Watch season one of "The French Chef with Julia Child" free with Amazon Prime

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/03/24/watch-season-one-of-the-fre.html

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where is it going?

Apparently not included with Prime in a week?

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When just a small child, I was for long periods in an o2 tent. Julia and I became good friends via the T.V., and she instilled a life long love of the culinary in me. My debt to her can never fully be paid, she made my long boring days happy.

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Julia was my friend too. She taught me to make an omelette.

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This does make me wonder if a cooking show in black and white with 250 lines of resolution can make it hard to appreciate the techniques being displayed once you’ve been immersed in high-res color.

Next day edit: So I watched the first episode of the first season. For an almost 60-year old cooking show, it holds up really well! Julia is very enthusiastic about showing you the ingredients and techniques, and that makes you want to cook what she is cooking, and eat it! The b&w oldness of it didn’t change a thing.

The other thing is that it made me appreciate how polished and incredible today’s cooking shows are, but it’s easy to see a direct line from “The French Chef with Julia Child” to the shows of today.

We’ve been watching. I’m sure it’s all been said before, but her lack of pretentiousness while making what would have seemed like intimidating exotic cuisine while dropping French all over the place sets her apart. So often she’ll screw up something and laugh it off, doesn’t matter. She’s able to zero in on the things that matter and wave off the stuff that doesn’t.

Only thing that has raised my hackles is in the omelette making, the idea of using a metal fork in a non-stick coated pan! You’ll ruin it!

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I can’t believe no one has made a historically dubious biopic about the period of her life when she worked as a spy (and shark-repellent inventor!) during WWII.

Like, the more historically dubious the better. Basically I want a scene where she is forced to kill a Nazi who was about to blow her cover with a kitchen knife and then disposes of the body by preparing a special meal for the Axis high command, Arya Stark style.

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Interesting! But who developed the other oceanic repellents?

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Thanks. I was definitely going to look for this anyways.

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I’m pretty sure that Amazon (along with Netflix and Youtube) has decided to sacrifice our bandwidth to appease various gods-- much of what was once high def will not be.

Yes, yes, I know the idea of Child as a spy evokes images of her in Paris, working with the French Resistance, fighting Nazis, etc. But it wasn’t so. She was in China and Ceylon during the war (her husband Paul was US diplomatic staff and was shifted from embassy to embassy). The shark repellent story is totally true, though.

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Same here. The high-heat nearly-instant fork method (in our family we used much lower heat that doesn’t work nearly as well and I had basically given up on omelets at home prior to reading “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”).

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No no, I’m fine with that - the first shows were taped in 1963, and videotape of that era only has about 250 lines. But I’m updating my post anyway, and haven’t seen much in bandwidth being sacrificed. I will say that an IT infrastructure upgrade will get more traction in congress after all this.

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