APPRECIATION Julia Child's love of food marked a lust for life BY IAN DONNIS

It’s not as if some sort of Rosetta stone of culinary potential went missing when I was a child. The matzoh balls in my grandmother Belle’s chicken soup awed me with their seemingly contradictory heft and lightness, and my mother’s unaffected home cooking planted the seeds of subsequent inspiration. My youthful eating habits nonetheless consisted in fair measure of hamburgers, Three Musketeer bars, and Yoo-hoo. Even in college, I was one of those guys who couldn’t cook a plate of spaghetti to save my life.

It was only in my early 20s, forced to fend for myself as a single guy, that the latent genetic imprint of the above-mentioned duo began to slowly flower, helping me to fashion a palatable, if unorthodox, chicken soup in my first post-collegiate kitchen. Somehow, there was another strong female presence from my days as a kid — the trilling voice and buoyant spirit of Julia Child, whose public television show had caught my fancy — offering the encouragement to plunge happily ahead, mistakes be damned. Julia’s public persona might have meshed with the Saturday Night Live satiric interpretation of an overly happy-go-lucky chef, but the message remained clear: good food is an intrinsic part of a life well lived. It took some years, but Julia helped lend the confidence to believe I could master almost any dish.

There was far more, of course, to this formidable Californian-turned-New Englander than met the eye. As described in her aptly named biography, Appetite for Life (Doubleday, 1997), Julia joined the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, during World War II, aspiring to become a spy, and her culinary expertise soared only after moving to France in her mid-30s with her husband Paul. It was after settling in Cambridge in 1956 that Julia became, as the New York Times headlined Saturday, August 14 in announcing her death at 91, "the French chef for a Jell-0 Nation."

Among her many accomplishments, Julia looms large for emphasizing the use of real pleasure-inducing ingredients — I can still hear her ringing, It tastes much better with butter, doesn’t it? — at a time when many Americans turn to products free of fat, but also flavor, in a misguided quest for a slimmer waist.

In the late ’90s, I lived in Somerville, Massachusetts, not far from where Julia made her home on a quiet street outside of Harvard Square (a few short blocks, appropriately enough, from the wonderful Spanish restaurant Dali and a superlative wine shop). The desire to stop by for an impromptu visit came to me periodically — we tend to think of our favored celebrities as something akin to friends — but respecting her privacy, I knew that innumerable people felt likewise.

Thankfully, there was a confirmation of the Julia we all love when another prominent chef, Jasper White, who once worked at the Providence Biltmore, spun some saucy tales during a talk at the Boston Athenaeum. Describing how he drove her back to Cambridge from a late ’90s Providence appearance, White recounted how it was getting late and he thought Julia, then well into her 80s, would be ready to retire for the night. She was having none of it, though. Even before they got near her street, White said, offering his best interpretation of Julia’s signature warble, she piped up, saying, "Would you like to go out for a drink?"