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Julia Child: bon appétit Celebrated cook taught America to relish life's bounty By Sylvia Lindman MSNBC contributor Updated: 10:54 a.m. ET Aug. 13, 2004 Julia Child, the celebrated cook, author and television personality who elevated the nation's culinary standards, died in her sleep Thursday night in her Santa Barbara, Calif, home. She was 91. As America's gastronomic guru, she had no peer. She taught us to relish food and wine as a way of appreciating life's bounty. From this brave new world of food, there is no turning back. Before Julia, whisks, soufflé dishes and copper pans were novelties brought home from France by pretentious tourists. After Julia, they were standard American kitchen battery. Before Julia, French cooking was an effete art form. After Julia, French cuisine was within reach of any home cook. Her joie de vivre, ability to explain techniques, and what-me-worry approach to mistakes made serious cooking fun. Child gave the country a taste of its culinary future in February 1962 when she went to a Boston television station to promote her first book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. To liven up the interview, she brought an omelet pan, a whisk, an apron and a dozen eggs and chattily whipped up an omelet in front of the cameras. That soon led to her first public television series, The French Chef, which debuted on Feb. 11, 1963, and made her a star at the age of 50. She went on to headline eight more television series and publish nine more cookbooks, including The French Chef Cookbook (1968), a second volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1970) and From Julia Child's Kitchen (1975). She also appeared on the cover of Time magazine (1967), hosted TV specials, wrote articles for publications such as Food & Wine and Parade, and co-founded the American Institute of Wine and Food. She changed not only home entertaining but restaurant dining, brought cooking to prime-time television, and was the first big celebrity chef. Many of today's top chefs, from Alice Waters to Emeril Lagasse, credit her inspiration. Child's television shows were equal parts instruction and performance art. If she dropped part of a potato pancake while flipping it, she scraped it up and went on. She sipped wine and tasted liberally while cooking and concluded every show with a cheery Bon Appétit! Child won distinguished awards in both broadcasting (a Peabody in 1965 and an Emmy in 1966) and cooking. In 1980, she became the first woman member of La Commanderie des Cordons Bleus de France. Never predictable It was an unlikely career for a woman from a privileged background in Pasadena, Calif., who had begun a career in the foreign service. But not much was predictable about Julia Child. Born Julia McWilliams on Aug. 15, 1912, she was one of three children of John and Caro McWilliams. Her father was a well-to-do real estate investor and businessman; her mother, a loving nonconformist, amateur athlete and patron of the arts. Neither Julia's mother nor the hired cooks, who fed the family a standard American meat-and-potatoes diet, inspired Julia to spend time in the kitchen. All my mother knew how to cook was baking powder biscuits, codfish balls and Welsh rarebit, Julia once said. But at frequent extended-family meals and dinner parties, young Julia did learn the joys of sharing food with friends and family. Child's biographer Noelle Riley Fitch, reports that Julia and her siblings ate as much as they could at every meal. Julia learned the secret of life at an early age: appetite, Fitch writes in Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child. Julia McWilliams was an extrovert and a tomboy
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