39 - Julia Child: WW2 Spy Who Created Shark Repellent Cakes

Pierustin pyöräilyvää teitä valmistavan ornotin vuonna 2013. Mielestäni parasta Shopify saan se, että voimme harjoittaa liiketoimintaa ilman teknistä osaamista. Voimme hallinoida yrityksen taustajaristeelle mien ja front-endia sekä myydä verkossa, vaivatta. Jos Shopify olisi pyöräilyvaruste, sollisimielestäni itse polkupyörä. Sillä asiat hoidetaan ja meidän liiketoiminta me hoituu Shopify'ssa. Aloita ilmainen kokeilu, Shopify piste komsi vustolla. Mielainen kesärempaa ja olet, selvitä se osoitteessa tikkurilla pistefi ja voittaa tuhat euroa remparahaa. Valitse kestävä tikkurilan ultra, vinhaa tai valtti plus kolor. Säännöllinen käsittely tikkurilan tuotteella pitää talousikaunina vuosikymesta toiseen. I'd hazard a guest that if you're listening to this show, then at some point in your life, you may have heard of the acclaimed Queen of French cuisine Julia Child. Like many of you, I too have seen the movie Julia and Julia where Julia Child was portrayed by the magnificent Meryl Streep. Like a fair amount fewer of you, I too have tried cooking a few of Julia's recipes on a lazy Sunday afternoon before the emergence of little toddler fingers made having raw meat and sharp knives around less of an option. But even with all of this knowledge and experience of Julia Child, I too was amazed to find out via my friend Melissa over at the World of Beast's podcast that Julia, before her foray into the culinary world, worked as a world war two spy. And she came up with a recipe for shark repellent. It seems that even the most famous and lauded among us still have a few tasty secrets up their sleeves. And today we're going to dive into this fascinating side of one of modern cooking's most famous gourmands. Welcome to the fantastic history of food, strange but true stories from history that in some way involve food. I'm your host, Nick Chiliki. Julia Child was born Julia Carolyn McWilliams on the 15th of August 1912 in Pasadena, California. Her family was incredibly wealthy, as her father was a successful banker and her mother was the a-rest to the Western paper company of Massachusetts. It's safe to say they didn't struggle financially. As happens with the children of the elite and wealthy she received the very best education money could buy and attended the Catherine Branson School for Girls. As you may or may not already know about her, Julia was an incredibly tall woman, standing at 6'2" tall or just under 190cm. This meant she excelled in her time as the captain of the woman's basketball team and gave her a sturdy frame with which to also become the president of the school's hiking club. She would go on to attend the all-female Smith College, where her most notable contribution was policing the college's well-manacured lawns, making sure that no unruly students stepped foot on them. She herself felt that she was wasting her life somewhat, and once wrote in her diary, "I am sadly an ordinary person, with talents I do not use." She had no real ambition to make much of herself as she had no need for money or influence, both of which had been bestowed upon her at birth. She went on to take a secretaryal course but left after just a month when she was offered the job of secretary at WJ Sloan, a furniture company in New York City. Four years later, she was fired after a catastrophic mix-up with some important company documents. But in a strange twist of fate, it would be the emergence of the United States participation in World War II that would forever change her life. It was September 1941, just three months before the US would officially enter the war, and Julia wanted to make herself useful to the cause. She began volunteering at the Pasadena Chapter of the American Red Cross, where she put her secretaryal skills to good use, heading up the department of Stenographic Services. Stenography is still mostly used in courtrooms today, but was the method of taking down notes in meeting minutes as people spoke, in a shorthand writing style often using symbols to represent words or phrases in order to keep up with the pace of the speakers. When the United States joined the war proper, Julia was unfortunately rejected for military combat roles because of her unusual height. But this wouldn't stop her, as for the first time in her life, she had begun to feel a sense of purpose in her work. So in 1942, she would move divisions and become a senior typist with the Research Unit of the Office of War Information in Washington, D.C. And then by the end of that same year, she would join the Secret Intelligence Branch of the Office of Strategic Services, otherwise known simply as the OSS. This was the agency that would later become what we know today as the CIA. In another sideways move across departments, Julia would end up working for the emergency C-risk U-equipment section of the Navy. It was by now 1943 and Sharks had become a major concern for naval operations, not least because of the media's sudden interest in it. In reality, for the first three years of the war, there had only been around 20 incidents of Sharks attacks on sailors and downed pilots who had found themselves caught in Sharks infested waters. But for the media, this was the perfect story to latch onto for its gruesome details and the almost supernatural fear that Sharks could inspire in people. Families back home began to fear Sharks almost as much as they feared the Nazis. The Navy knew it had to do something, and so it turned to the OSS for help in finding a solution to their shock problem. Scientists had already by this point been working for years to find a solution to scare off the toothy predators, but nothing they tried seemed to work. The new task team was set up, which included a scientist from Harvard named Coolidge, and a natural history museum researcher named Henry Field. Coolidge would ask Julia to join them in concocting something that would finally work. Julia Child and her team would end up testing more than 100 substances, including common poisons, decaying shark meat, acid, and various other chemical combinations. But it would be a full year before they would hit upon something that finally began to show some promise. In true Julia style, they were small cakes, but these cakes were made of copper acetate mixed with black dye. Research showed that it was the closest thing they could reproduce to how dead sharks smelled to other sharks, and was a lot more effective for some reason than when they had actually just used dead sharks in their earlier tests. The military wasn't 100% sold on the idea, but the recipe was put into action and slowly released to soldiers in the midst of World War II. These copper acetate cakes were attached to sailors' lifest and were also given to airmen to rubble themselves should they crash land in the water. There was a feeling among the higher ups than even if it wasn't as effective as it claimed to be, the placebo effect of it at least calmed the man down and gave them more hope of survival than they may otherwise have had. As the war dragged on, they began to use these shark repellent cakes for more than just personnel uses. The military shark had a nasty habit of nibbling on sea mines intended for German and Japanese submarines as well as other naval vessels. This would of course result in the swift and blinding demise of the unfortunate shark, but also meant the navy was losing mines unnecessarily at a rapid rate. So they began coating these underwater mines in the same substance with which the cakes were made in order to prevent the untimely death of some hungry and inquisitive sharks. One of today's sponsors is Athletic Greens. So what is Athletic Greens? Well with one delicious scoop of Athletic Greens you're absorbing 75 high quality vitamins, minerals, whole food source superfoods, probiotics and adaptogens to help you start your day right. This special blend of ingredients supports your gut health, your nervous system, your immune system, your energy, your recovery, your focus and aging. And best of all it's lifestyle friendly. So whether you follow a keto, paleo, vegan, dairy free or gluten free diet, Athletic Greens fits into all of them. It costs less than $3 a day and for every purchase Athletic Greens donates to organizations helping to get nutritious food to kids in need, including no kid hungry in the US. In 2020 alone Athletic Greens donated over 1.2 million meals to kids. Right now it's time to reclaim your health and arm your immune system with a convilient daily nutrition. It's just one scoop in a cup of water every day. That's it. No need for a million different pills and supplements to look out for your health. To make it easy, Athletic Greens is going to give you a free one year supply of immune supporting vitamin D and 5 free travel packs with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit Athletic Greens.com/emerging. Again, that's Athletic Greens.com/EMERGIG to take ownership over your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. Julia Child's time spent in the OSS helped her flourish into the woman with the forceful personality that we have all come to know. It was here in Washington DC that she left behind her feelings of inadequacy and normalcy and built creativity and confidence in abundance. She was awarded the emblem of Meritoria Civilian Service for her efforts during the war and was recognised for her resourcefulness, industry and good judgement. After the war, the OSS would place her at multiple stations overseas, spending time in China, India and Sri Lanka, the latter of which being where she would meet and then ultimately fall in love with her future husband Paul Child, a fellow OSS officer. They were soon married and packed their bags to begin a new life together in Paris. Paul was reassigned to work with the US Information Agency in 1948 and it was during this time that Julia was left to run the household. It was at this point that she realised with a sense of shame and horror that because of her privileged upbringing she had never learned any of the basic skills of home making, foremost of which was her lack of any cooking skills. She knew she wanted to change this and before long fell head over heels in love with French cuisine. She often recalled where it all began. Her husband Paul had travelled extensively before they had met and so had a fine appreciation for a variety of cuisines. It was because of him that one night early into their stay in France he took Julia to a fine dining restaurant in Roen called Lacaronne, French for the Crown. She describes that night as a culinary revelation and the meal of oysters, salt, munier and fine wine as an opening up of the soul and spirit. She was hooked and wanted to not just consume these dishes but also to create them. She decided that the only thing for it was to enrol in one of the most prestigious cooking schools in all of France and quite possibly the world at the time, named Lacaronne Blu. Julia was quoted as saying that on her first day of school all she knew how to do was boil the water to make a cup of tea. She took to the school like a duck to water and when she wasn't in class she spent hours wandering through the Parisian food markets purchasing all manner of local ingredients to experiment with at home. Once she had graduated from Lacaronne Blu she would go on to study under a range of French master chefs including Max Bunyard. She even joined a woman's cooking club called La Cirque L'Égoumée and it was here that fate would intervene in her life. During one of the club meetings she met a woman named Simone Beck who was in the middle of writing a cookbook aimed at an American audience with her friend Louisette Bittole. They brought Julia Child on initially as a consultant for the American audience but quickly she took to toiling away in the kitchen coming up with her own recipes for the first manuscript. Soon they were offering cooking classes for American women right in their test kitchen and called the informal cooking classes the school of the three food lovers. All the while they were cooking, testing, writing and updating their seminal masterpiece. It would take ten long years before their hard work would pay off and the book would get picked up by a major publisher. In that decade Julia had moved around Europe with her husband's assignments and had settled finally in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A large part of Julia's role was translating the French recipes accurately and simply into English making sure that the recipes were detailed, interesting and practical. Upon its release mastering the art of French cooking was a smash hit and it cemented the three women into the culinary history books forever. America was already going through a phase of loving everything French with a particular focus on its cuisine so the book landed at the perfect time to rarely explode onto the scene. The success of the cookbook and Julia's sudden rise to a household name quickly led to her being offered her own cooking show on television. While we are inundated with cooking shows, celebrity chefs and the like nowadays, she was a pioneer in this field which had not seen anything quite like it before. She had an easy manner on camera, her trademark sing-song voice and her commanding stature all led to her being instantly recognizable anywhere she went. In the years between 1963 and 1969 she would record 199 episodes of her show The French Chef. She would go on to write many more cookbooks, would co-found institutes such as the American Institute of Wine and Food as well as the Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts. She was famous for putting flavour and enjoyment above any semblance of healthy dieting which was shown most notably in her generous use of butter in all of her cooking. The child would end up building a home near Provance in the French countryside, high up in the hills above cans. They would name their cottage La Pichoune, a local word meaning the little one. She would go on to write cookbooks and star in many television shows throughout the rest of her life until the ripe old age of 92 when she passed away in Montecito, California in 2004. Her final book My Life in France ends with some fantastic words with which I would like to end this episode. She wrote, "Thinking back on it now, it reminds me that the pleasures of the table and of life are infinite. Tujous Bon Appétit!" Thank you for listening to this episode of the Fantastic History of Food. If you'd like to get in touch, you can find us on Twitter at Food HistoryPod. If you enjoyed this episode, I'd really appreciate you taking a moment to rate the show on Apple podcasts or whatever platform you listen on and if you can, leave a review as well. I also have a Patreon account where you can support the show and get access to exclusive content, bonus episodes and even the chance to choose the topic for an upcoming episode. But all of this is only for our Patreon subscribers. Everyone who donates or subscribes will also get a personal shout out from me on an upcoming episode. Check out our website where you can find transcripts, show notes and references for each and every episode at FoodHistoryPodcast.com.