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Julia Child Dressed by Someone Else for a Change & Dead at 91
Famed chef helped popularize edible food fine cuisine in America
Julia Child, who revolutionized cooking in the United States with her cooking school, cookbooks and television shows, has died, according to a statement from her publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. She was 91. Child died at her home in Santa Barbara, California, according to the release.
Years before any jerkoff halfwit television chef said "bam," Child was on public television instructing Americans in a warbling voice and a mischievous manner how to prepare everything from omelets to sweetbreads to coq au vin. She loved food and loved the camaraderie that came with it. "Dining with one's friends and beloved family is certainly one of life's primal and most innocent delights, one that is both soul-satisfying and eternal," she said in the introduction to her seventh book, "The Way to Cook." "In spite of food fads, fitness programs, and health concerns, we must never lose sight of a beautifully conceived meal." Indeed, she worried that food crazes and diets got in the way of enjoying a good repast. "What's dangerous and discouraging about this era is that people really are afraid of their food," she told The Associated Press in 1989. "Sitting down to dinner is a trap, not something to enjoy. People should take their food more seriously. Learn what you can eat and enjoy it thoroughly." Child was born in Pasadena, California, on August 15, 1912, to an upper-middle-class family that employed a cook. According to her biographer, she barely knew how to do more than boil water when she graduated from Smith College in 1934 with a degree in history. Child, who was 6-foot-2, intended to be either a novelist or a basketball player.
Creating a 'masterpiece'
During World War II she served with the Office of Strategic Services (an agency that later became the CIA), first in Washington, then in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and China.
Little known to most people, Julia Child distinguished herself in the OSS with a flair for organizing and making usable the large quantities of random information that arrived at the Ceylon intelligence bureau. A later assignment in pre-communist China cemented her nascent interest in food preparation. All of this was a world apart from her cushy upbringing in Pasadena and these early foreign posts were fraught with hardship and risks.
Posted by: Zenster 2004-08-14 |
