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and continued through and beyond her death in 2004. As a fan in California once wrote, “Whenever your name comes up, people smile.” And whenever her name came up, it was Julia, just Julia. “I feel that I know you so well that I take the liberty to call you by your first name,” wrote one of the thousands of people who after discovering The French Chef sat down to thank her. “I say Julia, as I have come to know you personally thru Television….” “I call you by your first name since I feel I know you so well from your program….” “Perhaps you do not mind that I refer to you fondly as ‘Julia’ because to me you are a very dear friend….” Letters piled up at every public television station that aired her series—letters, handwritten and typewritten, from men and women, often from children, and sometimes in verse. Most often people asked for recipes; other times they reported on what they had successfully made for dinner, thanks to Julia; many wanted to find out what kind of electric mixer or blender she was using, or where they could buy a whisk and a copper bowl for beating egg whites. But again and again, they wrote about love. “We love every swipe of your sticky hands….” “Our mouths water ever so often and our hearts laugh….” “PLEASE CONTINUE AS YOU ARE!” “Let me start first by saying—we love you, we love you, we love you!” “We love you, Julia!” Every television star had a following, but Julia was the only professional on screen whose appeal sprang directly from her own personality, unmediated by scriptwriters or guests. She played no role, not even the role of cooking teacher; she portrayed no fictional character; no political or religious agenda drove her contagious passion; she never gazed into the camera to discuss war and politics and thereby acquire the gravitas that made newscasters appear important. What viewers loved was the Julia they saw on television and believed in wholeheartedly—“your natural manner,” “your honesty”—and they were not mistaken.

Julia on television was Julia cooking; and to watch her cook was to see every dimension of herself fully engaged. She cooked with mind, body, and spirit—the way dancers dance and musicians play their instruments—though Julia’s work on-screen was more like a dancer’s rehearsal session than an actual performance of Swan Lake. The goal was not to create a flawless fantasy, but to summon the technique and wisdom that are the essential elements of the discipline. Cooking was fun for Julia, and she wanted everyone else to experience it that way, too, but fun didn’t mean frivolity to her. It meant that you knew what you were doing, that you had absorbed the skills and understood the procedures and now took great pleasure in the demands of the work. From the beginning, Julia was determined to prepare food on television in such a way that viewers would take cooking seriously even if the show itself was lighthearted. The “ladies’ magaziney” element in cooking—an approach that fussed endlessly over shortcuts without teaching anything useful about either cooking or eating—struck her as a Pied Piper, all too capable of enticing Americans to their culinary doom. A few months before the series made its debut, executives at WGBH-TV began tinkering with the proposed title, trying to come up with something that sounded breezier and less intimidating than The French Chef. How about, for instance, “Looking at Cooking”? Julia stood firm. The French Chef, she told them, was a title that said exactly what she wanted to say. “It is short, to the point, dignified, glamorous, and appeals to men as well as women…. Something like ‘Looking at Cooking,’ or variations, sounds cheesy, little-womanish, cute, amateurish.” Not that she ever represented herself as being, literally, either French or a chef. On-screen and off-, she was an American home cook, and a proud one. But she was also an expert with years of study and experience behind every recipe she prepared, and she had no intention of allowing herself or her chosen work to appear trivial.

The WGBH executives were wrong: nobody was intimidated by The