A Master of the Art of Living

Newsweek, August, 2004 by Dorothy Kalins ( )

Slipping away quietly in her sleep late last week may have been the only unspectacular thing Julia Child ever did in her 91 years. When, in 1961, in an act of generosity and scholarship, she published "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," she launched a major culture shift: cooking with the rigor of technique (yes, there is a right way to roast a chicken) without a whiff of the pretension Americans ascribed to anything French. Her bright Cambridge kitchen (now safely enshrined--with all its 1,000 objects; she was a gadget freak--in the Smithsonian) was the homey opposite of those flashy granite and stainless numbers people install but almost never cook in. And when, in 1962, she first waved a whisk at an audience on Boston's WGBH, she launched not just the idea of the cooking...

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