Remembering Julia

FOR FOUR DECADES, Julia Child was the nation's favorite television cook, the woman who convinced Americans that with a little patience they could learn French cooking. And while they were at it, they could have fun -- like she did on TV -- slinging a leg of lamb over her shoulder, cutting a piece of meat with a cleaver large enough to saw a tree, scooping up a dropped potato pancake and slipping it back into the pan with her famous line: "I have a self-cleaning floor." And so we made quiches and quenelles, simmered chickens in stewy wine sauces for coq au vin, and layered cream puffs into towering croquembouche confections.

Mrs. Child, who died in Santa Barbara, Calif., last Friday, two days before her 92d birthday, lived for almost 40 years in Cambridge, where she was a familiar character. Her striking 6-foot-2-inch frame was hard to hide at the local butcher or in the supermarket. In the years when she drove a little red VW Beatle with a kitchen spoon attached to the antenna, she zipped along Boston's streets to her favorite restaurants, where her first task was to say hello to a startled and delighted kitchen staff. There was never anyone in the cooking business like Julia before, and there never will be anyone like her again.

For a brief moment, when Julia Child was hamming it up in the kitchen and in that breathless, high-pitched voice wished her viewers "Bon appetit," everything in the world seemed right.