Julia Child's Makeshift Baking Stone Wasn't All That Safe

Julia Child's first book, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," was published in 1961, and nine years later, she followed it up with a second volume. The sequel, however, had one glaring flaw: Child, the cooking icon who taught us, among many other things, the genius extra step to make perfectly poached eggs and the trick for the creamiest pumpkin pie (and whose fast food true love was In-N-Out), recommended using asbestos tiles as baking stones. As Child explained in her posthumously published 2006 autobiography "My Life in France," the idea came from her husband, Paul Child.

Child, it seems, had been trying to make her home oven hot enough to produce a true boulangerie-style baguette. She credited Paul's "Yankee ingenuity" for coming up with an asbestos tile, something she says made for "a perfect, affordable baking surface." Also a very effective one, since her loaf came out absolument parfait. However, in 1971, her editor Judith Jones learned that asbestos could be carcinogenic, which sent Child and her husband scrambling to find a replacement baking stone. They needed to do so tout de suite, since by the time they found out, they only had about a week to prepare for several episodes of " The French Chef " that were specifically focused on baking bread.

Paul Child came through again, testing various types of non-asbestos tiles before finding that plain red quarry tile worked just fine, and in later editions of "French Cooking Volume II," that's exactly what the baguette recipe calls for. Unfortunately, either Julia Child or her editors seem to have missed a few more references, since in a 2011 edition there are still four recipes that use asbestos tiles: poulet poché au vin blanc (chicken poached in white wine), boeuf en daube à la provençale (beef casserole with wine and vegetables), pommes de terre sautées Calabrese (sliced potatoes sauteed with lemon and garlic), and galette de pommes de terre aux tomates (hashed brown potatoes with tomatoes and herbs).

Even though some of these recipes don't call for the asbestos to touch the food, it still poses a danger because the cook might breathe in asbestos fibers, causing lung scarring (a condition known as asbestosis), while asbestos exposure has also been linked to both lung cancer and mesothelioma. Sadly, even if Child had managed to obliterate every mention of asbestos from subsequent editions, cooks who followed the directions in "Mastering the Art of French Cooking Volume II" when it first came out may still be in danger. Even though the classic cookbook was published over 50 years ago, it's possible for mesothelioma to lay dormant for up to seven decades.