Meanwhile, everyone enjoyed Child favorites like French onion soup, coq au vin, bouillabaisse, and chocolate espresso pots de crème.Ĭhild would have loved that this evening in her name was all about delight. Toi Dennis, the Casa’s executive sous chef, worked the room wearing a Julia Child mask for just one more laugh. The room was filled with 179 diners, a record for a single sitting. The Casa Dorinda dinner that followed was much more than bananas. A nervous and excited-for-the-invite Warren first met Child at Julia’s Montecito Shores house for lunch Child said she was on a diet, handed Warren a banana, and said, “Here’s your lunch.” Judy Warren, who was hired when Child insisted on a female interior designer to help her build out her Casa Dorinda apartment, dug out some historic architectural drawings of her layout for Child’s famous kitchen (a smallish version of her Cambridge, Mass., one that is now at the Smithsonian). It remains, said Hadley, “a very happy place to live.” One time, thinking about all the adulation for Child, Eagleton asked Julia how she put up with it, and Child replied, “I try not to think about it.”Ĭissy Hadley, who never met Child but now lives in her former apartment, has done everything she can to keep Child’s garden growing, from the fruit trees to the yellow roses that now bear Julia Child’s name. Jane Eagleton, who knew Child first from their days together at Montecito Shores, reminisced about how she cooked for America’s Favorite Chef, who was always appreciative. Other Casa Dorinda-ites shared memories, too. Insisting Child’s favorite meal was steak and gin, Fussell shared Child’s enduring quote, “Everything in moderation … including moderation.” So much of cooking, like comedy, is timing.
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Stressing that with her TV presence, Child made “canned and bland done,” Fussell also shared some of Julia’s zingers, stressing how she was a born comedienne. That left estimable food writer Betty Fussell, a member of the James Beard Foundation Cookbook Hall of Fame (to mention just one of her honors), to pick things up from his, uh, fowl start.įussell certainly did, sharing memories of Child from 1963 on, even if Fussell got to Casa Dorinda after Julia’s passing. But before the screening, an aproned Bob Yamin, head of the Casa’s Entertainment Committee, paraded through with a trussed-up chicken carcass he unceremoniously dropped to the floor. The event moved into the auditorium for a screening of 2004’s Julia Child! America’s Favorite Chef, a PBS American Masters documentary rich with details, archival photos, and footage of the evening’s star.
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The evening kicked off in the Casa’s Game Room with a choice of wine or Julia’s beloved reverse martini - think 5-1 vermouth over gin, easier on one’s liver and the rest of the evening - plus bowls full of popcorn with real butter (Francophile, remember?) and Pepperidge Farm Goldfish (far from a snob, she loved what she loved, Costco hot dogs and all). Please don’t think that something at a retirement community will be stodgy. On February 14, her former resident friends threw a wonderful party called A Valentine Evening Remembering Julia Child. (See the full event schedule here.) īut beating that weekend to the punch was Casa Dorinda, where she lived from 2001 until her death in 2004.
From March 13 to 15, the inaugural Santa Barbara Culinary Experience will celebrate all things Julia by throwing a gastronomic blowout of workshops, tastings, dinners, and hoopla in her honor. While Child passed away 16 years ago at the age of 91, her time spent in Santa Barbara only seems to magnify and reverberate more loudly with each passing year. How could she not want to come to the American Riviera, then, especially with its elongated growing seasons and burgeoning wine industry? But Child was also a Francophile that made millions feel the same, thanks to her late-life blockbuster Mastering the Art of French Cooking (written with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle). She visited often while growing up in Pasadena in the 1910s and ’20s, so there was that tug of nostalgia. That this famous author and television personality chose to spend the end of her life in the Santa Barbara area should come as no surprise. And, in perhaps the most revolutionary way, she meant that both as a process - nope, that famed chicken dropped on the floor mid-episode never happened - and the product. One of the reasons Julia Child can inspire an almost religious fervor in those who followed her - that is, anyone who loves food - is that, like another famous J.C., she told us all to “Take, and eat.” Or maybe that should be, “ Cook, and eat.”įor in the 1960s, when most food was frozen and pre-prepared, Child made it clear that food could be fun. Casa Dorinda’s entertainment czar Bob Yamin prepares to drop a chicken.
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