Google Doodle Honors Julia Child On Her 100th Birthday

Today, August 15, would have been celebrated chef Julia Child’s 100th birthday, and so Google has rolled out one of its many Google Doodles honoring the iconic TV chef that taught many of us that despite we may think, we can, in fact, cook something more complicated than eggs — namely dishes of the French variety.

The Julia Child Google Doodle, which you can see for yourself in the image above, arranges a variety of food to spell out (more or less) Google. It’s not quite as detailed as some of the other Doodles we’ve seen recently, but we appreciate it nonetheless.

Child, who passed away two days before her birthday in 2004, is most famous for her memorable, informative books and her charming and equally informative television show, but that’s not all she’s known for.

For several years, Child worked at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which you may know as the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency.

Here’s a snippet from Christian Science Monitor’s article on Child’s life as a spy:

“In interviews, Child always played down her wartime achievements. She was just “a clerk.” But her husband told a different story. Paul Child, who met Julia while working with the OSS, wrote to his brother about her high-level clearance. She was actually “privy to all messages both incoming from the field or Washington, etc., and outgoing to our agents and operatives all over China-Burma-India.”

If the Google Doodle isn’t enough of a Julia Child tribute for you, PBS Digital also decided to cook up something to pay tribute to her, and they did it in the only way they knew how: by mixing various clips from her TV appearances and then auto-tuning her voice and making a song out of it. As ridiculous as it sounds — and it is ridiculous — it’s actually not bad.

If you’d like to check that out, you can find the video on YouTube.

What are your favorite memories of Julia Child?