Her genuine interest in people made her table a gathering place
Julia Child's interest in chefs, home cooks, and young people was legendary. Hundreds of cooks across the country claim her as their mentor. Her files were filled with letters from admirers and all sorts of cooks in various stages of their careers looking for advice.
Among the notes she received was one from Salem resident Nina Simonds, author and Asian cooking authority, who remembered sending Mrs. Child a letter when she was 18, probably written on lined notebook paper, asking for advice about a career in food. Mrs. Child not only answered the young cook, but also offered instructions on writing a proper letter. The two became friends, and Simonds, who visited Mrs. Child in California not long before her death, recalled: "For so many people, she was a huge enthusiast, promoter, supporter."
That generosity extended to people in all facets of the cooking field. "She did so much for other people's careers," says Concord-based French food historian Barbara Wheaton, who called Mrs. Child about the old French cookbooks in her library and received an invitation to come over -- that very afternoon.
Later, when Wheaton went for the first time to a dinner in the Cambridge kitchen, she was nervous. "It was like waking up and finding that a dream was really true." The house, Wheaton said, "was always so comfortable, so unstuffy. And she always served those Pepperidge Farm Goldfish first." The tiny orange crackers with their cheese flavor were standard fare with fine wine, offered before dinner.
The French Chef, said the historian, had "a good sense of proportion. The main reason for having a dinner party was to introduce people to one another" and at Mrs Child's table that was certainly the case. Everyone who was anyone gathered.
Two frequent guests were Italian-born cook Franco Romagnoli and his late wife, Margaret. Romagnoli was a film editor at WGBH when Mrs. Child was on "The French Chef." She encouraged the couple when they began filming "Romagnoli's Table," a series on the basics of Italian cuisine, in Mrs. Child's studio kitchen. "She changed my life," Romagnoli says.
Some nights, guests at Julia Child's were asked to sing for their supper. Brookline-based Cook's Illustrated founder Christopher Kimball was once more or less ordered to start shucking oysters. "What she did was have you over to cook part of the dinner," says Kimball. On his first visit, he was the only guest. She handed him the oysters. "Fifteen minutes later, I had three oysters open. She suggested I use a church key. It was a disaster. Julia is very competitive, she loved to test people. And she was very playful."
Anne Willan, founder of La Varenne cooking school in Burgundy, spent a lot of time with Mrs. Child and would write down some of her funniest lines after they were together. Once when she felt frustrated by an incompetent interviewer, who asked her what the best item in her kitchen was, Mrs. Child said, "The best thing in the kitchen is myself!"
At 91, when she received a call from President George W. Bush on receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest honor, she told Willan, "I'm horrified to say that I had a telephone call from the president and he sounded very nice indeed." Mrs. Child was a lifelong Democrat. So it makes sense that at one of her last public appearances, when she and a distinguished panel were asked what else they might have become, most of the people answered with vocations such as musician, artist, goat cheese maker. Not Julia, said Willan. Mrs. Child answered, "Well, I guess I would have married a Republican banker and become an alcoholic!"
"The French Chef" producer-director Russell Morash, who was a witness to this humor for hundreds of television cooking episodes, said, "It's hard to replace somebody with those gifts."
When cooks gather, there's invariably talk about who will be the next Julia. "That's absurd," says Kimball. "Who was the next Lincoln? The stars got aligned briefly." 