as Julia Child. I think you topped him to tell you the truth. Yeah, you know, if you grew up in the 70s, in the 80s, and even into the 90s, and you ever surfed around your cable TV and crossed PBS, there was a good chance that the wonderful Julia Child came into your life in some way. I remember watching her a little bit when I was a kid even and just thinking, like, who is this giant tall woman that talks funny cooking? in front of my face. But you were never intimidated by her, were you? No. I mean, she was always just so friendly and gregarious. I just had an instant liking. Yes. She was a very, very likable person. But even if you're not familiar with Julia Child and you live in the United States and you like decent food that's not processed, you owe an enormous debt to Julia Child because you can argue that

she almost single-handedly introduced America to real food through French cuisine. Yeah, I mean, these days it's taken for granted that, you know, farmed a table and ingredients that matter and food preparation and sort of taking pride and cooking at home like that is just so commonplace. But that was not the case when Julia Child was coming into things. She really revolutionized and sort of rocked America's culinary. world. Yeah. Like this was the time when she came around when people were making jello molds with like ground beef in them. That was nice. That was like showing off for a dinner

party kind of stuff. Yeah, for sure. So we'll talk about all the impact she had and why she was so beloved. But to start, we'll go a little further back toward the beginning. And if you've ever heard her speak, you really did do a pretty good impression. A lot of people think that she was British, and she was not British. She was American. She was born in Pasadena. Apparently, her accent was one of those Mid-Atlantic accents that she was taught growing up in private schools and private college, Smith College, in Massachusetts. Yeah, she was Julia McWilliams.

That's how she was born and didn't have British parents either. They had some money, though. Her parents were pretty well to do. Her dad was a financier, and her mom was a... an heiress of a paper company. So she grew up with a cook in the house, but it wasn't that that did it. As you'll see, she had quite a circuitous route

to becoming the most famous cook in the world and had a pretty interesting life up into that point. She really did, like a surprisingly interesting one. She was apparently a disaster in the kitchen and really didn't start cooking until I think she was in her 40s, maybe late 30s. I saw that the closest brush she had with being a gourmand and a host was when she was the chair of the refreshment committee for the senior prom and the fall dance one year at Smith College. And that's not really much of an exaggeration. That really probably is the closest

she came to being a foodie before she got into cooking later on in life. Yeah, she was a history student. She was going to be a writer. And like I said, she was tall. She was six foot two. And she was athletic. She played basketball. She played tennis. She played golf. She graduated in 1934 and moved to New York and was a, you know, I said she wanted to be a writer. She was an advertising copyrighter for Sloan's, which was a furniture company. So that was her first gig. But she was always a well-like person. She was a very, like I said, gregarious. That wasn't just a TV persona. Very, very sociable. People seemed to like her whole life. She was the life of the party, but she wasn't like just, you know, even though she loved her wine, she wasn't just some sals at the party. She was apparently pretty

responsible human, even early on. Like if she put a lampshade on her head, she remembered doing it the next day. It was on purpose. Yeah, exactly. She also had a really great work ethic, which served her well throughout the rest of her career, but really from the outset helped her because when World War II broke out, she's like, I want to become a spot. So she joined the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, the direct predecessor of the CIA, and worked directly under no less than Wild Bill Donovan, the guy who founded the OSS. Yeah, he was a general. And apparently that she didn't have a whole lot of direct interaction with him,

but it was a very big gig for her. It was pretty menial work, even though it was a job of responsibility that she was put in. It was kind of pre-computer work, like they needed human. beings to do stuff that computers would do. So she would type up profiles on note cards of OSS officers just to keep sort of in the file cabinet before they had, you know, computers to do that kind of thing along with several other women that she worked with. And like I said, she was charming. You said she had a great work ethic and she got promoted like several times through that job. Yeah. And she actually was promoted to become a member of the emergency

C. Sea Rescue Equipment section, which was tasked with coming up with a shark repellent, because sharks were a problem for downed pilots, shipwrecked sailors. I think at least 20 sailors had been attacked by sharks since the beginning of the war, and this was only a couple of years in, so they needed some sort of shark repellent that would keep sharks away, but that was also highly portable. Apparently, shark repellent did not exist to this point, and the shark repellent they came up with was so effective, it's still the shark repellent that's used today. Yeah. They would also

bump into sea mines that were supposed to hit German U-boats and detonate those, which is no good for the cause or for the shark, obviously. Mile, you son of it. So, oh man, what a line. So she was in the test

kitchen, essentially, trying to come up with a shark repellent. Obviously, had a lot of different tries on this. I I think there were over 100 different attempts at this recipe. And what they came up with, ultimately, was a mix of decayed shark meat, organic acids. And what was the copper acetate was sort of the main ingredient that capped it all off? Yeah, copper acetate, they figured out mixed with black dye, mimics the scent of a dead shark.

And I guess sharks don't like to go near other dead sharks. No, who would? And they figured out how to basically make this into a little cake. You know, a cake meaning like a little puck, not a cake, like a birthday cake. Right. And you could attach it to your life vest, and it would apparently keep sharks away for six to seven hours. It's not bad. No.

And she very facetiously, but also charmingly referred to that shark repellent as her first big recipe. You say it like her? I, okay. My first big recipe. Oh, that's perfect. That's also sounds like half of your Halloween characters. Yeah. It really was pretty bad.

Wait, hold on. Let me do it nasally. My first big, awesome. We had one person that wrote in said they couldn't get through it. I know. I felt kind of bad for him. Oh, that's right. From 44 to 45, I think these were her last two years in the OSS.

She served as chief of the OSS registry and was sent to some pretty faraway places. She went to China and Ceylon, which is modern-day Sri Lanka, and had some really top-notch security clearance. It was, you know, she really worked her way up the ladder in the OSS. I saw that she had top secret the highest-level security clearance for that assignment, which is, it's just nuts. One thing that we'll see later on is that she's basically always considered herself a feminist, and that's a good example that she worked her way to the top of the OSS

to have the highest possible security clearance during, the 40s at a time when women were not really I know that women worked a lot to support the war effort but that seems like an unusual position for a woman at the time yeah for sure uh all that you know due to her hard work um one of the biggest things that happened though in the OSS uh was that she met her future husband uh Paul child he was an officer and I say that not you know and like oh she met her husband there so that's what matters but she met her life partner and love of her life who um helped nurture her career and serve her and they they by all accounts they just seem like this really really wonderful uh couple like the kind that you've always you know want to be in

yourself that kind of relationship you know yeah i saw from basically every source that talked about it that they were the envy of their friends yeah um so yeah they stayed together they were married for almost 50 years from 1946 until Paul died in 1994. That's right. And the takeaway here is they landed in France at one point in 1948 as part of his assignment in the USS.

And when they were in France, and, you know, it's that sliding doors thing. Had they not gotten stationed in France, who knows if we ever would have gotten Julia Child? Yeah. Because he was a foodie, and she wasn't, and he said, hey, I'm going to take you out to a real French meal

and see what you think. So he took her to this very famous restaurant. How do you pronounce that, Josh? La Couronne. La Coron, which is the crown. This is in the Normandy region along the river there in northern France. And it has been a restaurant since the 1340s.

So it is legit. Some people claim it's the oldest inn in all of France. That's pretty cool. So they know what they're doing with French cuisine, which, by the way, if you don't really understand French cuisine, and I don't really claim to, I appreciate it, but it's not like that's what you and I are making on Tuesday night at home, yet, because I got her cookbook recently, and I'm very excited about it. But just to kind of like a little back of the envelope

sketch of it, French cuisine, French cooking was the first cuisine in the world to be recognized as a world heritage by UNESCO. That's how distinct and important French cuisine is. And this is the moment when Julia Child was introduced to it, this lunch at La Courant. Yeah. And as I understand it, French cuisine, I've watched a lot of top chef over the years. Okay. All of it, in fact. French cuisine is very humble, a very basic ingredients. It's not this fancy thing. You think of, you know, French food, if you don't know much about it, as being like super, super fancy. But it's actually very humble with very basic ingredients, but really quality ingredients, really perfect technique, real fats, real butters, real cream.

That's French cuisine, basically. It's like impeccable technique, you know, paired with a very simple, humble, but very well-sourced ingredients. Well put. I hope so. Made by Frenchies. You forgot that part. Yeah, generally. So at this lunch, in 1948, her first French meal, she had oysters.

All right. Poulet fumet wine, which is the official Sauvignon Blanc. Okay. And Sol Munier. Munier means Miller's wife. So like you were saying, humble, simple dishes, it's sole fish that's flowered and made with capers, lemon, butter, parsley, and not much more. And she said that that first true culinary experience, there's a few quotes I think we should trade off with. Okay.

She said that it was an opening up of the soul. and spirit for me. That first meal. It changed her life quite literally. Yeah. She also said it was a kind of coming to Jesus. And what else? She said it was the most exciting meal of my life. Yeah. And then that dish, that Dover soul that, you know, it's fried fish. You flower some soul, fry it up and some butter. Put some, I think, I think the lemon and parsley and capers is part of any, what is it? Minier. Mounier. Mounier.

I think any Mounier, that's basically what it is. But a very simple dish, and that became one of her, you know, one of her big signature dishes. Yeah. Put a little ketchup on there. You're in Hog Heaven. Oh, man. You and my daughter. So because she was moved by, she likes ketchup, huh?

Oh, God, it's so annoying. She's very cool. I have a lot in common. It gets her to eat some stuff she wouldn't normally eat. So that's good, I guess. Like broccoli? No, she didn't put it on broccoli. She doesn't like broccoli.

but she eats. Man, I don't like broccoli either. Does she hate peas, too? No, she loves peas. She, in fact, she eats frozen peas as a snack. Well, really, that's probably, like, that distinction erases all of the similarities, because I hate peas so much. Oh, yeah. I hate them so much, Chuck. Yeah, she loves sushi now, which was a big surprise for us. That's awesome. She just kind of started eating it when I got it, and because I think she likes stealing my food. So it started as a joke, and then now she's just eating it.

Do you remember what kind she eats? Is it like California rolls or nigeri? Yeah, man. Like, yeah, nagiri and just any kind of crazy roll I get, she'll eat. Man, that's awesome. That's great to start. No soy sauce, though. You're not supposed to eat much soy sauce, if any, with it.

I don't care if supposed to or not. I'm telling you what I like. Oh, that's fine. I'm just saying like she's actually, she could go to Japan right now and they wouldn't bat an eyelash at her for it. Hey, you think I don't remember our sushi episode? I didn't know. We did the Black Hole episode,

Twice. That's a good point. All right. So where are we? Julia Child has eaten this meal. It blew her mind because she was raised on American food, like you said, was not a foodie. And not only American food, but in recent years, post-war American food, which is when stuff started to get really sort of mass produced and not very good, like very processed. And this French food just blew her mind.

Yeah. So she wanted to understand how that could happen, right? Yeah. So she started taking cooking classes. And again, like, she's a total novice here. And I think she's, again, in her late 30, so this is 1948. She's about 36 at this time. And her life has just changed.

Like, she's just figured out what she wants to do in life. So she starts taking classes, ends up enrolled in La Cordon Blue in 1951. That same year, she found her own cooking school that she runs out of her own kitchen with her, who would become long-time collaborators, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertolt. And they founded the school called Lecolde de Troix Gormand, which means the school of the three Gormand's. That's right.

I didn't get this verified, but I did read somewhere that she was either the only woman in her class at La Cordon Blue or one of only two, maybe. It just, you know, back then, and, you know, there's still a lot of sexism in the chef's kitchen. and restaurants. It's come a long way, but for many, many years, it was a profession of

white men. Yeah. You know, I feel like that's something we say a lot on the show, but that's the case. Within 10 years of being at La Cordon Blue, she had sold her best-selling cookbook that you just bought, I guess. Did you get the O.G? Yeah. Yeah. What's the name of that? Mastering the art of French cooking. That's right. 700 plus pages. And then about 50 years after she enrolled at La Cordeon blue. Her actual kitchen that she cooked in would be in the Smithsonian Museum of American History as a permanent exhibit. Pretty neat. Pretty amazing. I say we take a break and we'll come back and we'll talk about that cookbook that I got because it was groundbreaking to say the least. All right.

And stuff with Joshua and Charles, stuff you should know. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Aldman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person, a billion-dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen.

I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shellgame on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcast. It's okay not to be okay sometimes and be able to build strength and love within each other. Thanksgiving isn't just about food. It's a day for us to show up for one another. I'm Elliot

Connie, host of the podcast Family Therapy, a series where real families come together to heal and find hope. What would be a clue that would be like? I've gotten lots of text messages from him. This one's from a little bit better of a version of him. Because he's feeding himself well. It's always a concern. Like, are you eating well? He's actually an amazing cook. There was this one time where we had neighbors and I saved their dog and I ended up inviting them over for food. And that was like one of my proudest moments. This is family therapy. Real families, real stories on a journey to heal together listen to season two of family therapy every wednesday on the black effect podcast network iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts welcome fellow seekers of the dark i'm

danie dregor won't you join me in nocturno tales from the shadows an anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends and lore of Latin America. Take a trip from ghastly encounters with evil spirits to bone chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. And experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. You should probably keep your lights on for nocturnal tales from the shadows. Listen to nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network

available on the I-Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. So, Chuck, you said you mentioned mastering the art of French cooking, this cookbook that Julia Child made with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertolt. And it was designed specifically for America, for the United States, to introduce them to French cooking. And up to this point, cookbooks were basically like, take a little handful of flour and throw it at, you know, the elf that's helping.

you and put a little oil in there and fold it together and voila. Yeah. Like they were not very helpful and they assumed that you already had some sort of training, maybe apprenticeship, something like that. Mastering the art of French cooking did the exact opposite. Because having not that long ago been a total novice, Julia Child realized what people who are being exposed to this new way of cooking, new foods, new techniques, new ingredients would need to know, and that was essentially everything.

So they laid out everything that you would need to know to make these recipes in this cookbook, training anyone who bought this cookbook on French cuisine. Yeah, like, you know, a recipe might have said, Julian these carrots and then put them in butter, and she would say, well, what if they don't know what that means? Here's how you Julianne. Right. And not only that, but here's the kind of knife that's ideal for that kind of thing. And the butter, too.

Yeah, and the, oh, boy, she talked a lot about butter. Yes, it did. But, like, here are the tools, here are the techniques, and here's how you do all of these for these 524 recipes. And it really just sort of, it broke down a wall in that it demystified, you know, sort of high-class cooking. Because she's like, this is something that you can do in your kitchen. Yeah. You know, Sheboygan. Exactly.

Oh, Sheboygan went nuts for this. Of course. All the men grew up pencil-thin mustaches and wore beret. the women all wore pencil, um, pencil pants. Pinsle pants? Yeah. Pencil skirts? No, what are the little short, almost clam diggers, but they were much more sveled?

I thought they were pencil something. Oh, I don't know, maybe. I know what you're talking about, though. Coolots? No. No. I don't think those are French. I think those, those don't, no country will claim those.

Oh, the coach of the Falcons wears those, which is probably why it sucks so bad. That is crazy. So on the book, um, you know, know, where she's demystifying the process and talking about quality ingredients and quality fresh herbs and high quality butters and good meats, you would think that'd be like a slam dunk because they would say no one's ever done anything like this before. But it got rejected, you know, like most success stories in the book world, there's usually like, yeah, I got rejected by like eight publishers. And she got rejected quite a bit before she finally landed with

the editor named Judith Jones at Alfred Knopf Publishing. Yeah. So Judith Jones was already a legend by this time because just a few years before, she'd kind of discovered this obscure French book and recognized how important it was and had it translated in English and published it as the Diary of Anne Frank. So she was the editor who got the diary of Anne Frank out to the English speaking world. So she already had a pretty great nose for this kind of thing. And she recognized that in mastering the art of French cooking. Not that it would be as important necessarily. is the Diary of Anne Frank, but not necessarily that it would be that far behind as far as changing the world goes, or at least the United States. Yeah, man, we should do a short stuff on Judith Jones. Okay. Can you imagine, like, walking into any publishing event? She's like, by the way, Diary of An Frank and the art, what, the mastery of French cooking.

What is it? Mastering the Art of French cooking, yeah. Yeah, she would say it better than that. She'd say both those. Those were mine. Oh, we should also do an episode on Anne Frank sometime. Yeah, I'm surprised we haven't, actually. I am a little bit, too.

Yeah, let's do that. So one of the other things that made the cookbook finally successful when it did get published, and boy, was it successful. I saw in one place that it spent five years on the bestseller list, but I couldn't find any other place to verify it. It's still worth mentioning. We were on there for two weeks. We sure were, buddy.

I think more than that, actually. I think it was two. Okay. Well, let's say two and a half. We'll split the difference. But Frenchiness was very chic at the time. Yeah. There was a French chef in the White House kitchen.

Of course, you had, you mentioned Audrey Hepburn and wearing those French clothes, French designers. Jackie Kennedy was as well. Pencil pants. Pencil pants, that French wine was starting to be a thing at a time when, you know, again, now wine is so popular. But it wasn't that hugely popular in the United States at the time. So French wine kind of became a thing. Yeah. And the first volume was so successful a few years later, I think nine years later in

1970, they released volume two, which had another 257 recipes. And apparently you can spend up to 10K, actually I saw more than that, to buy assigned volumes one and two together of the first edition. That's awesome. Yeah. I mean, they became Bibles for cooks in America. And again, it wasn't like people were already primed for this. what made people primed to consider cookbooks bibles in their kitchen in the United States.

Yeah. And you know Judith Jones, also the Bible. That's right. She helped write it. So everyone's probably saying like, yeah, this book's great, but what about television? Because that's where I remember her from my childhood. Here's where we get to TV because she moved around Europe during the 1950s with her husband Paul, came back to the States in the 60s. I believe. leave they had come back before on some, I don't know, you want to say visits, maybe some forced visits when her husband Paul was called for the blacklisted McCarthy hearings. So that was a thing. I don't think he got in trouble, though, right?

No, they were friends with a woman who was a suspected communist in the government, and they wanted to know about her. Right. So they brought him in. But they ultimately landed for good in Cambridge, Mass. And when she was, you know, promoting her cookbook, mastering the art of French cooking, I finally got it. She went on PBS at WGBH there in Boston for a book review show called I've Been Reading ellipses. And she was just doing a little demonstration on how to make an omelette.

She brought everything with her, you know, her little hot plate and saute pan or tools and her eggs. And everyone loved it. Everyone was like riding into the station saying, like, this woman that you had on cooking that omelet was funny and gregar. And we just loved her. And we also learned something. And so they said, hey, we should give you your own TV show. Yeah, within a year, the French chef, her first cooking show was on the air on WGBH. And this is at a time where cooking shows were not a thing. Right. A lot of people say the fact that cooking shows are so widespread today, you can essentially thank Julia Child for that too. That's right. And thank the French chef. It had a 10-year run. And because it was a PBS joint, other people,

TBS stations around the United States picked it up. It made its way to Europe and the UK via the BBC. It became a really big show very quickly, and Julia Child became the most widely recognized chef in the entire world, at the very least in the United States during this period, the early 60s to the early 70s. Yeah, we had a TV show for a year. We did, and we became the most widely known cooks in the world,

if not at least the United States. One thing I'm learning is it to compare our career to Julia Child's humbling experience. You were a spy for that little while, or you pretended you were at parties. Yeah, that's right. She won an Emmy and a Peabody Award for that show. And this is just a little feather in her cap, I think. It was the first TV show in the United States to feature closed captioning for the deaf and hard-op-hearing community. Yeah, open captioning.

I saw where it was for everybody. Everyone read it, but yeah. Oh, is that what close captioning means? Yeah, where you have to select it to see it. Yeah, I didn't know that either. So I guess it was open captioning, but yes, that didn't exist on TV until that. Man, I'm just learning so much because of you, my friend. Hey, right back at you, buddy.

So, you know, the TV show was a big hit. She, because she was just so lovable and she wasn't patronizing and she, you know, had her closing phrase, Bon Appetit. And she would just, she would get in there and get dirty and make mistakes. And, like, she would want people to leave the, you know, the editors to leave the mistakes in there. She's like, that's part of cooking. Yeah, that's a big deal. Because it also not only made her approachable, it made the people watching who were trying these recipes, too, realized that she wasn't infallible.

And therefore, they didn't need to worry about not being infallible, too. Like, mistakes are part of it. You just learned from them. Yeah. But, like, that was, she made it. way more approachable to people by doing that. Yeah, and I also read that this is from, I believe the women who made the documentary about her, Julia,

which is really, really good. Okay. That another reason that she left the mistakes in was especially for women because she felt like women felt like they needed to always feel bad when they mess something up in life, period, but especially in the kitchen. And she was like, no, it's okay to mess up.

And while you're in that kitchen, like, you know, it was kind of an opposition in a way to, like, the feminist movement at the time, which is, like, get out of the kitchen. Julia Child was saying, like, no, like, get in that kitchen and own it and cook for you and learn to make stuff that you want to make and not just, like, maybe what your husband and kids are yelling at you to make. Like, take over the kitchen as something that you love doing and that's for yourself. Right. I saw a Bustle magazine describer as a BAMP, which I'm not familiar with, but based on context, it seemed like it was a good thing. What does that stand for? All right, well, Josh just told me all fair what it stood for, and I agree. My joke.

So you mentioned mistakes. There's actually some famous mistakes that she made. One was she was pulling a cake from the oven, and apparently it fell flat on camera. She said something like, well, that didn't work out. Can you say it? Well, that didn't work out. Very nice. And then everybody knows that she once dropped an entire raw turkey on the floor, on camera,

left this in, pick the turkey up off the floor, kind of brushed it off, and put it in the oven and baked it like nothing ever happened. I would do that. Well, yeah, we did a whole episode on the five-second rule. Yeah, but I mean, for a raw thing like that, I know it sounds gross, but you can wash that thing off and bake it, and it's fine. Yes. You don't have a cooking show.

No, exactly. So, yes, the fact that she did this, well, I should say not the fact, because that's actually an urban legend, a rumor. It's something did happen, but it morphed into, like, the most spectacular version of itself. Oh, so it wasn't a turkey? No, it wasn't. Snopes dated it back to at least 1989, but she once, the closest they could,

find was that she was flipping a potato pancake and flipped it out of the pan onto the countertop and it crumbled and she said like I think she said when you're in the kitchen nobody can see you and she pushed it back together and put it back in the pan and cooked it yeah I love that because that's how it goes when you're cooking in your house you know yeah you you I've never not flipped a potato pancake onto the countertop uh she had you know a a string of successful cooking shows after that first one all the way from the 70s

through the 80s into the 90s. I believe she had 12 Emmy nominations total and seven wins. And by the time she got into the 1990s, they were shooting that show in her home kitchen in Cambridge. Her husband Paul

designed this kitchen that was like part kitchen, part TV studio. And just so they could spend time at home, and he was heavily involved. Apparently, at times, he was on the floor with cue cards, and he helped design the original patch for the three gourmandes that, when she worked with the other two chefs. And so they were really a sort of a power couple working together to enrich her career. Yeah.

Chuck, I say we take your second break and come back and talk about why Julia Child is so beloved. All right. We'll be right back. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles, stuff you should know. Hi, Kyle, could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc, and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link.

There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Aldman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one person, a billion dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen.

I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast. Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. It's okay not to be okay sometimes and be able to build strength and love within each other. Thanksgiving isn't just about food. It's a day for us to show up for one another.

I'm Elliot Connie, host of the podcast Family Therapy, a series where real families come together to heal and find hope. What would be a clue that would be like? I've gotten lots of text messages from him. This one's from a little bit better of a version of him. Because he's feeding himself well. It's always a concern. Like, are you eating well?

He's actually an amazing cook. There was this one time where we had neighbors and I saved their dog. And I ended up inviting them over for food. And that was like one of my proudest moments. This is Family Therapy, real families, real stories on a journey to heal together. Listen to season two of Family Therapy every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, fellow seekers of the dark.

I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me in Nocturno? Tales from the Shadow. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends and lore of Latin America. Take a trip from ghastly encounters with evil spirits to bone chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. And experience the horrors to have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. You should probably keep your lights on for a night. on for Nocturnal

Tales from the Shadows Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura Podcast Network Available on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get

your podcast. All right. Why was Julia Child so beloved? I feel like we've already made a case. But let's talk about it some more. All right. I mean, we've covered some of it, but not all. A big one is that she introduced fresh ingredients to America. This is really kind of, we hit on this, but it's worth saying. This is a time when people were using canned soup as an ingredient, not just the canned soup, right? So everything was very processed. And she insisted on fresh ingredients. Like there was no way around it. You had to use these or else these things were going to turn out very well. But at the same time, she also said, like, you need to let the food stand on its own. Like, yes, you want herbs, but you want the herbs to complement it.

You don't want the herbs to cover up. You don't want to use a bunch of A1 on your sole muneer. Like you let the thing stand on its own. You let the fish taste like fish. Like, that was kind of like a subtext, I guess, of introducing fresh ingredients, teaching people to enjoy the thing that they were cooking rather than the thing that they were cooking plus, again, A1 sauce. Yeah, exactly. And that technique, you know, if you cook a piece of fish perfectly, you don't need anything more than a little salt and pepper and butter and maybe a squirt of lemon.

Even tilapia. Yeah. But despite all this, she was not a food snob. She was very approachable. She loved In-N-Out burger. She used Helmand's mayo in her tuna salad. Apparently she liked Costco hot dogs even. I don't blame her.

I've never had one. What's special? They're like a... Wait, what's different, though? Isn't it just a hot dog? Yes, it's just a hot dog. But do you know how every once in a while your school lunch would give you something that you're like, this is amazing? Yeah.

That's like their hot dogs. They have their own taste and it's an amazing. taste, but they are on par with like a school lunch type hot dog. In the best way, I got you. Yeah, it's where people go to Costco just to eat the hot dogs and the pizza's not bad too, but it's worth going to just for the hot dogs, which technically in a weird way gives it one Michelin star. Well, you know, buddy, our friend, Joe Garden, a friend of the show, a former writer of

the onion. Joe lives there in Woodstock, and he posts pictures on his Instagram, eating those Costco hot dogs. See, he knows what's going on. Joe always knows what's up. He's got his finger on the pulse of Julia Child. That's right. So she also reintroduced America to wine.

Yeah. At the time, Americans were drinking the stuff that's now on the bottom shelf of grocery stores. Yeah, the jug wine. Yeah. So not only did she reintroduce America to wine, she normalized it by doing the same thing she did with mistakes. She drank wine on,

camera as part of her show. On some episodes, apparently she would start to get a little tipsy. She never got drunk or sloppy or anything like that. But the fact that she was drinking this wine, and by the way, pretty good wine made Americans realize what they were drinking was just bottom of the barrel stuff. And let's see what else we've got. And as a result, California wine became super dominant, essentially in part from her normalizing it. Yeah, I think that happened in the 70s when California started making good wine on par with the French, you know, according to everyone but the French. She also liked beer, and this sounds very gross to me, but she enjoyed something called

an upside-down martini, which is you swap the vermouth parts in the gin, so it's much more of vermouth than gin. Yeah, it's also lower ABV, so you don't get quite as trashed as quickly. Yeah, but man, that's kind of one of the good parts about a martini, right? For sure. She also had a really great sense of humor. Apparently, another long-standing rumor that sometimes fans would confront her with. They were like, I remember that time you drank wine directly out of the bottle on one of your episodes.

And that apparently never happened either. Again, it was just the extreme version of what she was actually doing, which is drinking wine out of a glass. But she said, I would never do that on television. Right. Yeah, and, you know, I opened with the Dan Aykroyd bit. If you didn't know what I was doing, it was a very famous S&L sketch from back in the day in 78, where Dan Aykroyd portrayed Julia Child, where he cut the dickens out of his finger. And, you know, blood's just going everywhere. Of course, they had the blood pack just squirting blood all over everything.

He was a big fan, apparently, and there was a real incident, I think about a month before that sketch where she was working with Jacques Pepin on Tom Snyder's Tomorrow Show, where she had cut herself pretty bad. and I guess that was the inspiration for that. She also apparently was very proud of that sketch and thought it was hilarious. So she kept a videotape of it and would show people sometimes. And then at a really particularly fun, enthusiastic dinner party, she might act it out like word for word by heart. Can you imagine?

Oh, I would have loved to have seen that. Yeah, incredible. She was also super charming and funny on TV appearances, but particularly Letterman. You can watch compilations of her on Letterman. She could hold her own against Letterman. no problem. Yeah, you sent me that one clip.

I actually think I remember seeing that in high school, but Letterman was, you know, I love Letterman. He was, I felt like he was not being too kind about the food. Sometimes he's cranky. Yeah, so I felt a little bad for her in that she was serving him, kind of a version in this one of a tartar. What do you call? Yeah, of a steak tartar, but it was with ground beef and melted cheese, and he just sort of kept making fun of it, and then he spit it out.

And at the end, I think she said something that kind of made me feel bad. She was like, well, maybe next time I can serve something you like or something like that. Well, she used an acetylene torch to melt the cheese, which is pretty hilarious. I had the impression that they didn't have the equipment she needed to make a burger, so she made the most out of it. Oh, interesting. Well, using a torch is very commonplace in kitchens now, but Dave made it, I guess back then it was unusual because Dave was, like, thought it was the weirdest thing you'd ever seen. For sure. Yeah.

One other thing we mentioned, too, that we have to do. touchline is she was known for her love of butter. She taught America to cook all through the decades where America started to become health conscious and fat-free and all that stuff. And so she would become criticized for pushing things like real butter on people. And she would say things like, well, if you're afraid of butter, use cream instead, which is at least as bad as butter. And her whole thing was like, yes, you shouldn't just be gorging yourself on butter all the time.

But if you're going to make a meal, use the real butter and enjoy every bite of it. Like, that's the point is enjoying every single bite of this stuff, not enjoying every single bite until you start eating mindlessly because you eat this 10 times a day, right? Yeah. And she had, she quoted Oscar Wilde, which I thought was great. But she said everything in moderation, including moderation. That's a great quote. I got a little kitchen tip. If you're health conscious and you're thinking, like,

I don't want to use a lot of butter. I use olive oil or whatever. Use that olive oil, but you can also throw in, like, one pad of butter in with that olive oil. You can mix those two things, and it's great. For sure. And it adds just a little unctuousness that olive oil won't give you. I love that.

Yeah. And don't forget the A1. My friend Clay still loves that stuff. So, well, it's classy. Yeah. I mean, it's a very specific taste. I love that tart tangy A1. I just don't use it.

So, Chuck, we talked about volumes one and two of mastering the art of French cooking. We should say in addition to the string of successful TV shows, she had a bunch of cookbooks. But these were her two classics. And put together a 781 recipes between the two of them. But if you go on to food sites

and you look up something like Julia Child's best recipes, some of them kind of percolate to the top where you're like, you see them on just about every list. And I think that we should go over a few of those starting now. Yeah, for sure. If you've ever seen the movie Julia and Julia, did you see that? I haven't. I heard it was great. It's really good. That is the story of a woman named Julie Powell, who I think was sort of felt lost in life and wanted to dive into this project of cooking every recipe. I think she had a blog or something maybe. It was a really good movie,

though. Amy Adams played Julie Powell, who very sadly passed away a few years ago at the young age of 49. Oh, wow. And Meryl Streep, I don't know if she won the Academy Award. I know she was nominated for playing Julia Child. So it sort of tells those two stories together. And it's a wonderful movie from Nora Ephron. But in that movie, she's cooking all the recipes and won the big, big one from the book that she was most well known for that she really wanted to master out of the gate was the buff Bourguignon. Mm-hmm. Which is essentially a beef stew with red wine. But again, you take some deceptively simple ingredients and put them together in the right way. It's going to produce a smash hit dish, and that's what beef bourguignon is. What else? Kish Lorraine, which everybody knows, you can get Kish Lorraine at the grocery store by the slice. Yeah. Because Julia Child introduced it to the United States with her cookbook. That's right. Again, very simple. clean recipe, bacon, onions, egg, cream, a few cheeses, some spices, of course, eggs.

Just real quick about bacon, remember I said that she didn't want to cover up the taste, she wanted let things to stand on their own. Yeah. One of the things she talks about mastering the art of French cooking was that with American bacon, you have to blanch it first to remove the smoky flavor. So you actually lightly boil it for a little bit until you get the smoky flavor off, and then you start to use bacon, which I think is actually a huge. tip for a lot of people out there, believe me.

If they don't like smoky flavors, I guess. But the problem is, is the bacon, smokiness is going to take over. Like, that's all you're going to taste. Whereas you're not, if you can get rid of that smoky flavor, then you're in hog heaven, as she always said. I don't mind it. I like that apple. And I also cook it in the oven.

I think that is the best way to cook bacon. Agreed. And they, on a baking sheet. With the little elf laying on it to keep it flat. What about a cassoulet? That's a very classic French dish. Yeah, it's pork and beans, poultry, sausage. There's a dark brown crust on the top of the whole thing.

She had a great quote about that. Yeah, cassoulet, that best of bean feast is everyday fare for a peasant, but ambrosia for a gastronome. Though its ideal consumer is a 300-pound blocking back, who's been splitting firewood nonstop for the last 12 hours on a sub-zero day in Manitoba. And, like, if you look at pictures of the Kesoulet, it's, like, I want one so bad. Yeah, it looks really good. And what about chocolate mousse?

Yeah, that's another one that apparently she made a mistake on air. It didn't set correctly, and you know that moose has to set. But good chocolate mousse is out of this world. Yeah, I couldn't find the episode, but apparently a 1992 WAPO article mentioned it. But supposedly it is surprisingly easy to make, and the outcome is just amazing. I saw light, airy, silky, smooth, says the endless meal. And it's just a few ingredients, including rum, chocolate, coffee. And she teaches you these techniques of how to make it, how to fold it, how to whip the egg whites, and just get it just right.

Yum. Every time I hear chocolate moose, I think of chocolate moose from Top Secret. Oh yeah He was great This is good movie RIP Val Kilmer Oh yeah I forgot about that

And then of course French onion soup I know that you and I both talked on the air About our love For French onion soup If it's on a menu There's two things in my life

If it's on a menu I will get it One is French onion soup And the other is a French dip sandwich You love the French Two of my favorite things And it's not on You know the most menu

So when I see it I order it And that French onion soup, crusty on top, and that delicious onion-y broth and the bread, it's just one of life's treats. Have you ever made it? I've never made it myself. I should try that. It's really good.

All it takes is patience. It's not hard, but it takes a while for everything to come together. It takes a while to, like, genuinely caramelize the onions. But, man, it is so worth it. It's really good. Don't you just get one of those Lipton packets? Yeah. Out of the can, that's how I do it.

Well, you take one of those Lipton packets and you put it in a turkey burger. That's what you do. Yeah, that's supposed to be pretty good. I've not had that. I found a recipe for a roast that has a packet of au jus, you know, the dry augeau packet, a packet of ranch, dry ranch mix, peppercini, and like maybe one other thing in a roast. And you put it in a slow cooker, and it's supposed to be a knockout dish, and I can't wait to try it. Oh, man. You got to watch Julia and Julie and Julia and then start cooking that stuff and let me know how it goes.

Okay, yeah, I definitely plan to make some stuff, so I'll let you know for sure. All right. Sadly, we're at the end of this episode, and Julia Child met the end of her life at the almost age of 92. I think she was just a couple of days short of her 22nd birthday when she passed away at her home at the time in Montecito, California in August 2004 of liver failure. Yeah, Elaine Ducasse, who I think is the only three-star Michelin chef in the world, said today the entire community of cooks is sad and feels like orphans. Oh, man. I know, isn't that sad? That's brutal, yeah.

So she's actually buried in one of the more interesting places I've ever heard of. Had you heard of the Neptune Memorial Reef before? No, that sounds kind of cool, though. Yeah, so they took her cremated remains, mixed together with some concrete, and formed a headstone out of it. put it underwater, I can't remember how deep it is, but this is an acre-long underwater cemetery off a Key Biscayne in Florida. And on the headstone, again, made from her cremated remains,

there's a plaque with a knife and a fork inscribed on it and a quote from her, fat gives things flavor. I love it. Yep. That's pretty fun for a scuba diver to see, I bet. For sure. So RIP Julia Childen, thanks for everything. that's right our berets are off to you

let's see we talked about Julia Child you took off your brain yeah that means it's time for listener mail All right so this is from Nathan Winger and Carmel

Indiana and Nathan went through the trouble of calculating how many Olympic pools deep and how many Big Macs we are as a show he loves it says I love nerd maths so I did some calculations. Using my trusty search engine,

I found out there are over 2,600 episodes of stuff you should know. We're just going to use 2,600 to make it simple, he says. All told the average length is 45 minutes, which makes me feel good because that's what we're shooting for. He said, that seems low, though, so I'm going to adjust it up to 55. I think these days it's 45. They used to be longer, so that's probably what he's witnessing. Okay.

At average conversational speed, humans speak about 130 words a minute. So you guys do a great podcast, and as pros have honed your conversational skills to not be fast nor slow. So I'm going to stick with that median figure. Thanks. The average number of letters per English word is five. But since you often talk about subjects that require words like Sputacular and Hint or Kaifect, I'm going to up your average to six. And finally, we're going to convert your speech into inches based on the size of a standard size 12 font, which is 0.167 inches. I love this stuff.

So based on all that, we can get inches per word, one, inches per minute of speech, 130, inches per episode, 70150, total episode inches, 18,590,000, and total episode feet, which is 1.549-167 feet. That equates, so one episode of stuff you should know, equates to the depth of 238,33 Olympic swimming pools. Wow. A bit short of Josh's estimate of 10 to 15 million, and for the sake of transparency and Chuck's liking, that is 7.75 and change million Big Macs at an average of 2.5 inches per burger. Man, who is this? This is Nathan Wenger, or Winger. Okay. I'd say Winger.

I think it's Winger in the tradition of Kipwinger. Well, it's W. So that's Nathan. He's in Carmel, Indiana. That's a lot of work to go through, Nathan. Yeah, Nathan, I could tell you're a true fan with that little trusty search engine aside. I caught that. I love it. Thank you for doing that. I always wanted to know how many Big Macs we are and Olympic pools. So thanks a lot, Nathan. And happy Thanksgiving to you. And happy Thanksgiving to all of you out there, including our Canada friends.

And if you want to send us an email like Nathan did, send it off to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the IHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Join me, Danny Trejo, in Nocturno, Tales from the Shadow. An anthology of modern-day horror. stories inspired by the legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal, Tales from the Shadows.

On the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Jingle bells, jingle, jingle all the way. Yo, yo, yo, yo. Can we get a Thanksgiving first? I'm hungry. What's up, y'all? It's Cadeen. And DeVal, the host of the Ellis Ever After. podcast. This holiday season, tune out the noise and tune in to Ellis Ever After. On Ellis Ever After, we get real with our crew about family, love and marriage, and everything else in between.

Listen to Ellis Ever After on America's number one podcast network, IHeart. Follow Ellis Ever After and start listening on the free IHeart Radio app today. Thanksgiving isn't just about food. It's a day for us to show up for one another. It's okay not to be okay sometimes and be able to build strength and love within each other. Connie, host of the podcast Family Therapy, a series where real families come together to heal and find hope. I've always wanted us to have therapy, so this is such a beautiful opportunity. Listen to season two of family therapy every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.