Julia Child, the doyenne of US television cookery shows and a larger-than-life food writer and television personality who demystified French cuisine for the American public, has been celebrated in a Google doodle marking her birthday.
The cook, who died in 2004, was herself re-introduced to a new generation of fans as a result of her portrayal by Meryl Streep in a 2009 film, Julie & Julia, which centred on the the culinary journey of a mildly bored diplomat's wife who enrolls in the Cordon Bleu cookery school in post-war Paris. It simultaneously retells the story of a New York blogger's bid to cook all 524 recipes from Child's seminal cookbook during a single year
Child's book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, was published in 1961 and gave rise in turn to a television series, The French Chef.
Born in Pasadena, California, in 1913, the then Julia McWilliams worked during the second world war for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the US intelligence agency that served as a precursor to the CIA. She married another OSS employee, Paul Cushing Child, who was an artist, poet, photographer and gourmet.
He is credited with introducing his wife to fine cuisine, a love that was to be developed when the couple moved to France when he was posted there in 1948.
Child subsequently recalled her first meal in the city of Rouen as a culinary revelation, describing the meal of oysters, sole meunière and wine to the New York Times on one occasion as "an opening up of the soul and spirit for me."
At 6ft 2in tall, aged 51 and with a distinctive, warbling voice, Child was regarded as an unlikely television star but the weekly US programme she started hosting in 1963 lasted for 206 episodes
She went on to other shows, Julia Child and Company, and Dinner With Julia, and won various broadcasting awards. The Legion of Honour was bestowed along the way by France.
Two years before her show's debut, she had written a major culinary work, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Volume 1, which took 10 years to complete with the help of two French colleagues, was regarded as the definitive work for English-language readers.
