JULIA CHILD introduced gastronomically-challenged Americans to the ease of making cheese soufflé or cherry clafoutis — or even quiche Lorraine. She decoded the mysteries of French cuisine for a generation of American television audiences. It would be no exaggeration to say that Child, more than any other person, brought haute cuisine to America. She was a pioneer of television cooking programmes and the author of nine cookbooks, including the seminal Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

When her first television series, The French Chef, was aired in 1962, audiences were immediately entranced by her scatterbrained nonchalance, as she careered about the kitchen in a seemingly haphazard and tipsy (but, in fact, well-rehearsed) performance of whisking, grating and chattering. Alternating between a throaty drawl and a regal trill, she spanned octaves, tossing off ad-libbed jokes to gloss over deflated desserts or splattered potatos. But while her delivery was folksy, her subject was serious, and she approached it, the journalist Lewis Lapham, said as “a missionary instructing a noble but savage race in a civilised art.” And she did it with a patrician charm fine-tuned at a thousand embassy cocktail parties.

Child had her work cut out for her, given the hegemony at the time of prepared and frozen foods, as well as the vogue — in feminism’s early days — for “hassle-free” cooking. With a perfectionist’s zeal for detail, her 6ft 2in frame slightly stooped in a sensible tailored blouse, she walked her audience through cassoulet and coubilliac like an exacting but affectionate headmistress.

Julia Carolyn McWilliams was born in 1912 in Pasadena, California. As a skinny, freckled redhead, invariably the tallest girl in the room, she was a popular tomboy prankster who challenged the boys in athletics. In a house full of servants, she took no interest in what were then called the “womanly arts,” scarcely ever entering the kitchen. After graduation from Smith College, Child lived in Manhattan and worked in the advertising section of a department store. She tried her hand at writing reviews, with little success, and had her heart broken by a young literature major. She returned to Pasadena and became, for a time, a self-described social butterfly. But by 1942, she had developed a keen enough interest in politics to move to Washington and enter government service.

Turned down by the Wacs and the Waves, she eventually became a researcher and file clerk for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which posted her to Ceylon. There, she met Paul Cushing Child, an urbane, polyglot artist and OSS officer ten years older than she. After the War, the two were married in Pennsylvania, and when Paul was assigned to the US Information Service at the American Embassy in Paris, Julia enrolled in cooking classes at the Cordon Bleu.

She also gave cooking classes for Americans in her Paris kitchen and joined two French colleagues to research and produce Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which was published in 1961. Well into middle age, with no professional cooking experience, Julia Child had launched her career as the American grand dame of French cooking.

Her first television series, The French Chef, had at least as much impact as the book. The gangly Pasadena girl, it turned out, was a natural before the camera. Her biographer Noël Riley Fitch observed, “Changing Americans’ attitudes toward food would take decades, but the impact is undeniable: She celebrated her appetite, the joy of the kitchen, and the pleasure of food, a pleasure conveyed in the way she patted the bread dough and caressed the chicken.”

Child continued to celebrate that prodigious appetite from her home and workbase, a fastidiously equipped but homey kitchen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from which she filmed her television series. Her recent series, Master Chefs, brought her together with other famous cooks to trade ideas and inveigh against the perils of America’s obsession with low-fat food. Butter and cream and meat, she argued were healthy in reasonable doses, because they brought pleasure.

Famous among friends for what her husband called her “sleight of tongues,” — “I didn’t have my glasses on when I was thinking,” she might say, or “It was so noisy I couldn’t hear myself eat” — Child often had a gentle put-down for political or culinary fads and pretensions. She dismissed nouvelle cuisine as “just that Paris PR game.”

Her husband, who died in 1994, was her greatest fan and supporter, and she often gave him credit for her success.Child was an active member of the International Association of Culinary Professionals and a co-founder of California’s American Institute of Wine and Food.

Julia Child, American cookery writer and television personality, was born on August 15, 1912. She died on August 12, 2004, aged 91.