Lessons Learned

Confident men don't mind if their wives are successful.

"Paul Child was a supremely confident man. "Whatever it is, I will do it," he told Julia, becoming her manager, photographer, recipe-tester and taster, proofreader, illustrator. When she went on the road to promote her books, he went along. Few men of Paul Child's generation would have been able to enjoy their wife's success as he did."

Julia Child liked to hang things up in the kitchen.

"Aware of her passion for order, he figured out the perfect place for every pot and pan and drew its outline on the pegboard; a blind person could cook in this kitchen. 'I like things to hang up,' Julia said, 'so Paul made a diagram of where everything goes. It's nice to have them back where they belong.'"

In 1952, Julia Child decided that cooking was a satisfying way to keep busy (more interesting than playing golf, or even enrolling in the US intelligence service during the war).

"She played a great deal of golf and joined the Junior League. For someone with her drive, intelligence and energy, this little life must have been a nightmare, and when the war came along she happily joined the OSS, propelled as much by boredom as by patriotism. By then she was already in spinster territory-the dread 30s."

"'I have,' she said with remarkable prescience in 1952, 'finally found a real and satisfying profession which will keep me busy well into the year 2,000.' Exhilarated by her new career, she set about writing a book that would 'make cooking make sense.'"

Source: "Julia Child's Recipe for a Thoroughly Modern Marriage," The Smithsonian, June 2012. (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Julia-Childs-Recipe-for-a-Thoroughly-Modern-Marriage.html)