Training Lessons from the French Chef: Being Resourceful and Making Mistakes
By Mary Pat Campbell
The Stepping Stone, July 2022
There has been Julia Child mania in the media of late. Even though she died in 2004, there have been multiple shows and movies based on her life and work: “Julia” (2021–2022 HBO series, docudrama based on her life); “The Julia Child Challenge” (2022 Food Network series, competition based on Julia Child episodes set in a replica of Child’s kitchen), “Julia” (2021 documentary, covering Child’s life), “Julie & Julia” (2009 film based on a memoir by Julie Powell, who worked through the entirety of Child’s magnum opus Mastering the Art of French Cooking).
While the last project was from over a decade ago, the others may have been boosted by people rediscovering home arts through pandemic lockdowns. Along with shanty-singing and puzzle-solving, home cooking came into popularity as many attempted bread-baking and comfort food cooking to make time inside more bearable. And it turns out there is a lot we can learn about resilience from Julia Child.
I have been able to find several episodes of Julia Child’s first and classic TV series, “The French Chef,” streaming on various services. Indeed, as I write this, there is an entire Julia Child channel on Pluto TV, but it can also be found via PBS, Amazon, Roku, and many other streaming video services.
The French Chef was launched with a black and white pilot in 1962, and was shot live to videotape. That fact is important to how Child conducted the show—there were no pauses, and she had to prepare everything in advance for the show. Child’s cooking show wasn’t the first TV cooking show, but hers was the first broad hit for a variety of reasons.
Obviously, Child’s show came out of all her work from her training in French cooking at Cordon Bleu as well as her training with other master chefs, plus her gigantic book Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It is far easier to follow cooking instructions when you can see them carried out in front of you instead of merely reading them. From the very first episode, there were above-the-table vertical camera shots, so that people could more easily see what she was doing. Because of the half-hour running time, generally none of the dishes would be fully cooked in front of the audience, so she would have prepared finished or partially finished portions ready to continue the process.
While she demonstrated the steps in putting together a dish, she explained why you needed to do certain things, and whether other ingredients or methods could be substituted. For example, in the first episode of the first regular season, in preparing Boeuf Bourguignon (beef burgundy), she pats the beef dry with paper towels while explaining that if there is much water on the beef, one is merely steaming the meat, not browning it. She usually stayed away from jargon and also from measuring spoons and cups, mainly doling out salt and butter by eye—which is how most cooks really do it. She made French cooking for many dishes look like the homey cooking much of it was and made it very approachable.
But there were two aspects that made it very popular, I think, one of which most people didn’t consciously notice, and one which everybody did (as it was often lampooned, in very good humor—just Google “Dan Aykroyd Julia Child” for a classic spoof from “Saturday Night Live”).
Working Through Mistakes
First, the aspect that everybody noticed: what happened when mistakes occurred.
As mentioned above, “The French Chef” was filmed live to videotape, without pauses, so Child had to power through 28 minutes for the full performance. As with anybody in live theater, the show must go on—but in live theater, many times the audience can’t tell if you’ve made a mistake. However, if you’ve dropped the chicken breast on the floor in a cooking show, the audience definitely knows that wasn’t supposed to happen.
To be sure, because the show was well-prepared ahead of time, she had backup chicken breasts and the like she could pull in to replace the messed-up dish. She did do such things from time to time.
But most of the time, she didn’t, because the home cook often did not have such an option. Most people did not want to throw out perfectly good meat because they singed it a little or dropped it on the floor, if it could be salvaged in some way. Most people couldn’t afford to throw out good food, or they really didn’t have any backup as she did.
From her training, she knew a variety of fixes—also, she knew that some of the mistakes weren’t really serious but only cosmetic. You could always rinse off the chicken breast and cook it some more. Or for burnt food, sometimes if could be salvaged by throwing it in a stew or chopping it up, mixing in some sour cream, putting it over noodles and calling it stroganoff. (Yes, I’ve done this.)
By showing the audience that most of the time you could save a recipe, and that it wasn’t necessarily a disaster, Child made French cooking less scary. To be sure, most of the recipes she chose were standard fare and she wanted to demonstrate common cooking techniques as well. She just coincidentally showed off common cooking problem-solving in the process.
Being Resourceful
The second aspect, which was less noticeable, was the resourcefulness during the show when equipment was not at hand. Some was planned in terms of substituting common American kitchenware for what is normally used by master chefs. In later programs, Child would sometimes bring on the specialized cookware to show the audience what has been used or can be used, but she would usually use standard utensils and pans for cooking.
The ones I noticed, such as when she used a pie tin to cover over a saucepan in the Boeuf Bourguignon episode, were when she did not have the normal tools at hand. She commented she did not have a lid; she probably had laid it out of reach or could not see it. Again, it is the live performer where the show must go on.
Applications to Your Work
This is a good practice for those who need to do presentations, just to elide the thing you had prepared or the specialized jargon for another audience that you cannot use right now. Most of the time, your audience will not even know that you have omitted something or have substituted something in place of what you were originally going to do.
This can also be applied to mentoring or training: In both cases, make it explicit to those you are mentoring that this is what we are doing. That yes, we often make mistakes and have to course-correct. That yes, we may not have the tools we want to do a job, and have to make-do with what is on hand.
To give examples from my own work—I have given live classes and webinars on Excel spreadsheets during which Excel crashes or the spreadsheet otherwise “misbehaves.” Or I get an unexpected question from an attendee.
Usually, I will try to rescue the situation (and sometimes google the solution live in front of the audience), but many times I have screenshots of steps already prepared on slides ready for reference as well. It’s better for students to see live demonstrations of working through the problems, but I have the artificial backups if the first route does work.
When the software fails completely, I can “audible” the answer (to use the jargon) and talk through the approach I would use to solve a situation, even if I don’t have working technology to demonstrate. In all these cases, the time is limited in which to answer, and the show must go on. Simply sitting in silence and befuddlement is not an option to the professional trainer—though it can be. There is always another time to try to make it right.
But let us get away from unreliable software and back to the classics! Julia Child is a lot of fun to watch, and you can make some really yummy food—still!—if you check out her shows from 60 years ago.
Bon appétit!
Statements of fact and opinions expressed herein are those of the individual authors and are not necessarily those of the Society of Actuaries, the editors, or the respective authors’ employers.
Mary Pat Campbell, FSA, MAAA, is vice president, Insurance Research, for Conning in Hartford, Conn. She can be contacted at marypat.campbell@gmail.com. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marypatcampbell/