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By Root 261 0

French Chef, though there were certainly viewers who were quite content to stay right there in the living room and let Julia do the cooking. Even her friends, most of whom were very good cooks themselves, drew the line occasionally. “Quenelle show was absolutely marvelous,” one of them wrote to her after seeing the program. In it Julia ground fillets of fish, mixed the fish with a cream puff batter, beat in dollop after dollop of cream until the mixture was holding as much cream as it possibly could without becoming too loose to handle, then shaped the mixture into cylinders and poached them—a fairly intense series of procedures, with pitfalls lying in wait around every corner. “Very very interesting watching the process and all quite clear,” Julia’s friend complimented her. “Would never make them in the living world.” Neither would most of the other fans in the audience, but that didn’t stop them from heading for the television when it was time for Julia every week. Quenelles weren’t necessarily the point. “We love to watch you cook—myself especially—with your mouth-watering recipes—positively ‘Smell’ them cooking! Delicious—I’ll bet!” wrote a viewer. “You sure make them sound that way as well as look—and best of all you are not afraid to taste as you cook—to me that’s cooking!”

The food was front and center, the food was glorious; but to this letter writer and to Julia herself, The French Chef was about life in the kitchen. Julia didn’t see any difference between French food and American food that couldn’t be bridged with cooking lessons, though her idea of what belonged in a cookery class went considerably deeper than recipes and techniques. At the heart of every one of her television programs was a lesson—sometimes spoken outright and sometimes simply clear from the way she worked—about how to approach any task in the kitchen. It didn’t matter whether you were planning to boil an egg or to spend the next two days making a galantine of turkey, the lesson was the same, and it was a moral template for American cooks. Use all your senses, all the time, Julia instructed. Take pains with the work; do it carefully. Relish the details. Enjoy your hunger. And remember why you’re there.

Julia’s own kitchen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she lived for more than forty years and taped three television series, officially became a national treasure in 2001. Julia turned eighty-nine that year, and as she was clearing out the house in preparation for a long-planned move to a Santa Barbara, California, retirement complex, the Smithsonian Institution put in a request for her kitchen. Julia agreed; and a team of curators and conservators quickly descended on the house to inventory everything in the kitchen, including the knives and pot holders, the dime-store vegetable peelers, and the warnings she stuck to the wall about using the garbage disposal (BEWARE ONION SKINS). Then they disassembled and transported the entire room to the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., where they put it back together. Apart from a new etched-acrylic window standing in for the Peg-Board where she hung copper pots and pans—the Peg-Board and copper had been promised earlier to COPIA, the American Center for Wine, Food & the Arts, in Napa, California—the kitchen was erected in the museum exactly as it had been in Cambridge. The Garland stove, the twenty-four refrigerator magnets, the plastic venetian blinds, the big wooden table, the copper stockpot full of rolling pins, her phone and her Bulfinch’s Mythology and her guide to Massachusetts state government—it was all in place. Julia’s kitchen had moved from her home to our history.

Her talent was cooking and her medium was food, but all the signals radiating from Julia as she sliced potatoes or carefully unmolded a dessert had to do with character. All of her fans understood this. They responded to her generous nature and abundant skills, maybe even tried to make their own puff pastry, because they knew they could believe in her. She wasn’t selling them anything; on the contrary, she