Julia Child made cooking entertainment. A well-bred, tall, ebullient woman who came to cooking in the middle of her life, Julia Child appeared on television for the first time in the early 1960s and inaugurated a new culinary age in America. Blessed with an ever-present sense of humor, a magnetic presence in front of the camera, and the ability to convey information in a thoroughly engaging manner, Julia Child spirited Americans away from their frozen foods and TV dinners and back into the kitchen, by showing them that cooking could be fun.

For someone who would become one of the most recognizable and influential women in the world, it took Julia Child a long time to find her true calling. She spent the first 40 years of her life in search of her passion—cooking—and when she found it, she was unrelenting in promoting...