Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Conversation Bites Kidding Around with Julia Child, 1992 and 2004
Posted by Nicki Wood on Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 7:24 AM
Commenter Mimi was asking about a couple of encounters I had with Julia Child back in the day, so I went in search of an interview I did with her for the old Nashville Banner newspaper. It was a fun interview, if not brilliant, and a fun-to-write article.
I called the legendary television chef on her 80th birthday and asked her some rookie questions about food and cooking, what it's like to be a legend, and nutrition. She was extremely chatty, and over the course of a wonderful conversation, we discovered that we both habitually burned toast, that she felt optimistic about the comeback of home cooking (she was right), and she was not a fan of food fads.
Four or five years later, she was a guest at a professional food writers conference I attended at the Greenbrier resort. She was a great companion, though by then very old, with limited mobility. Still, she stayed up late with all of us, and after an epic night drinking free champagne and wine, she and cookbook author Ann Willan fixed breakfast the next day for the 35 writers. And she burned the toast.
I finally found a hard copy of the original interview in my files, and by "files" I mean plastic tubs in the cricket cavern basement. The original interview is not online.
Time for a tiny innernetz rant: The story ran in the Banner in 1992, and online aggregators don't usually offer content from before 1995. Through a flukey series of coincidences, tragedies and bad luck, no print or microfilm copies reside in the newspaper archives at the public library. Part of the reason I post it here is to make sure it exists somewhere.
To be bluntly honest, you've read shorter, tighter stories. It helps to recall that in 1992, food sections were vast oceans of space, and long stories were encouraged. All that said, here it is in PDF form.
For a slightly better crafted piece, you can read the remembrance of her I wrote for this paper in 2004.
Comments (3)
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Thanks, Nicki - I loved reading it and looking at the whole section (which was all Nicki.) Strikes me as sad that the days where a food writer (who would be responsible for the whole section) has made like the dodo bird. I hope the Scene/City Paper continue to value local reporting.
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