"Jennifer" > wrote

> The French Chef is gone.

I remember her show fondly, watching it as a kid on the
no-commercial channel (Channel 13: Was it already called
"PBS" then?) in NYC, where it got its start. She gave me my
first incentive to learn to cook. Within less than a year
after I started watching the show regularly I was being
given important duties in the typical extended North Jersey
Italian family's Christmas blowout. If I didn't go on to be
a professional cook it certainly wasn't her fault. There
were other fish to fry, as it were.

My favorite recollection from her show, "The French Chef",
was the one in which she showed how to do a roast suckling
pig from start to finish. She kept referring to the pig as
"he": "And now we put foil over his ears to keep them from
burning."

I couldn't believe it when the notice of her death said she
was 92 or so. That means she was born more than 30 years
before I was, in 1912, two years before world war 1 got
started. What a short century that was.

One must assume that Julia ate the kinds of things that she
showed us how to cook. They certainly weren't low-fat. But
they weren't low-carb either. And she lived to be 92. (Memo
to self: Find out how she did that.)

A well-weathered copy of her "Mastering the Art of French
Cooking" (a 1970s edition) sits proudly on the book shelf
above the monitor on which these words are appearing as I
write them.

Will I miss Julia? No. How can I? She's part of me.

--
Bob
Kanyak's Doghouse
http://www.kanyak.com