Famed Chef Julia Child Turns 90

Aug. 15, 2002 -- 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.

She said the new setting would impress her late husband, Paul.

"I think he'd be very proud and pleased to know that his kitchen was in the Smithsonian," Child said.

Getting Hooked on French Cooking

Child may be 90, but she is not exactly a typical senior.

"I'm working on another book," Child said. "I haven't gotten very far on it, but I have all of the material ready, and it's ready to work on. The thing is to start it."

But this time, it won't be a new recipe book.

"Well, there'll be a lot of food staining the pages, but this is more of a memoir about France in the '50s and the good time we had there," she said.

When Child first met her husband, she didn't know how to cook. But when they worked together at the U.S. Embassy in Paris, Child discovered that the kitchen was her calling. It was the taste of French food that did it.

"I could remember our first lunch. I was just hooked on that. We started out with oysters, and then we had a lovely scallops baked in a shell with one of those lovely French 'winey,' creamy sauces, and we had a duck dish, and it was just absolutely delicious," Child said.

"I had never eaten food like that because in the '40s and '50s, American food was very simple — good, but very simple. And this was very sophisticated. That's when I just decided, 'I'm going to learn how to do that.'"