A Julia Child Marathon Is About To Air On Twitch

Julia Child fans, your day, or rather your four days, have come. Twitch, better known as the video-streaming site that lets gamers watch each other play DotA in their bedrooms, is about to air a four-day-long marathon of Julia Child's The French Chef. Starting today, at 5 p.m. EST, the site will stream all 201 episodes.

The marathon is in honor of the site's new food channel, Twitch.tv/Food, which will broadcast live cooking content 24/7. It falls under five-month-old Twitch Creative, which is an extension of the site's initial focus on gaming voyeurism. Twitch Creative lets artists watch other artists work, and the new Food channel will do the same for cooks.

"Twitch Creative celebrates the creative process, whether it's painting a picture, composing a song or preparing a meal. It was because we saw the cooking community really start to take off that we were inspired to do the Julia Child marathon to shine a spotlight on the burgeoning phenomenon," Twitch's PR director tells us.

In a way, it's an odd mash-up: a gamer's streaming site and Julia Child. But it's also perfect. The French Chef was filmed live, which is how all of Child's iconic, endearing mistakes made it into the show. Those very mistakes are what made Child human, relatable. They are also what made her a star. In turn, French cooking—previously regared as inaccessible, restaurants-only cusisine in the U.S.—entered America's home kitchens.

This is also a timely move. As the New York Times points out, today is the 65th anniversary of the official date of Julia Child's graduation from Le Cordon Bleu.

The new channel will eventually include other programming, but when it launches this evening with the Julia Child marathon, it will simply serve as a hub for cooking content.