'Tis The Season To Watch Julia Child Go HAM on A Bûche de Noël

Welcome back to “To Eat, Perchance To Stream,” your monthly roundup of piping hot content you can stream on your favorite device. Hanukkah came early this year, and fellow Clemson Tiger Claire Spellberg has the definitive word on that.

Christmas is bearing down on us just around the corner, and regardless of how you plan to celebrate, it’s good to have something to watch while you stuff those stockings. Our entrée this month is a dessert (because life is short!): it’s time to pay homage to Julia Child, the G.O.A.T., as she shows you how to make a bûche de noël.

Julia Child’s face should be on money. She did more to transform what we eat in the USA than any other chef, and if you disagree, meet me at dawn and we can fight it out with wooden spoons. Unfortunately, Julia got done dirty in a movie about a blogger who cooked all of the recipes out of her cookbook. Inexplicably, the usually reliable Meryl Streep offers a grotesque caricature of Child, and I fear that many younger fans know her work only through this context. (Seriously, if you want to see someone do an impression of Julia Child, Dan Aykroyd’s version is much truer to her indomitable spirit.)

Between the Julia who helped write a legendary cookbook, and the Julia who exists as a pop culture icon, there was the Julia who Put In The Work, hosting a cooking show out of the studios of Channel 2, Boston’s PBS station. In the early years, they jammed econo, and the first seasons of her first show are in black and white. If you are wondering, cooking shows in B&W are so metal they are actually on the Periodic Table.

But take 30 minutes and just watch Julia work. One camera, black and white, and she cooks in real time, pretty much. It’s about as close as you can get to food tv that works like your favorite live to 2-track punk rock record album. And! Julia seems really focused on taking the rolled sponge cake with chocolate filling, and making it look absolutely as much like a real log as possible. Julia worked for CIA granddaddy the OSS before she went to cooking school, and I like to think there was a time when her skills as a camofleuse meant the difference between life and death on a secret mission in the Ardennes. So we have a cooking show that begins with the actual cooking as a prerequisite – Julia tells us basically to whip up a sponge cake and some buttercream frosting before she gets rolling, and focuses on creating truly treelike frosting, and making merengues that look like mushrooms. This time of year is about being generous in spirit, and cooking this is a way to do that. My mom used to make this when I was little, and I can confirm that if you have any kids at your holiday table, the idea of a dessert that looks like a tree, but is actually a frosting-forward cake, will blow their tiny minds.

Kwanzaa is also right around the corner. Christmas has been a thing for around 2,000 years, and Hanukkah for slightly longer than that. Maulana Ndabezitha Karenga invented Kwanzaa in 1966, so Kwanzaa some catching up to do, in terms of iconic holiday food content. If you celebrate Kwanzaa, watch Tracy Clayton and Heben Nigatu of Another Round or Nikki and Evelyn of Naturally Curly attempt to create Sandra Lee’s infamous Kwanzaa cake. As the late and lamented Anthony Bourdain observed “The most terrifying thing I’ve seen is her making a Kwanzaa cake. Watch that clip and tell me your eyeballs don’t burst into flames. It’s a war crime on television. You’ll scream.”

Some streaming stocking stuffers:

On a brighter note, if there is anything truer to the spirit of the holidays than Martha Stewart watching the late great Ms. Aretha pour a whole jug of Vernors over her Christmas ham, I don’t know what it is.
If you need something to watch while you wrap your gifts, take Neal Pollack’s advice and bounce on The Final Table (unless you like cooking shows that feel like Tom Clancy movies starring Tom Cruise), and instead fire up Samin Nosrat in Salt Fat Acid Heat. If there is anyone on your list who would like to be a better cook – buy her book for them. If you have to be in a car or train, here is Samin on Carbface.
It’s not super heavy on food, but if your family is likely to argue about politics, throw on A Very Murray Christmas – voila, your family can argue about Miley Cyrus’s performance. (Spoiler – she’s great.)
Compared to Thanksgiving, Christmas is thin on food-related music content, but in Hollis, Mom’s cooking chicken and collard greens, rice and stuffing and macaroni and cheese.
And allow me to play you off with The Waitresses, who are in the clubhouse with the only Xmas song about shopping for a Christmas dinner that concludes with a long anticipated (and consensual – looking at you Baby), hookup. To all a good night, and see you next month, when we solemnly swear we will not be here to cause any trouble.

Jonathan Beecher Field was born in New England, educated in the Midwest, and teaches in the South. He Tweets professionally as @ThatJBF, and unprofessionally as @TheGurglingCod. He also sometimes writes for Avidly and Common-Place.