Julia Child: ESE

"If people aren't interested in food, I'm not very much interested in them. They seem to lack something in their personality."

"A cookbook is only as good as its worst recipe."

The famous cook Julia Child (1912–2004) is one of the cleaner ESE cases in twentieth-century American public life. The warm hyperthymic energy, the enthusiastic celebration of food and people, the natural-ham theatrical capacity, the comfort at being the center of attention, the susceptibility to passionate enthusiasms that organized her life all point to this type.

The "conversion" experience shows the temperament in pure form. Julia was thirty-six years old,  recently arrived in Paris because her husband had been posted to the U.S. Information Service. She had not cooked before, and although her family had had a cook, she hadn't been interested in that job. To quote her herself, food in her childhood was "very sensible New England-type food" that "nobody discussed a great deal because it just wasn't done." Then she had a sole meunière at La Couronne in Rouen on the way into Paris in November 1948 and her life changed. "From the beginning, I fell in love with everything I saw", she recalled, contemplating the start of her famous career. The susceptibility to passionate enthusiasm is the type's signature ("the Enthusiast" is even one of its nicknames), and Julia had it in unusually concentrated form.

Her marriage to the diplomat and civil servant Paul (possible Ti lead, at least) is consistent with the type. They met in Ceylon in 1944, married in 1946, lived together for forty-eight years until his death. "Without Paul Child, I would not have had my career", she claimed. The ethical dependence on other people (despite being quite high-energy) is common for the type. 

A major ESE marker is the warm-hosting-feeding orientation that ran through everything. "Dining with one's friends and beloved family is certainly one of life's primal and most innocent delights, one that is both soul-satisfying and eternal. In spite of food fads, fitness programs, and health concerns, we must never lose sight of a beautifully conceived meal." This is the ESE register of food, as the medium of gathering, celebration, family, and shared pleasure. Her cookbook's introduction states the project plainly: "This is a book for the servantless American cook who can be unconcerned on occasion with budgets, waistlines, time schedules, children's meals, the parent-chauffeur-den mother syndrome or anything else which might interfere with the enjoyment of producing something wonderful to eat." The "enjoyment" framing is definitely ESE. 

The "natural-ham" (as she described it herself) theatrical presence on television turned her from a respected cookbook author into a cultural phenomenon. She clearly was not averse to Fe-style public performing and being the center of attention. She also was physically commanding, and high-energy across her entire adult life: nearly twenty cookbooks, multiple television series, regular columns for the Boston Globe and various magazines, frequent guest appearances, the founding of the American Institute of Wine and Food, fundraising for Planned Parenthood, public speaking, teaching. She was a chatterbox, in an ESE manner — her grand-nephew, Alex Prud'homme, recalls that she at restaurants, she visited the kitchen to talk to everybody and that "she spent more time with the dishwasher than the chef. She always wanted to know their stories". And while not vain, she was enough concerned about the impression she makes on other people to have plastic surgery.

Untypically for an ESE, she did not have children (a biopic suggests that she may have had fertility issues), and while she occasionally expressed regret, she largely accepted this (quite ironic, considering her surname). Still, according to her grand-nephew, "Paul and Julia never had kids but they had surrogate children — my sisters, me, my cousins — they were generous with them and with a lot of other people." Wikipedia also notes that in the mid-1990s, she became concerned about children's food education.

Her late-life sudden advocacy for progressive causes was also telling: "we are concerned with freedom of choice," she explained. ESE political feeling, when it engages, is usually grounded in this kind of practical concern rather than in systematic ideology (the type has a very negative reaction to specific situations it considers to be "unjust", but its relationship to general global justice can be quite varied). Julia engaged when she felt the cause was about people's actual lives.

The friendships and collaborations confirm the ESE base. The lifelong correspondence with Avis DeVoto (120 letters in the first two years, decades of exchange afterward), the partnership with Simone Beck across thirty years on both volumes of Mastering, the cooking school L'École des Trois Gourmandes with Beck and Bertholle, the late collaboration with Jacques Pépin on Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home, the supportive friendships within the food world (M.F.K. Fisher, Craig Claiborne, James Beard) — Julia's professional life was a sustained network of warm collaborations (see Talanov-style De as "acceptance of collaboration") with people she liked and worked well with. The collaborations were not a long-range business strategy (as common for another "De" type, LIE) but in a general register of ethical-sensory enthusiasm.

She died in 2004, two days before her 92nd birthday, of kidney failure, having donated her famous kitchen to the Smithsonian and her Cambridge house and office to Smith College. The trajectory was an ESE life lived to its proper length. She had thought food was about gathering people in joy, and she had spent her life proving it.