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also a vigorous supporter of the Schlesinger Library at Harvard, which houses one of the nation’s most substantial culinary collections. She donated her own papers and persuaded Simca and Avis to do the same, and her participation in library events brought it considerable visibility. She liked to think that someday all the culinary collections in the United States would be “connected by computer,” with the Schlesinger at the center of a national research network buzzing constantly with new findings and ideas. “Me, I am not an intellectual,” she had said ruefully to Avis years earlier. But of course she was—her passion for food raced through her whole body and fired her brain as well. One of her lasting gifts to the food world was to help make it a place where good minds could settle in for life.

French cooking, Julia style, flourished at countless dinner parties for a decade or so, but eventually gave way to simpler, lighter cuisines. Though Mastering remains the gold standard for learning French techniques and recipes, it’s a rare host or hostess who makes an entire, head-spinning meal from Julia’s repertoire the way her early fans sometimes did. By the time she died, American cooking reflected far more direct influences from California and Italy than from any of Julia’s books, and the culinary stage she had once dominated was crowded with stars. Julia welcomed all of them; she was always looking for what she called “new blood” for the profession. Yet it’s doubtful whether any of the prolific, telegenic cooking experts who came after Julia have ever touched an audience the way she did. Today there appear to be two kinds of good cooks: those who want to impress people and those who want to feed people. The meal may be delicious in either case, but you can always tell the difference, in part because it’s written across the face of the cook when he or she presents the platter. “Admire me,” some of their expressions seem to say. “Here, this is for you, let’s eat!” say the others. Julia’s ego was never visible when she cooked: it seemed to flow directly into the food and emerge as a gift of herself. “Thank you!” people often wrote in their fan letters. It was the first thing they wanted to tell her. They understood—watching her ecstatically smell a vanilla bean, or nail an eel by the head to a board for easier peeling, or put a freshly baked baguette to her ear (“Now this crackles!”), or hold up a spoon with its miraculous cloud of beaten egg whites—that she was teaching them how to live.

SOURCES

JULIA CHILD gave nearly all her personal and professional papers to the Schlesinger Library at Harvard; and in those dozens of cartons I found most of the material for the facts, inferences, and quotations in this book. The library also holds the papers of Avis DeVoto, whose correspondence provided details on the publishing of Mastering the Art of French Cooking as well as other insights into Julia’s life and times.

Among secondary sources, the most important to me was Noel Riley Fitch’s Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (Doubleday, 1997), which I drew on especially in describing Julia’s childhood in California, her education, and her life just after college. Sisterhood of Spies: The Women of the OSS, by Elizabeth P. McIntosh (Naval Institute Press, 1998), supplied information on Julia’s wartime experiences. Hundreds of journalists interviewed Julia over the years, but the most substantive articles remain the Time cover story (November 25, 1966) and the profile by Calvin Tomkins in The New Yorker (December 23, 1974). I made use of both, and occasionally of other newspaper and magazine stories as well.

To describe and quote from Julia’s television programs, I used notes and transcripts in the Schlesinger archives, and the DVDs of The French Chef produced by WGBH Boston Video.

I’m sorry that the Penguin Lives format does not include footnotes, but researchers who would like to track down specific references are invited to write to me care of the publisher.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I AM INDEBTED first and forever