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of the ribs along here, where it gets up to your neck.” Finally, the camera reached her, just in time to see Julia running her hand up her own side. She cut the meat into chunks, chatting comfortably about quantities per person and handling the meat as affectionately as if she were powdering a baby. Then came the browning of the beef, three or four minutes that strikingly illustrated how television—at least as Julia conceived it—could be a great teacher of cooking. Browning is a simple procedure, but there are many more ways to do it wrong than right; and mistakes can ruin the meat. In her methodical way, Julia discussed the pitfalls and how to avoid them, browning the meat properly while an overhead mirror made the contents of the pan clearly visible. To a novice cook, or an experienced cook with bad habits, this lesson would have been life-changing.

After deglazing the pan with wine, she poured the wine over the meat—“just enough liquid so that the meat is barely covered,” she instructed, and added tenderly, “It’s called a fleur in France. When the meat looks like little flowers.” Julia had long ago acquired a correct if unmusical French accent, but here she deliberately lapsed into the vulgate. “A fleur” became “ah flerr” and “beurre manie” came out “burr man-yay,” both pronounced in careful Americanese. Perhaps she was trying to sound unpretentious, but she needn’t have worried; she was incapable of sounding anything else. In later programs her accent returned to normal.

Here, right at the start of her long career on television, Julia was already recognizably Julia—straightforward, intelligent, relishing the work, and giving star treatment to the food. Her all-important butter dish, the size and shape of a small rowboat, was at the ready; and though she praised her nonstick pan, she made it clear that a nonstick pan was no excuse for cutting back on the butter and oil. Standing at the dining table in the last moments of the show, a ticking clock all but visible in her eyes, she summed up what the program had covered—reminding viewers for at least the third time that they could do lamb, veal, and chicken exactly the same way—and invited them to return for French onion soup next week. She had composed a sign-off—“This is Julia Child, your French Chef. Bon appétit!”—but it disintegrated in the flurry of the final seconds. “This is Julia Child, welcome to The French Chef, and see you next time,” she said, rather confusingly. “Bon appétit!”

Throughout the WGBH broadcast area, audiences fell in love. “We have gotten quite a few calls, etc., and people seem to like it,” Julia told Koshland after “Boeuf Bourguignon” was aired. “It went quite well, I thought, though a bit rough and hurried in spots.” Nobody seemed to mind the rough spots. By March, some six hundred letters had poured in, many asking for the recipes, and others simply expressing rapture. “The station is getting a bit worried as it costs them about 10 cents an answer, but luckily quite a few of the letters enclose contributions to the station. I think we are luckily in at just the right time, as there have been no cooking shows for years, and people are evidently just ripe for them,” she wrote to Koshland. Julia often attributed her success to luck and good timing, but the onslaught of mail made it perfectly clear why people responded to The French Chef: it was Julia.

“We love her naturalness & lack of that T.V. manner, her quick but unhurried action, her own appreciation of what she is producing. By the time she gets to the table with her dish and takes off her apron, we are so much ‘with’ her that we feel as if someone had snatched our plates from in front of us when the program ends.”

“I love it where you say, ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you thus and so’ (so human and consoling to amateur cooks).”

“You are such a refreshing change from all the dainty cookery and gracious living that women are bombarded with—I hope you live to be a hundred and grow to enormous size.”

“Your honesty & forthrightness in all you do and say is greatly appreciated & welcomed in this