Here’s Something to Brighten Your Day: Watch This Video of Julia Child Making Spaghetti with Mr. Rogers

When the news gets stressful or life gets trying, the people of social media tend to rely on heartwarming videos to bring back happier thoughts: puppies playing, improbable animal friendships, and the kind of throwback television that reminds everyone of childhood. After that, they often turn to the second-best emotional crutch in this world: comfort food.

Well, in this video that might be the single thing that the internet needs to see more than anything else today, you can combine those by spending 11 minutes and 15 seconds forgetting about the impending pandemic and the roller coaster of elections, and simply letting yourself enjoy the purest thing ever to cross your screen: Julia Child teaching Fred Rogers how to make spaghetti.

Posted by the official Julia Child Facebook page, the video is from Julia’s 1974 appearance on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. She, Chef Brockett, and Mr. Rogers himself work together to show kids and their parents how to make a simple noodle dish called Spaghetti Marco Polo. She starts right from the beginning, teaching her fellow cooks how to oil the wooden cutting board before they even start.

She casually chitchats about old movies as she chops parsley and preps ingredients. The dish itself involves mixing warm spaghetti with salt, pepper, olive oil, butter, canned tuna in oil, chopped red pimentos, green onions, black olives, walnuts, grated Swiss cheese, and parsley.

The name refers to the (much disputed) idea that Marco Polo brought noodles from China to Italy, and she seems to be giving a subtle nod to this when she tastes the dish with a pair of chopsticks “because it’s more fun.” She advises that for additional fun, you can toss the salad right at the table — and she makes a lovely, ugly mess of it doing this on camera, in that beloved way that only she can, and that today’s polished, shiny food television would never permit.