Julia Child opens her kitchen once again

NEW YORK (AP) _ The one TV trick Julia Child has learned since the first episode of ``The French Chef'' aired in 1963 is to always make a spare dish ahead of time, just in case that hollandaise

Wednesday, November 22nd 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

NEW YORK (AP) _ The one TV trick Julia Child has learned since the first episode of ``The French Chef'' aired in 1963 is to always make a spare dish ahead of time, just in case that hollandaise sauce doesn't quite work out.

``You want to have something that you can show the audience and say, `This is what it's supposed to look like, not like the one I just made,''' explains Child in that familiar singsong voice, which is accompanied by a hearty laugh.

Child, the original TV chef, seems to remember every kitchen mishap, including the collapsed desserts and the broken bowls, from her seven cooking series.

But she also remembers the successes, and those are the ones featured in ``Julia Child's Kitchen Wisdom,'' a two-hour retrospective that will air in December on PBS (check local listings).

``People like her for her shoot-from-the-hip truthfulness,'' says producer Geoffrey Drummond. His company, A La Carte Communications, also produced the Emmy award-winning series ``Julia and Jacques: Cooking at Home'' and ``Baking With Julia,'' her two most recent shows.

Drummond and his team screened about 350 of Child's 850 cooking-show episodes for the special, drawing on the memories of Child, her co-workers and devoted viewers to pick out the best moments.

``This is a retrospective, not a chronology that moves beginning to end, because she's still going,'' he explains.

Chefs Emeril Lagasse, Jacques Pepin and Alice Waters; Charles Gibson of ``Good Morning America''; and Martha Stewart are among the fans who appear in the special, praising Child for blazing the food-television trail they have all traveled.

``I started watching Julia not because I thought I'd be a chef but I was interested and she was funny,'' says Lagasse, one of the Food Network's top stars.

Child says she is flattered and grateful for her friends' kind words but doesn't see herself as a TV star.

``I'm a cook and a teacher. The use of the word `chef' is loose in this country, but a chef is supposed to be the chief of a kitchen. I don't have a kitchen to be chief of,'' she says. ``We called the first show `French Chef' because we wanted chefs to come on the show as guests, but that never happened.

``I'm a cook, which is an honorable word, who happens to go on TV sometimes.''

Yet Child sees some perks to having a television presence.

``It is very convenient in a restaurant to have people recognize you. You usually get a table,'' Child says in a tone that indicates she doesn't know there isn't a maitre d' in the country who would dare to keep her waiting 45 minutes.

``I might have been the first because I happened to appear at the right time. The Kennedys were in the White House and they had a French chef, which raised interest. And you could fly to Europe for the first time in a few hours instead of a few days. We were ready for some sort of food revolution.''

Child says she's thankful her shows aired on public television because it gave her the freedom to feature foods like tripe and brains, which might not have gone over well with commercial networks and their advertisers.

``I always wanted it to be passionately entertaining but it also would be technical. My audience was people who wanted to learn how to cook. I didn't have to worry about a gas-station attendant.''

However, she did turn her TV crew on to some of those more unusual foods.

After a taping, the food was always up for grabs. There would be flocks of people around if a dessert was served, and some crew members embraced fresh asparagus and artichokes, she recalls, but when the show featured snails, ``a great number of the crew seemed to disappear.''

At 88, Child says she probably won't do another TV series but that's not because the audience doesn't love her. During a recent taping of ``Emeril Live,'' the audience gave her a standing ovation and cheered her as she coached Lagasse on the proper cooking techniques for cheese souffle and apple tart.

Child, who splits her time between Cambridge, Mass., and Santa Barbara, Calif., says she doesn't have much time to watch television but she'll ``take a peek'' now and then at her old shows, which are still aired in reruns.

``Seeing a `French Chef' brings it all back again. Everyone, the camera crew, we were part of a family. We always had a good time.''

So did we.