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CHILD, JULIA. Possibly more than any other person, from the 1960s onward, Julia Child (1912–) revolutionized American attitudes toward cooking and eating by embodying two principles: cooks are made, not born, and the pleasure of food comes first. With the supreme confidence of a born clown who grew to six-foot-two, she turned America on to food by entertaining her audience as well as instructing them, making her an icon of the American spirit of energy and good humor. Combining the skills of a highly organized engineer with those of a slapstick comedian, she brought all of America into her home kitchen, through the doubled media of books and television, to wish them "bon appétit."

Born Julia McWilliams in Pasadena, California, to a family who had their own cook, Child did not set foot in a kitchen until she married at thirty-four. A graduate of Smith College and a veteran of World War II, she wed a fellow member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) whom she had met in Ceylon, Paul Child, who loved art, good living, and good food. When her husband was assigned to the Paris office of the United States Information Service in 1948, Child quickly enrolled in the Cordon Bleu school of cooking. There she joined with Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck to found l'École des Trois Gourmandes (the school of the three gourmets). The first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking appeared in 1961. The second volume, coauthored by Child and Beck, followed in 1970. Together, the encyclopedic volumes introduced "the servantless American cook" to the classic techniques and terminology of French bourgeois cooking translated into American terms and American kitchens.

While the success of the first volume was phenomenal, it was but a prelude to Child's success as a television performer in 1962, in which her infectious enthusiasm and natural clowning were simultaneously embraced and parodied. She followed The French Chef series for Boston's public station WGBH, from 1963 to 1973, by eight more series over the next decades, where she often served as interlocutor to guest chefs. Usually a series such as In Julia's Kitchen with Master Chefs was followed by a book of similar title, so that her publishing output was as prolific as her broadcasting. To date she has published eleven volumes.

Like James Beard, Child linked America's East to West, with houses in both Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Santa Barbara, California. She was among the first to establish an American food community with a national educative mission and proselytized universities to recognize gastronomic studies as part of a liberal arts curriculum. With California winemakers Robert Mondavi and Richard Graff, she founded the American Institute of Wine and Food in 1981 and helped transform the International Association of Cooking Professionals (IACP) into a comprehensive trade organization.

Her personal generosity and breadth of spirit brought amateurs together with professionals and made her a goodwill ambassador, not just between America and France, where the Childs built a house in Provence, but also internationally. She has fulfilled in her own life her admonition in her first book to "above all, have a good time." By taking what she called the "lah-de-dah" out of French cooking, she has made the pleasures of food available to ordinary Americans everywhere.

See also Beard, James; Chef; Cookbooks; Fisher, M. F. K.; Gastronomy; Wine.

Betty Fussell