Julia Child

Julia Child's kitchen opened at the Smithsonian Institution yesterday, right down to the plastic-veggie refrigerator magnets and her beloved "fright knife" from her former home in Cambridge, Mass. A self-proclaimed "knife freak," Child covered almost every bare wall with knives of every shape - implements both strange and familiar. Child, 90, venerable star of TV cooking shows and author of the best-selling Mastering the Art of French Cooking, designed the kitchen with help from her husband, the late Paul Child, when they moved into the home in 1961.

Lari Robling is a regular commentator on WHYY-FM's A Chef's Table, heard Saturdays at noon In tribute to her passing Friday, I'm certain dinner tables across the country tonight will feature favorite dishes from well-worn copies of The French Chef Cookbook by Julia Child. This was the companion book to her public-television series that brought cooking out of kitchen drudgery and into our consciousness as entertainment - even if we didn't know a soupcon from a saucepan. Wolfgang Puck, Emeril, even Martha Stewart owes Julia Child for looking into that camera, butcher knife in hand, and carving out the world of celebrity chefs.

President Bush has thrown down the gauntlet or, more accurately, the broccoli, and master chef Julia Child has picked it up. The President says he doesn't like the green veggie. Child says that if White House chefs cut it, blanch it, then saute it in olive oil and garlic, the leader of the Western world will devour it. "President Bush would love to eat broccoli if it was prepared in this way," Child insisted during an interview here, where she was participating in the Book and the Cook festival that ended yesterday.

Most of us don't go home after a hard day's work and bone a duck for dinner. Or prepare a creme bruleed chocolate Bundt cake for dessert. Or know just when to open the oven for a flawless souffle. But that doesn't mean we don't owe a hearty debt to Julia Child. America's grande dame of cooking turns 85 years old today, and that is cause for celebration even if Lamb Stew Printanierre (one of her favorite dishes) has never, ever graced your kitchen table. Julia Child has done more than pen famous cookbooks, appear in countless television shows and lead an industry with her passion for French cooking and baking.

Julia Child, the gangly grande dame of French cooking in America who demystified the joys of quiche and duck a l'orange for generations of home cooks through her books and pioneering television shows, died in her sleep early yesterday in Montecito, Calif. She was two days shy of her 92d birthday. The unmistakable hoot of her voice, her disarming sense of humor, and her notorious butterfingers in the kitchen made Child an endearing national icon, coaxing millions of food-lovers to the stove with the assurance that if she could do it, so could they.

SHE WAS brining, roasting, kneading and sautéing when Emeril Lagasse was in diapers, and Rachael Ray wasn't even a gleam in her parents' eyes. At a time when cooking wasn't cool - and certainly not on television - Julia Child single-handedly pioneered a new gastronomic course for the world. But the familiar, larger-than-life persona of her celebrity years had humble beginnings as a shy, awkward, sometimes inept culinary student. Though she is known mostly for the television fame she gained late in life, her love affair with French cooking began as a lark, a thirtysomething's determination to learn a few dishes to please her new husband.

It was 8:30 in the morning as I walked through the already brisk New England chill, past the picket fence and fire-engine-red Volvo to the door of Julia Child's home in Cambridge, Mass. Clutching a small ice chest filled with sweet Olympia oysters and first-of-the-season Dungeness crabs under one arm and a note pad under the other, I rang the doorbell. Warming up in her cozy big kitchen a few minutes later, I watched as Julia Child pulled a small knife from a drawer, opened an Olympia and slurped it down with great enthusiasm.

Happy birthday, Julia Child. The food world's first lady turns 85 on Friday. And to mark the occasion, fans and foodies everywhere are participating in a worldwide birthday celebration initiated by the International Association of Cooking Professionals. There's an open invitation to some of the parties, one there's still time to accept. The price of each event includes a $25 tax-deductible donation to the culinary scholarship fund that bears Child's name. Local parties include a four-course gourmet dinner of Child's recipes Friday at The Restaurant School, 4207 Walnut St. The $65 dinner, with seatings at 6 and 8:30 p.m., will be hosted by Esther Press, a featured chef in Baking With Julia.

Julie Powell proved you can be completely original by following in someone else's footsteps. In August 2002, Powell was approaching 30 with fear and loathing: She'd learned she might never bear children; her dream of an acting career had deflated; and she was spending her days as a temp, commuting from Queens to a dead-end secretarial? gig. "A temp!" she rails even now, recalling how the limitations of the position pounded against her unexplored potential. She was not even a bona fide, if underappreciated, employee.

"Do you eat oat bran?" Julia Child asked me. "I don't. As soon as something becomes trendy, I don't eat it," she said. No one would ever accuse Julia Child of succumbing to trendiness. She's as sensible as a Republican cloth coat. She carries her own baggage aboard planes. She drives a sensible Honda. Even her proudest moment is a modest one. "I think I did a pretty good description of French bread. " And at a robust 77, she has done just fine without oat bran, thank you. The Julia Child we have come to know and love like our favorite but slightly ditsy aunt was sitting serenely in her suite at the Four Seasons Clift Hotel in San Francisco.

Meryl Streep is saucy as Julia Child in Julie & Julia , an irresistible account of the American who taught her countrywomen to cook a la Française . And, who 40 years later, inspired the foundering Julie Powell (Amy Adams, at her most winsome) to find her moorings by cooking all 524 recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking - and blogging about it. Like Nora Ephron's captivating film, Streep's performance is haute cuisine disguised as comfort food, a complex preparation yielding effects both broadly entertaining and subtly moving.

The bad marriage is such a staple of the modern movie that it has become a bit of a bore. Watching Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio go at it in "Revolutionary Road" made me wish, for the first time, that I was watching "Titanic" again. Maybe that's why there's something almost subversive about Nora Ephron's "Julie & Julia," a smiley-face version of the "The Hours" that substitutes Julia Child for Virginia Woolf, food for suicide, jokes for despair, and startles us with its refreshing portrait of a good marriage.

SHE WAS brining, roasting, kneading and sautéing when Emeril Lagasse was in diapers, and Rachael Ray wasn't even a gleam in her parents' eyes. At a time when cooking wasn't cool - and certainly not on television - Julia Child single-handedly pioneered a new gastronomic course for the world. But the familiar, larger-than-life persona of her celebrity years had humble beginnings as a shy, awkward, sometimes inept culinary student. Though she is known mostly for the television fame she gained late in life, her love affair with French cooking began as a lark, a thirtysomething's determination to learn a few dishes to please her new husband.

Julie Powell proved you can be completely original by following in someone else's footsteps. In August 2002, Powell was approaching 30 with fear and loathing: She'd learned she might never bear children; her dream of an acting career had deflated; and she was spending her days as a temp, commuting from Queens to a dead-end secretarial? gig. "A temp!" she rails even now, recalling how the limitations of the position pounded against her unexplored potential. She was not even a bona fide, if underappreciated, employee.

For most performers, preparing for the opening of a show means running through lines and fine-tuning songs. But for Jilline Ringle, getting ready for a run of her cabaret act Mondo Mangia requires a shopping trip to pick up 50 pounds of onions and a case of plum tomatoes. That's because Ringle not only sings food-themed songs and tells stories about her family's Italian matriarchs during her one-woman show. She also cooks a pasta dish onstage and feeds the entire audience. Ringle, who opened a monthlong run of Mondo Mangia last night at the Walnut Street Theatre, premiered her unusual culinary cabaret here four years ago with 1812 Productions.

Lari Robling is a regular commentator on WHYY-FM's A Chef's Table, heard Saturdays at noon In tribute to her passing Friday, I'm certain dinner tables across the country tonight will feature favorite dishes from well-worn copies of The French Chef Cookbook by Julia Child. This was the companion book to her public-television series that brought cooking out of kitchen drudgery and into our consciousness as entertainment - even if we didn't know a soupcon from a saucepan. Wolfgang Puck, Emeril, even Martha Stewart owes Julia Child for looking into that camera, butcher knife in hand, and carving out the world of celebrity chefs.

Julia Child, the gangly grande dame of French cooking in America who demystified the joys of quiche and duck a l'orange for generations of home cooks through her books and pioneering television shows, died in her sleep early yesterday in Montecito, Calif. She was two days shy of her 92d birthday. The unmistakable hoot of her voice, her disarming sense of humor, and her notorious butterfingers in the kitchen made Child an endearing national icon, coaxing millions of food-lovers to the stove with the assurance that if she could do it, so could they.

Julia Child's kitchen opened at the Smithsonian Institution yesterday, right down to the plastic-veggie refrigerator magnets and her beloved "fright knife" from her former home in Cambridge, Mass. A self-proclaimed "knife freak," Child covered almost every bare wall with knives of every shape - implements both strange and familiar. Child, 90, venerable star of TV cooking shows and author of the best-selling Mastering the Art of French Cooking, designed the kitchen with help from her husband, the late Paul Child, when they moved into the home in 1961.

It was in 1959 that a talented young French chef named Jacques Pepin first saw the manuscript. It had been cowritten by an American woman named Julia Child. An 800-page opus, it illuminated the mysterious world of French cooking for American readers like never before, from the detail of instructions to the line drawings that showed techniques from how to make a roux to getting maximum puff out of your souffle. "It was amazing," said Pepin, a former personal chef to Charles de Gaulle who had just arrived in New York City to cook at Le Pavillon.

In a school report displayed behind glass, a math teacher wrote, "I fear numbers mean little to Diana. " Nearby are a school trunk labeled "D. Spencer" and a pair of small, well-worn tap shoes - mementos of a little girl who grew up to be Princess Diana. About 2,500 people waited in line for more than an hour to see such relics yesterday - what would have been Diana's 37th birthday - the opening day of a $5 million memorial museum at Diana's ancestral home, Althorp House, in England.