Not Julia Child’s Best Work
You may be familiar with Julia Child’s recipe for boeuf bourguignon, or perhaps, her wonderful puff pastry. But before she became the nation’s favorite chef, Child worked for the OSS, the spy agency that later became the CIA. She was not, at least as far as the unclassified parts of her time there reveal, actually a spy. But she did work on some pretty sensitive projects. And one of those projects foreshadowed her coming career: It was a recipe, but not a particularly appetizing one.
It was a recipe for shark repellent. The idea, of course, was not to eat it, but to rub it on your skin. It was intended for use by pilots who had been shot down over the ocean. It smelled like dead shark; presumably sharks don’t feed on dead sharks. The chef-to-be must have known what a dead shark smelled like. (Just that tidbit makes me wonder how she ever got into a career involving food.)
Sadly, the recipe was only a moderate success. The National World War II Museum reports that, according to a memo by the chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, the effect of the mixture was a “slight repellence.”
We all serve our country in whatever ways we can. For Julia, mixing and measuring was part of what she had to offer. I’m just glad she didn’t use what she learned in the spy trade (yuk!) when developing her famous recipes.
’Til next time,
Avery
Image KUHU, Universal Public Domain