The remembrances of Julia Child, who died last week at age 91, have emphasized the calm but direct way in which she revolutionized cooking by taking the mystery out of technique. She also expanded the American vision of flavor and ingredients and raised the bar for our expectations of texture and freshness.

In short, largely through Child’s influence the standards for the American meal had been rewritten by the end of the 1960s. By then, Child and company’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” first published in 1961, had logged numerous printings. For example, the copy I inherited from my mother came off the press in 1967 as part of the 14th. By the end of the decade American cooks who watched “The French Chef” on PBS had seen Child prepare any number of elegant dishes without a hint of pretension.

Outside the can

Julia Child made haute cuisine the people’s food. Those who came after her have not succeeded quite as well in uniting these two ideas, but hers is the example they try to follow.

Child’s impact had a lot to do with her moment in American cultural history. In the 1960s Child’s culinary ethic clashed head-on with the post-World War II mindset that saw something noble in a tuna casserole. In those days, when canned and prepared ingredients were touted as the American way, cooks felt clever using Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup as the all-purpose ingredient. Then Child demonstrated that a better-tasting cream and mushroom sauce could be made simply and quickly from scratch. In fact, a whole list of sauces quickly found their way into many families’ menus.

She took the fear out of baking and taught even the most inexperienced cooks to make everything from pie dough to puff pastry. Somewhere along the line a good crusty French-style loaf elbowed Wonder Bread off many dinner tables. Her 1996 cookbook “Baking with Julia” has spent enough time open on my kitchen counter that many of the pages are coated with a film of flour.

New way of cooking

Child also introduced the American palate to herbs and spices. Suddenly, white pepper and bay leaf were kitchen staples, fresh parsley became more than a garnish and grocers were expected to stock fresh garlic.

Simply put, food looked and tasted different after Child transformed the American kitchen. I clearly remember a sort of tectonic shift in my mother’s cooking during this period. A souffle appeared on the dinner table every now and then, a whiff of red wine could be discerned in beef dishes, salmon mousse turned up for special occasions and Gourmet magazine started arriving in the mailbox.

What made Child so endearing — more to the point, what made American cooks trust her approach to cooking — was her humanness. Along the way, she committed enough spills and on-air boo-boos to make even the sloppiest cook feel comfortable with experimentation.

Her technique, though sometimes unorthodox, also included a degree of daring practicality that more tentative cooks hadn’t thought possible. People were caught off guard when Child introduced the blow torch as the means to caramelize the top of a dessert, but it made sense. Mini-blow torches now are sold among kitchen implements.

Child was unfazed in her love of rich food by the low-fat, low-cholesterol campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s. She never wavered in her commitment to butter and cream or in her insistence that bread and dessert have a place on the table. The key to eating well, she maintained, was to practice moderation. We need not deny ourselves the pleasures of eating or feel the need to watch our weight if we take small helpings, don’t go back for seconds and don’t snack between meals.

Child’s recipe for good eating and good living is her legacy.