Famed Chef Julia Child Turns 90

Aug. 15 -- Julia Child was television's first chef, and she may be its most recognizable.

When she started writing about French cooking, and then appearing on television in the 1960s, Americans considered macaroni and cheese to be a fancy meal. But Child, who was born in Pasadena, Calif., has helped transform her fellow Americans into a nation of chefs who head for the gourmet sections of our supermarkets before whipping up a good meal.

Child turns 90 today, but she says she isn't feeling her age.

"I feel about the same as I did when I was 4 years old," Child told Good Morning America's Charlie Gibson. "I'm just feeling very good, indeed, and it's very nice to be back here."

‘Every Toothpick Is Catalogued’

Fans of Child's French Chef television series, which launched in 1962, may recall the deluxe kitchen from which the program was televised at her home in Cambridge, Mass. She has sold the house and moved to a retirement home in Santa Barbara, Calif., where the kitchen is a bit humbler.

"I have a very small and compact one," Child said. "It's rather like a kitchen on a boat. It's kind of a galley kitchen, but I've got plenty of room in it."

She no longer has the giant, industrialized-size stove from the old house in Cambridge, but the new "galley kitchen" provides enough room, even when celebrity chefs come to visit.

"We had Wolfgang Puck in there, and he a segment of one of his shows, and he did about four or five different things, and it worked out very well," Child said.

Recalling his own experience in the old kitchen, during one of Good Morning America's visits, Gibson said the menu was plain but unforgettable.

"We had tuna fish sandwiches, but they were the best tuna fish sandwiches I ever had," Gibson said.

Now Child's old kitchen has been moved to the Behring Center of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington.

"They took all kinds of photographs, and they wrote down everything, and I think every, even every toothpick is catalogued, and it's back in its exact order," Child said.