"A great soul" with a zest for life and food: Julia Child dies at 91
When America's beloved queen of the kitchen died early this morning, just two days short of her 92nd birthday, she left those fans with the rich flavor of her zest for life and food.
The famed television chef, cookbook author and idol of countless home cooks for more than four decades died in her sleep at her home in an assisted-living center in Montecito, Calif., said a statement from her publisher, Alfred A. Knopf.
When she launched her "French Chef" cooking series on PBS television in the early 1960s, Mrs. Child became the first of what would grow to be a long string of TV chefs informing and hugely influencing America's home cooks.
Mrs. Child's own influence over more than four decades stemmed in part from her cheerfully independent outlook:
• In an age of haste and frozen dinners, she urged taking the time to cook good food.
• While men still reigned in nearly every professional kitchen, she became the country's most celebrated chef.
• In a culture that worshipped youth, she came to fame in middle age.
• When health concerns set the nation to worrying about too much fat or other dietary woes, she railed against the "fear of food."
• And in an era of public personalities crafted by image-makers, she was real: down-to-earth, plain-spoken, funny.
Mrs. Child's cookbooks, beginning with "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in 1961, her high-spirited style in the TV kitchen and her tireless drive to teach the wonders of great food inspired legions to better cooking.
Among them were numerous Northwesterners, who had opportunities to observe Mrs. Child first-hand during her many visits to Seattle.
"A great soul"
Beginning in the early 1970s, Child, who lived in both Boston and Santa Barbara during much of her career, came here periodically to give cooking demonstrations, address conferences, autograph her cookbooks or raise money for food-related organizations.
Fans found Mrs. Child — often known as simply "Julia" — approachable and warm, even when aides and escorts kept her surrounded.
Among those who came to know her was Francois Kissel, former owner/chef of Seattle's Maximilien-in-the-Market restaurant.
"She's a great soul," Kissel once said. "She's extraordinary. She's the kindest person, the most thoughtful. She has such grace and such humor."
She also had extraordinary energy, as he learned when he was a guest chef on her TV series of the 1980s, "Dinner at Julia's," filmed mainly in Santa Barbara.
With retakes and endless details, Mrs. Child, then in her 70s, "never stopped running for hours," yet never seemed tired or grumpy, Kissel recalled.
To film the opening scenes of that segment, which featured Dungeness crab, Mrs. Child went crabbing in Puget Sound and stayed cheerful even though the catch came to a grand total of one crab, others remembered.
Kissel's wife and business partner, Julia Kissel, recalled Mrs. Child as "a great, great lady," considerate to everyone despite her fame and busy schedule.
"A joy to work with her"
Another local chef, Monique Barbeau, formerly of Fullers restaurant (now a private dining room), was a guest on Mrs. Child's PBS series, "In Julia's Kitchen with Master Chefs." The segment was taped in the kitchen of Mrs. Child's rambling, old Boston-area house in July 1994.
"It was a joy to work with her," Barbeau, now a restaurant consultant, once said. Even at 81, Mrs. Child's age then, she remained eager to learn and closely observed Barbeau's cooking techniques, the chef said.
Mrs. Child's legendary accessibility impressed Barbeau the next year, when both she and Mrs. Child attended a food-related convention in Chicago. There, said Barbeau, Mrs. Child took the time to chat with anyone who approached her.
Mrs. Child's green kitchen in Boston was not state-of-the-art, Barbeau recalled, but she had a wealth of cooking tools hung on peg boards with their shapes outlined so she would know what was missing if a space was empty.
That kitchen, seen on so many of her shows, was immortalized in 2002, when it was dismantled and reconstructed, piece by piece, at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., after Mrs. Child had moved to a retirement community in Santa Barbara.
Though Mrs. Child knew her way around complex cooking, her tastes were simple, another Seattleite, Dorothea Checkley, once said.
When Mrs. Child gave a series of cooking demonstrations at St. Mark's Cathedral in the 1970s, Checkley's task was to prepare dinner for Mrs. Child and her husband Paul before each evening session.
The usual menu: salad, steak, wine and perhaps an in-season vegetable, such as the fat asparagus that Mrs. Child loved. (She also was known to have a taste for fast-food burgers.)
"The simpler, the better" was their preference, recalled Checkley, who wasn't nervous at all cooking for the famous chef. "They'd be very nice and thank me and clean their plates."
Checkley also helped set up the kitchen for Mrs. Child's demonstrations. Because Mrs. Child was tall — 6 feet, 2 inches — Checkley had the stove and counter raised a few inches.
"She took one look at it and told us to put it all back," said Checkley, who happily complied with any request from the "wonderful" woman with whom she became friends over the years.
"A what-the-hell attitude"
Mrs. Child sallied onto the world stage of cookery in 1961 with publication of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," co-written with Simone Beck and Loisette Bertholle.
Soon, she was slicing and dicing on her own TV series, "The French Chef" on public television, which made her a household name. The groundbreaking series introduced countless Americans to the essentials of great cooking: use of the best ingredients, careful techniques and a willing investment of time over quick convenience. She also made it look like fun.
Mrs. Child made the cover of Time magazine in November 1966. A string of other cookbooks and television series followed over the next four decades. She was food editor of Parade magazine for several years and regularly appeared on ABC's "Good Morning America."
As much as the techniques she taught, Mrs. Child's lively style, good humor and warbling voice kept viewers rapt from the start of her first series. French cuisine may have had a snooty image, but the enthusiastic Mrs. Child put on no airs.
After viewing her first show at home, Mrs. Child offered her own apt description of it, as quoted by biographer Joan Reardon: "Here was this woman tossing French omelettes, splashing eggs about the place, brandishing big knives, panting heavily as she careened around the stove."
Home cooks perhaps identified with Mrs. Child, who, though she clearly knew her sauces and souffles, also committed bloopers on camera. She dropped things, nicked a finger with a knife, made messes — all while carrying on her high-pitched, breathless commentary. She had flair.
"The only real stumbling block (in the kitchen)," Mrs. Child once said, "is the fear of failure. In cooking, you've got to have a what-the-hell attitude."
WWII espionage
Mrs. Child did not grow up attached to a sauce pan. Born Julia McWilliams on Aug. 15, 1912, she was raised in Pasadena, Calif., in an upper-middle-class family and, according to biographer Reardon, was not especially fascinated by food.
"I was 32 when I started cooking; up until then, I just ate," Mrs. Child was once quoted as saying.
After graduating from Smith College, she worked in advertising for a department store in New York and Los Angeles.
With the outbreak of World War II, she volunteered for the government's Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Sent to India and other Asian points, she helped field communications with Allied spies behind Japanese lines. It was here that she met Paul Child, an OSS officer as well as an artist and photographer, whom she married at age 34, leaving government work.
When Paul's diplomatic service assignment took the two to Paris for five years, Julia — amazed at the quality and variety of French food — began to seriously study French cooking. Soon she was teaching it and then working on a cookbook, even as Paul's work took them on to Marseille, Bonn, Washington, Oslo and back to the U.S.
When the masterful "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" appeared after 10 years of research and writing, Julia was 49. She was in her early 50s when major fame arrived with her first TV series.
Of that first book, Judith Jones, Mrs. Child's longtime editor at Alfred A. Knopf publishers, said: "There was nothing like it. No one had ever really taken French cooking and translated it for Americans in terms of showing why you did things, how to do them, what to do if you made a mistake. It was an analytical approach, a teaching approach. That was really Julia's genius."
The recipes were long and detailed, in both the first book and in Volume II of "Mastering," (co-written with Beck), which included a 12-page recipe for French bread.
Daunting though that sounds, home cooks apparently craved such information. Years later, Mrs. Child told an interviewer that the books came along just as Americans were beginning to travel to Europe in growing numbers, whetting their appetites for French cookery. It also helped that Americans had increased leisure time for cooking, she said.
Paul Child, 10 years older than Julia, retired just as her career was flowering. Switching gears, he helped with her research. Both analytical, the two once created a huge chart to compare different ways of making sausage. Paul even test-baked French bread, but with dismal results, Jones recalled.
"They went everywhere together," Jones said. They had no children. Paul Child died in 1994.
No low-fat food for her
Julia's early recipes swam in butter and cream, in the French manner. By the time her seventh book, "The Way to Cook," came out in 1989, she had toned that down, but not a lot. While health authorities and consumers worried about fat and cholesterol, Child preached against the "fear of food" she saw sweeping the country.
Eat a variety of foods, in moderation, she said, agreeing with the experts, but don't let health fears sour every bite. Never would Mrs. Child produce a book of low-fat recipes.
Mrs. Child displayed remarkable energy. At age 82, her schedule still kept her away from home 300 days a year, an aide said when the chef visited Seattle in 1995. How was she able to keep up the pace?
"Because I eat good food! Good food, red wine — and gin!" Julia declared.
In her later years, Mrs. Child campaigned for greater academic respect for the culinary arts at colleges and universities, saying cooking should rate as highly as other arts. With that in mind, she co-founded the American Institute of Food and Wine.
Embracing technology, she once said she had used a computer "since they were invented," and at age 82 issued her first cooking CD-ROM, with Microsoft, after meeting with company officials in Redmond.
She also felt Americans should accept biotechnology and food irradiation, with appropriate controls.
The later years
In 2001, at age 89, Mrs. Child sold the Boston home where she had cooked and filmed for decades and moved into the retirement community near Santa Barbara.
Mrs. Child discovered that her fellow retirement-community residents included a number of friends from her childhood in Southern California.
Chefs, friends and reporters were among those who came calling.
Mrs. Child traveled to Boston and elsewhere in August 2002 to attend a round of high-profile parties marking her 90th birthday. By then, her tall frame was bent and she used a cane but said she felt well, though two months later she underwent knee-replacement surgery for the second time. Over the years, Mrs. Child's impact on fans seemed to extend beyond her gift of cooking know-how. Her message of respect for good food, prepared with care and shared with friends, appeared soul-nourishing for many.
When Mrs. Child autographed her cookbooks at a Seattle kitchenware shop in 1995, fans' response approached adulation. Some came from as far away as Florida, Chicago and Alaska merely to stand beside the chef, have her sign their books and then fly home.
Said more than one: "She is my idol."
This story includes information from The Associated Press, The Washington Post, the Detroit News and the books "M.F.K. Fisher," by Joan Reardon, and "The Quotable Cook," edited by Kate Rowinski.