Julia
Sky

Sixty years ago, in the days when television was entirely run by men, cooking programmes were considered a branch of home economics, presented (if shown at all) by bossy women in pinnies. But there is a lesson to be learned from Sky’s entertaining new drama about the great American cook Julia Child: it doesn’t do to underestimate a woman in a pinny.

Julia Child introduced mid-twentieth-century American households to classic French cooking. She had learned to cook while living in France with her diplomat husband Paul, and triumphantly conjoined French style and American reliability. By adding weights and measures to je ne sais quoi, she made her recipes the gold ­standard. Her kitchen has been preserved in its entirety in the Smithsonian.