JULIA CHILD: Julia Child, the masterful cooking instructor, author and TV personality whose knowledge, exuberance and daft antics lured legions of inexperienced cooks into the kitchen, demystified French cuisine and launched an enduring epicurean craze in America, has died in California aged 91.
The six feet, two inch Child started a revolution in the kitchen in 1961 when she published, with co-authors Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. With more than 1 million copies sold and a 40th anniversary edition published in 2001, it is still considered the definitive classical French cookbook in the English language.
She went on to blaze trails on television. A self-described ham, Child promoted Mastering on a Boston educational television station and wound up with her own show, The French Chef, in 1963. She captivated audiences with her merry patter, often clumsy technique, and down-to-earth attitude about a cuisine that had been too haute for the masses.
By the late 1970s, Child was an American icon, ripe for parody. In a classic Saturday Night Live skit, Dan Aykroyd showed her blithely chattering about chicken giblets and livers while chopping off her finger and drenching the kitchen in blood. She was delighted. Child was the first to admit that cooking was often messy and its results imperfect. But that was part of the fun.
Along the way, Child introduced Americans to good cooking and to a bounty of unfamiliar foods, launching a march to kitchen supply shops and supermarkets for copper bowls and wire whisks, goose liver and leeks.
Pro-butter, pro-salt, pro-fat, and pro-red meat in moderation, Child prided herself as the loyal opposition of "food terrorists", believing their alarms about cholesterol, calories and contaminants would deprive the palate of joyful tastes.
Born in 1912, Julia McWilliams was the oldest of three children of a patrician Pasadena, California, family who remembered the kitchen of her youth as "a dismal place". She attended private schools and Smith College, her mother's alma mater, then returned to Pasadena where she tried to immerse herself in the rituals of her class and find a husband.
Her height was a disadvantage in the dating game. So, with thoughts of being a novelist, she went east, where she wrote advertising copy for W.J. Sloane in New York and published a few pieces in The New Yorker before returning to California.
The second World War helped her find a sense of purpose. Too tall to join the military, she moved to Washington in 1942 and after some time as a typist was hired as a researcher in the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA, where she developed a shark repellent to protect airmen downed at sea.
When the OSS wanted to open a branch in India, Child volunteered and met Paul Child there, an artist turned mapmaker for the OSS who was 10 years her senior. They couldn't have been more different. "He had lived in France and I'd only been to Tijuana," she told a biographer, "and he was also an intellectual. I was a kind of southern California butterfly." He was also a passionate gourmet who introduced her to the world of food.
To capture his heart, Julia knew what she would have to do: She had to learn to cook. Back in the US after the war, she enrolled in the Hillcliff School of Cookery in Beverly Hills, California. When Paul Child came to visit, she cooked him calves' brains in red wine sauce, but the results were disastrous. She would say that Paul "married me in spite of my cooking" in 1946, and they lived in Washington, DC, for two years, until he was posted to Paris for the United States Information Service.
En route to Paris from Le Havre, the Childs stopped in Rouen for lunch. Her meal - oysters Portugaises on the half shell, sole meuniere browned in Normandy butter, a green salad, creme fraiche and café filtre - was an epiphany.She signed up at Le Cordon Bleu, the renowned school of French cooking, the only woman in chef Max Bugnard's class for ex-soldiers who wanted to become professional cooks.
In 1951 Child met Simone Beck, who introduced her to an exclusive gastronomic society for women known as Le Cercle des Gourmettes. Beck had a friend, Louisette Bertholle, with whom she had written a slim French cookbook for Americans.
Unable to get it published, they were advised by their editor to find "an American who is crazy about French cooking" to collaborate with them. Child enthusiastically embraced the role.
Believing most cookbooks failed to give enough detail, she said, "I thought we could really do something to explain French cooking to America."
The three women decided initially, however, to open their own cooking school, L'Ecole des Trois Gourmandes, in the Childs' Left Bank apartment.
Work on the book began in earnest in 1952. Beck developed the recipes, while Child translated them into English. When Beck sent her a recipe, Child tested it until it was foolproof. Bertholle would add some flourishes, then Child would write the final version.
In 1961, when Child was 49, her public career was launched. Craig Claiborne, then food editor of the New York Times, called Mastering "monumental . . . what may be the finest volume on French cooking ever published in English". Although he and others also were labouring to refine the American palate (pre-Child, the most popular cookbooks in the US had titles like The Can Opener Cookbook and 10-Minute Meals), Mastering created the new standard. People cooked their way through it, chapter by chapter.
Invited on a book review programme on Boston's educational television station, Child brought along a copper bowl and a giant whisk and proceeded to show viewers how to whip egg whites. "Who is this mad woman cooking an omelette on a book review programme?" producer Russell Morash, Child's future producer and director, thought the first time he saw her.
The station received 28 letters asking for more cooking demonstrations and Child was offered a chance to make three pilots. Dubbed The French Chef, the first show aired on February 11th, 1963.
The timing was fortuitous. The Kennedys were in the White House and had installed a French chef. More Americans were travelling to Europe.
Once the show opened on a boiling pot of water shrouded by a piece of cheesecloth. Suddenly Child was in the picture, lifting the cloth and inquiring, "What's cooking under this gossamer veil? Why, here's a great big, bad artichoke, and some people are afraid of it." She appeared in a pith helmet and fired a popgun to snare a squab for an instalment on "Small Roast Birds". There was no re-taping to cover up goofs or dishes gone awry. Many tuned in "to see just what rule of gastronomic or television decorum Julia might break tonight", food historian Robert Clark once observed.
The programme was broadcast from 1963 to 1966, went on hiatus while Child worked on the second volume of Mastering, then returned for another run from 1970 to 1973. In 1965, it won a Peabody award and in 1966, it earned public television's first Emmy.
Her other television shows included Dinner at Julia's, Baking With Julia, Julia Child and Company, and Julia Child - Cooking With Master Chefs. Most were accompanied by cookbooks.
She was criticised over the years for favouring food that padded the hips while depleting the pocketbook. She never gave in to the critics whom she accused of fanning fear of food. Nor did she care for the products marketed to the fat-conscious that she called "fake food". Child helped found the American Institute of Wine and Food with vintner Robert Mondavi in 1981. She donated 2,500 books, papers and manuscripts to the library of gastronomic literature at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University and Radcliffe College.
Paul Child died in 1994 at 92. The couple never had children.She is survived by a sister, Dorothy Cousins, nieces and nephews. Her husband's grandnephew is completing her last book, a memoir of her years in the diplomatic service
Julia Carolyn McWilliams Child, cook, born April 15th, 1912; died April 13th 2004.