A 6-foot-2 American folk hero, "The French Chef" was known to her public as Julia. She showed a delight not only in preparing good food but in sharing it, and ended her landmark public television lessons at a set table with the wish, "Bon appetit."
Child died at her home in an assisted-living center in Montecito, about 90 miles northwest of Los Angeles, said her niece, Philadelphia Cousins.
"She passed away in her sleep," Cousins said. "She was with family and friends and her kitten, Minou. She had cookbooks and many paintings by her husband Paul around the house."
Child, who died two days before her 92nd birthday, had been suffering from kidney failure, Cousins said.
"America has lost a true national treasure," Nicholas Latimer, director of publicity for Child's publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, said in a statement. "She will be missed terribly."
Child was a skillful �?and sometimes messy �?chef, beckoning everyone to have no fear and give exquisite cuisine a try.
"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."
Her gourmet philosophy also included drinking. In one TV program, chef and friend Jacques Pepin asked what kind of wine she preferred with picnics �?red or white.
"I like beer," Child said enthusiastically, pulling out a cold bottle and two glasses.
Pepin recalled a friendship that began in 1960.
"We'd go to the market, and she'd buy Wonder Bread," he told The Associated Press. "She had no snobbism about food whatsoever. She loved iceberg lettuce."
Child also expressed a fondness for hamburgers, which she ate while recovering from 2002 knee-replacement surgery.
Like the rest of us, she sometimes dropped things or had trouble getting a cake out of its mold.
"She just kind of opened the doors ... to the idea that cooking could be a pleasure and it wasn't drudgery in the kitchen," said Alice Waters, executive chef and owner of Chez Panisse, the celebrated Berkeley, Calif., restaurant. "It wasn't just for fancy French chefs."
In an A-line skirt and blouse, and an apron with a dish towel tucked into the waist, Child grew familiar enough to be parodied by Dan Aykroyd (news) on NBC's "Saturday Night Live" and was the subject of Jean Stapleton's musical revue, "Bon Appetit." She also was on the cover of Time magazine in 1966.
Decades of popularity prompted President Bush (news - web sites) last year to give her a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. Her custom-designed kitchen �?including small utensils, personal cookbooks and six-burner Garland commercial range �?has been on display at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
"She was more than a pioneer, a legend or a giant. She's the rock that started the avalanche that changed the way America eats," said Brooke Johnson, president of the Food Network. The food and cooking channel on Aug. 22 will air a recently completed documentary on Child, Johnson said.
Born in Pasadena, Calif., Child once said she was raised on so-so cooking by hired cooks.
She graduated from Smith College in 1934 with a history degree and aspirations to be a novelist or a writer for The New Yorker magazine. Instead, she ended up in the publicity department of a New York City furniture and rug chain.
When World War II began, she joined the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA (news - web sites). She was sent off to do clerical chores in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where she met Paul Child, a career diplomat who later became a photographer and painter, on the porch of a tea planter's bungalow in 1943.
They married in 1946 and two years later were sent to Paris.
Child enrolled in the famed Cordon Bleu cooking school, motivated at least in part by a desire to cook for her epicure husband.
"I'd been looking for my life's work all along," she once told the AP. "And when I got into cooking I found it. I was inspired by the tremendous seriousness with which they took it."
In France, she also met Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, with whom she collaborated on "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." The book was nine years in the making and became mandatory for anyone who took cooking seriously.
It was published in 1961 and was followed by "The French Chef Cookbook"; "Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. II," with Beck; "From Julia Child's Kitchen"; "Julia Child & Company"; "Julia Child & More Company"; and "The Way to Cook," in October 1989.
She was 51 when she made her television debut as "The French Chef." The series began in 1963 and continued for 206 episodes. Child won a Peabody award in 1965 and an Emmy in 1966, and went on to star in several more series for Boston's WGBH-TV.
Russell Morash, who produced "The French Chef" and other public television shows featuring Child as recently as the mid-1990s, said she was a consummate optimist with a razor-sharp intellect and voracious appetite for learning.
"She was incredibly smart, and if she wanted to learn something, she set about learning it. Whether it was how to make French bread, or how to prepare the perfect omelet, she would take the trouble to learn about something, and then she mastered it in a way that I never saw anyone else do."
Since the 1980s, she devoted attention to promoting the serious study of food and cooking. She co-founded the American Institute of Wine and Food in San Francisco in 1981 and co-founded the James Beard Foundation in New York City in 1986.
More recently, she teamed with fellow television chef Jacques Pepin for the 1994 PBS special, "Julia Child & Jacques Pepin: Cooking in Concert" and a 1996 sequel, "More Cooking in Concert."
Child also had been collaborating on a memoir with a grandnephew, Alex Prud'homme, and had completed two chapters, said her longtime editor at Knopf, Judith Jones. Work on the memoir likely will continue, she said.
Paul Child died in 1994, and in late 2001, Julia Child, a longtime resident of Cambridge, Mass., moved to Santa Barbara. The couple had no children.
A private memorial service was planned, but Child asked that no funeral be held.
___
Associated Press Writer Daisy Nguyen contributed to this report.
She will be missed
Free Forum Hosting
Important Announcement
First 
