Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, and Simone Beck

Julia Child was an American cooking teacher and author who introduced French cuisine to American home cooks through her books, television programs, and infectious personality.

Julia Child was born in Pasadena, California in 1912 and did not learn to cook until her thirties, when she accompanied her diplomat husband Paul to France and encountered French cuisine for the first time. She enrolled at the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris, befriended Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck, and the three began collaborating on the book that would become Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

The book, published in 1961 after a decade of work and several rejections, was a phenomenon. Child had an instinct for teaching — for explaining not just the steps of a recipe but the reasoning behind them, the techniques that underlie multiple dishes, the principles that allow a cook to adapt rather than merely replicate. The book demystified French cuisine for American home cooks and created a generation of serious home cooking.

Her television programme The French Chef, which began on PBS in 1963, amplified the book’s influence enormously and made Child a national figure. Her willingness to make mistakes on air — dropping food, fumbling with equipment, making jokes about her own clumsiness — made serious cooking accessible and human. She died in 2004, two days before her 92nd birthday.