Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

  • 7 - Cold War Cooking

  • Edited by J. Michelle Coghlan, University of Manchester
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food
    Published online:
    17 March 2020
    Print publication:
    19 March 2020, pp 101-115

  • Summary

    This chapter explores Julia Child’s role in the “hot kitchen” of Cold War culture, and her unlikely repurposing of the trans-national domestic front. Recent commentators have suggested that the OSS researcher, food writer, TV celebrity, and domestic goddess single-handedly “re-outfitted the American kitchen and re-educated the American palate.” In the heyday of Jello molds and frozen foods, she made French cooking hot. But when Julia arrived in France in 1948, the country was scarred by war and reeling from deprivation – was, in other words, far from a foodie paradise. Child’s memoirs reveal her keen awareness of postwar scarcity, and the postwar politics of being an American in Paris in the age of both McCarthy and the Marshall Plan. Reading My Life in France alongside Mastering the Art of French Cooking and Child's collected letters, I uncover how her work to translate French cuisine for an American audience pivotally upended Cold War domestic ideology, countering narratives of American modernity and postwar abundance with visions of French leisure, luxury, and culinary extravagance.