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Claim: An episode of cooking doyen Julia Child's television program showed her dropping a turkey on the floor, picking it back up, dusting it off, putting it on the platter, and saying to the camera, "Remember, you're alone in the kitchen."
Variations:
In the late 1990s 
and into the new millennium, this form of televised programming has achieved a level of popularity unimaginable by earlier standards when cooking shows were simply what networks used to fill undesirable time slots, and chefs such as Emeril Lagasse have now become celebrities in their own right. Offbeat cooking shows like Japan's hugely popular Iron Chef have attained cult status in the North American viewing market. An entire cable channel (Food TV) is devoted to the genre.
And it all began with a lady who died in 2004 at the age of 91. During the course of her lifetime, she had become a much beloved figure in American culture, both on- and off-camera. It's no wonder such a cultural icon has attracted a number of persistent rumors. Child's show taught many to cook; hers were the hands that demonstrated what cookbooks had previously explained with only words and pictures. Her savoir faire and matter-of-fact way of handling things imparted confidence into fledgling cooks, reassuring them that even the best make mistakes and that a 'disaster' is really only a temporary setback as long as one can whip up a sauce to cover it. No one can place an accurate date on when the tale of a dropped viand began dogging Julia Child, but we do know it was being reported as a persistent rumor back in 1989. Its spread has no doubt been helped along by articles appearing in respected publications which passed some version of it along as fact. For instance, in 1992 a reporter for The Washington Post said of Child:
It wasn't that she could do no wrong; rather, she made doing wrong so right. The more she faltered — dropping the entire side of lamb on the floor, failing to make a dent carving the suckling pig, unmolding the mousse with a splat — the more viewers loved and trusted her. Just remember that you're all alone in the kitchen, she would recommend, as she dusted off the lamb and thus gave permission to thousands of viewers to do what they already were secretly doing.
Authoritatively stated by a respected publication or not, it's still mostly rumor and precious little substance. Child once did drop a food item, then picked it up and continued cooking it, but the item was a potato pancake that was flipped a bit too enthusiastically to remain in the pan, not a leg of lamb or a duck. Moreover, it didn't land on the floor (a surface always presumed to be far too dirty to scoop food back up from, five second rule or not); it plopped onto a table. A 1997 Los Angeles Times review of Julia Child's biography, Appetite For Life, said:
Julia worked hard in preparation for the shows, always determined to direct her efforts toward the home cook, but on camera she was, as Paul [Child] said, "a natural clown" as much as she was a teacher and chef. She improvised, she joked, she dropped food and utensils. In one of her best-known television episodes, she flipped a potato pancake in the air and, instead of landing in the skillet, it plopped on the table. Julia simply looked straight into the camera and said, "You just scoop it back into the pan. Remember, you are alone in the kitchen and nobody can see you."
Child admitted time and again to the potato pancake incident but
Her producer, Geoffrey Drummond, backed Child's assertions that neither incident happened. The task fell to him to review more than Barbara "cuisine of the crime" Mikkelson Sightings: An 8 December 1978 Saturday Night Live sketch featured a Dan Aykroyd spoof of Julia Child in which he [as Child] pretended to cut his hand, and then continued with the program as copious amounts of blood came spurting out of the wound. Additional information:
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