Julia Child
ESL 33A
“How Julia Child Invented Modern Life” by Karen Lehrman
Discussion Questions
1.
What were popular American attitudes toward food before Julia Child’s book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking?
2.
How did American culture change after World War II?
3.
How did Julia’s book influence the way Americans viewed food?
4.
How did Julia Child influence the way Americans viewed women?
5.
Where and how did Julia Child meet her husband? What was he doing at the time?
6.
How did Julia Child come to learn French cooking? How did that lead to her writing her first book?
7.
Why was Julia Child’s book so much more successful than other books about French cooking? How Julia Child invented modern life
What Julia started
Julia Child made America mad for food and changed notions of class and gender
BY KAREN LEHRMAN
Americans are obsessive about fancy food. At the pricier supermarkets, it's hard to find the hamburgers among the pâtés, the buns among the polenta, the ketchup among the jars of mango salsa. Guests at tony dinner parties twitter about whether one should wok in peanut or canola oil, and why a morel tastes better with a dash of rosemary. Books devoted to cooking, broken down by region, appliance, and heat source, occupy four aisles at the neighborhood Barnes & Noble. Food has become an integral part of high culture. A character proclaims in John Guare's 1990 play, Six Degrees of Separation, "The restaurants! New York has become the Florence of the sixteenth century. Genius on every corner."
Haute cuisine is embedded in mass culture, too: The corner coffee shop sells pain au chocolat, and
Burger King slaps sausage, egg, and cheese between two crescent-shaped rolls and calls it a
"Croissan’wich."
It wasn't always this way. In the 1950s, America was a meat-and-potatoes kind of country. Women did all of the cooking and got their recipes from ladies' magazine articles with titles like "The 10-Minute
Meal and How to Make It." Meatloaf, liver and onions,
“How Julia Child Invented Modern Life” by Karen Lehrman
Discussion Questions
1.
What were popular American attitudes toward food before Julia Child’s book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking?
2.
How did American culture change after World War II?
3.
How did Julia’s book influence the way Americans viewed food?
4.
How did Julia Child influence the way Americans viewed women?
5.
Where and how did Julia Child meet her husband? What was he doing at the time?
6.
How did Julia Child come to learn French cooking? How did that lead to her writing her first book?
7.
Why was Julia Child’s book so much more successful than other books about French cooking? How Julia Child invented modern life
What Julia started
Julia Child made America mad for food and changed notions of class and gender
BY KAREN LEHRMAN
Americans are obsessive about fancy food. At the pricier supermarkets, it's hard to find the hamburgers among the pâtés, the buns among the polenta, the ketchup among the jars of mango salsa. Guests at tony dinner parties twitter about whether one should wok in peanut or canola oil, and why a morel tastes better with a dash of rosemary. Books devoted to cooking, broken down by region, appliance, and heat source, occupy four aisles at the neighborhood Barnes & Noble. Food has become an integral part of high culture. A character proclaims in John Guare's 1990 play, Six Degrees of Separation, "The restaurants! New York has become the Florence of the sixteenth century. Genius on every corner."
Haute cuisine is embedded in mass culture, too: The corner coffee shop sells pain au chocolat, and
Burger King slaps sausage, egg, and cheese between two crescent-shaped rolls and calls it a
"Croissan’wich."
It wasn't always this way. In the 1950s, America was a meat-and-potatoes kind of country. Women did all of the cooking and got their recipes from ladies' magazine articles with titles like "The 10-Minute
Meal and How to Make It." Meatloaf, liver and onions,