The Man Who Ate Too Much John Birdsall excavates the queer life of James Beard BY Jeffrey Edalatpour
I ILLUSTRATION BY ADE HOIDAR
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n last year’s fact-packed documentary, Julia, viewers learn every last darn thing about the celebrated television chef, Julia Child. Her life turns out to be an open book. The new HBO series, also called Julia, imagines her private persona and provides the same sense of intimacy that Meryl Streep performed in Nora Ephron’s film, Julie and Julia (2009). In this new iteration, the British actress Sarah Lancashire (Last Tango in Halifax) asserts Child’s identity without overdoing that
EAST BAY MAGAZINE | EASTBAYMAG.COM | MAY/JUNE 2022
familiar, trilling accent. In equally rationed out portions, she expresses Child’s hesitancy and self-doubt, as well as her verve and ambition. The series revisits the arc of Child’s stardom, beginning with the origin story of her television career. Julia slows her biography down to the culinary equivalent of a long-simmering stew. Each moment is rich and perspiring with earthiness and good taste. With decades of her fabled cooking shows still accessible via streaming, alongside this show, you’d think that Julia
Child’s mythology would have reached a saturation point in this country’s popular imagination. But when Lancashire shows up at the WGBH station with a chocolate almond cake, we understand that Julia will serve up scene after scene of comfort food and comfort viewing. Part of Child’s mythology asserts that she was the original, the primogenitor, the Eve of television chefdom. But in the pilot episode of Julia, set in 1961, while she and her husband, Paul, are dining out, he mentions the name James Beard.
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