Friday, August 13

 
Julia Child Dies at Age 91

It's true -- the woman who helped revamp cooking at all levels in America died in her sleep Thursday at her home in Santa Barbara, Calif. (Link points to a Chicago Tribune story; registration required).

Prepare now for an onslaught of eulogies from everyone who ever watched any of her PBS cooking shows (I preferred the ones she did with Jacques Pepin for their humor, banter and crosstalk about food and cooking), or bought one of her books, or attended a show, or sat next to her and had the effrontery to ask her for an autograph (like me).

I am lucky enough to be able to report on actually meeting her several times in the 1990s. She was tall, gracious, interested in everything and everyone, generous with opinions, even potentially unpopular ones and unflagging. She came to Wisconsin either as a guest of corporate entities such as the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board or heritage-food organizations. I met her in Madison as she toured the famous Saturday-morning Farmers Market around the Capitol Square and then cooked with Odessa Piper at her restaurant, L'Etoile, for one of her shows, then again when she went on a cruise dinner in Milwaukee and taught a cooking class at Jill Prescott's former school in Kohler.

The best thing to do now would be to make something from one of her books. I heartily recommend the chocolate-and-almond Queen of Sheba cake ( Reine de Saba, p. 677 in the original 1961 edition of Mastering the Art of French Cooking).

A faster alternative is the shrimp quiche from The Way to Cook (my copy of which opens right to the recipe on p 384).

If you're not up to that, go buy or borrow "Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child" by Noel Riley Fitch, a gush-free examination of Julia's remarkable life.

Most people will remember Julia as the woman who made French cooking accessible to the American public, but she's also to be remembered as an apparently fearless woman who carved her own path in life, who reinvented herself in her early 30s and ended up with a husband whose life eventually centered around her own. She was able to create her life without the distraction of children, which opens up a small debate: If she'd had a child, or children, would she have become the Julia we know today? And, would they have been the best-fed children in town, or would the old cobbler's-children maxim have ruled (the cobbler's children are the worst-shod)?

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Bon appetit!
posted by Unknown 11:29 AM