Pear and Gorgonzola Flatbread

Julia Child’s approach to cooking — using real butter, real cream, real ingredients in appropriate quantities rather than the low-fat substitutes that became fashionable in the decades after her peak influence — has been increasingly vindicated by nutritional research that has revised the understanding of dietary fat developed in the 1970s and 1980s. The full-fat dairy and the moderate use of butter and olive oil that characterize classical French cooking, which Child championed, align closely with the Mediterranean dietary pattern now recognized as one of the most health-supportive available. Child herself, who ate with genuine pleasure and without dietary anxiety throughout her life, lived to ninety-one — a biographical data point that she would have appreciated being noted.