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Examples: [Collected via e-mail, August 2009] Variations: On 11 February 1963, Julia Child stepped before the cameras to make boeuf bourguignon. In doing so, she pioneered the genre of the celebrity cooking show. In the late 1990s and into the new millennium, this form of televised programming has achieved a level of popularity unimaginable by earlier standards when cooking shows were simply what networks used to fill undesirable time slots, and chefs such as Emeril Lagasse have now become celebrities in their own right. Offbeat cooking shows like Japan's hugely popular Iron Chef have attained cult status in the North American viewing market. An entire cable channel (Food TV) is devoted to the genre. And it all began with a lady who died in 2004 at the age of 91. During the course of her lifetime, she had become a much beloved figure in American culture, both on- and off-camera. It's no wonder such a cultural icon has attracted a number of persistent rumors. Child's show taught many to cook; hers were the hands that demonstrated what cookbooks had previously explained with only words and pictures. Her savoir faire and matter-of-fact way of handling things imparted confidence into fledgling cooks, reassuring them that even the best make mistakes and that a 'disaster' is really only a temporary setback as long as one can whip up a sauce to cover it. No one can place an accurate date on when the tale of a dropped viand began dogging Julia Child, but we do know it was being reported as a persistent rumor back in 1989. Its spread has no doubt been helped along by articles appearing in respected publications which passed some version of it along as fact. For instance, in 1992 a reporter for the Washington Post said of Child: Authoritatively stated by a respected publication or not, it's still mostly rumor and precious little substance. Child once did drop a food item, then picked it up and continued cooking it, but the item was a potato pancake that was flipped a bit too enthusiastically to remain in the pan, not a leg of lamb or a duck. Moreover, it didn't land on the floor (a surface always presumed to be far too dirty to scoop food back up from, five second rule or not); it plopped onto a table. A 1997 Los Angeles Times review of Julia Child's biography, Appetite for Life, noted: Child admitted time and again to the potato pancake incident but always firmly maintained she never dropped a chicken, duck, or whatever else the rumor has ascribed to her. Thanks to the power of manufactured memory, fans of the show remain convinced they saw something she directly and repeatedly denied. She was often confronted with those who swore they saw such an episode or one in which she supposedly guzzled wine straight from the bottle. Said Child: It's interesting when people say, 'I saw you do it.' Or that 'I saw you pick up the bottle of wine and take a swig of it' — which I would never do. On television. As Vanity Fair noted in an August 2009 profile of the woman who revolutionized America's relationship with food: Her producer, Geoffrey Drummond, backed Child's assertions that she neither nonchalantly reused a dropped food item nor drank straight from a wine bottle on the air. The task fell to him to review more than 700 episodes of classic Julia to compile the PBS special Julia Child's Kitchen Wisdom. I never saw Julia drop a chicken, he swore. Apocryphal tales about clever cooks and hostesses who find ways to serve dropped food to their guests aren't new, as this anecdote harvested from a 1959 humor book demonstrates:
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