Julia Child was television’s beloved “French Chef.” Though she was actually neither French nor a chef, she led generations of viewers enchanted by her ebullient personality and practical, can-do cookery into the kitchen. The impact of that still reverberates through American culture.
“People would not be eating as well today without Julia,” says Judith Jones, the legendary Knopf editor who championed Child’s first book, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” in 1961. “Julia gave people a sense of pride in cooking.”
Aug. 15 would have been Child’s 100th birthday. Publishers are releasing biographies. Special dinners are being hosted, including one for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, where the kitchen from Child’s house in Cambridge, Mass., is on display. Home cooks and bloggers are cooking Child’s recipes and posting the results online. Writers, like me, are writing about her anew.
“What’s left to say about Julia?” asks Betty Fussell, who profiled Child in “Masters of American Cookery: The American Food Revolution & the Chefs Who Shaped It” back in 1983. “A lot of people have said a lot about Julia — including Julia.”
Indeed. Her story had been retold enough that the outline is fairly familiar. Julia was a very late-bloomer. She didn’t marry Paul Child until she was 34 (unusual in the 1940s). She discovered cooking as a passion after arriving in Paris at age 36. She burst onto the American culinary scene with “Mastering” at the age of 49 and became a TV phenomenon at 51.
Child did not look like the typical 1960’s TV star. She was tall, about 6-foot-2, and dressed for the camera in a sensible skirt and blouse adorned with the badge of her old cooking school in Paris. Her voice warbled dramatically.