Julia wields a mallet on The French Chef, circa 1970. Right, Dan Aykroyd as Julia in the Saturday Night Live skit, 1978. From Everett Collection; by Owen Franken/Corbis.

The French Chef officially premiered on February 11, 1963, and ran through 1973 (Julia did many other television shows, and won three Emmys). As the show caught on, a whole cult of Julia stories sprang up. That dropped potato cake soon became, in the retelling, a dropped chicken, a roast, a whole salmon on the floor, which she picked up while saying (not), “Your guests will never know.” And because Julia used wine in her cooking and toasted viewers at the show’s end, people thought she was drunk on-camera, not knowing her glass of wine was really Gravy Master mixed with water. In 1978, Saturday Night Live presented a Grand Guignol spoof of The French Chef, co-written by Al Franken and starring Dan Aykroyd as Julia, who slices off her thumb while making poularde demi-désossée, bleeds copiously, and then passes out crying, “Save the liver.” The skit is still aired today and still funny, a testament to Julia’s continuing stature in the culture. (She herself loved the skit, and kept a videotape of it under the television in her kitchen.)

In the 10 years that The French Chef aired, Julia’s subtext was not out of sync with the era’s counterculture or its overt message of psychosexual liberation. Julia wanted her viewers to loosen up, get physical, not with controlled substances but with food, not through a glass darkly but at table, with delight. Hers was a civilized sensuality, the integration of the senses that she’d learned in France. This is why her following was legion—Julia’s appetite appealed to young and old alike.

“Americans didn’t come over on the Mayflower trusting food,” says Laura Shapiro. “Julia’s whole thing about food was that you had to trust it. That, to me, is her great message. Getting your hands into it—touch it, breathe it, smell it, live it. If we as Americans have overcome to any degree our fear of food, our weird neurotic thing about the body, it starts with Julia.”

“I felt very related to her,” says Judith Jones, “because we were both released from very traditional, middle-class American values. And it was France that released us. She wanted to bring this message to America—that we were still steeped in the Puritan attitude towards food, and what the food industry had done to make us feel that food was not for the modern woman. It’s what an artist does: you want to express it so that you awaken sensibility. And she really did that.”

“Her favorite point in her life was the years in France, that period of discovery and awakening,” says Alex Prud’homme. “As she said, ‘I felt myself opening like a flower.’ It was a lovely phrase. And I think one of the reasons that—this is my personal theory—she wanted to write all these recipes down and transmit them to Americans is it was a form of distilling experience, almost like a short story or a poem. She used the recipe as a way of talking about France and its values, which are so different from ours. You know, doing things correctly and taking the time to get it right, and to work hard and learn your technique, and also to have fun.”

Paul Child died at the age of 92, in 1994. Ten years later, in 2004, Julia Child died two days short of her 92nd birthday. In the last year of her life she suffered knee surgeries, kidney failure, and a stroke. On August 12, when her doctor called to say she had an infection and would need to be hospitalized, she chose not to be treated. The meal that turned out to be her last, before she went to sleep and never woke up, was *Mastering’*s recipe for French onion soup.

“Her birthday was August 15,” says Alex Prud’homme. “And we had people from all over the country and around the world coming for this big party in Santa Barbara for her 92nd birthday, and she died two days beforehand. And I’ve always wondered, Did she do that on purpose? We’ll never know. But it would be a very typical Julia move, knowing that all her favorite people were coming from all over, and wouldn’t this be a nice moment for her to, as she would say, ‘slip off the raft.’”

Did they still come?

“Everybody came. And it turned into a sort of three-day Irish wake, everybody telling stories and laughing and crying and eating and drinking. I think she felt very lucky to live the life she did. I think she loved it.”

Laura Jacobs is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.