How to Sell Broccoli

She picks up a rolling pin that could only have been made from a sequoia and crunches it down on a slab of cold butter. She lifts up a cleaver and amputates the outer wings of a goose, with a couple of chops that sound like cannon fire. She pops a chestnut into her mouth to see if it is done. She smiles and says between swallows, "Welcome to The French Chef. I'm Julia Child."

On educational TV in 13 cities, including Boston, New York, Washington and San Francisco, Julia Child, 51, is re-educating the misguided masses who think that French cooking is all ruffles and truffles and dazzling confectionary architecture beyond the tactile comprehension of the ordinary citizen who buys her staples at the A. & P. Her message is that French cooking, by and large, is merely the best, simplest, and most satisfying way ever devised in the Western world to handle basic food materials.

Prunes & Poisson. Julia Child learned her own lesson relatively late in life. Born in California, she went to Smith and did not know a choucroute garnie from a pate en croute until she began living in Paris in 1948, where her husband was attached to the U.S. Embassy. Having no children and little to do, Mrs. Child began to study the cuisine of France under a chef who once worked with Auguste Escoffier. Soon she had established her own cooking school--Ecole des Trois Gourmandes--with two French women as partners, who still run it. After twelve years of preparation, the three of them published in 1961 a cookbook called Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

To amateur cooks, having Julia Child on TV is as rewarding as it would be, say, to amateur painters to have Andrew Wyeth giving a weekly drill in sketching. She delivers her points with a kind of muddleheaded nonchalance that invites others to feel that if she can do it, anybody can. As she putters over items like roast goose with a stuffing of pate-filled prunes or a simple mousseline de poisson a la marechale, she mutters archaically about the "icebox," refers to the ventral area of the bird as its "chest," advises using "a few good whaps of pepper." She even says "eek" on occasion, when things go wrong; but nothing really troubles her. If a filling drools out onto a baking sheet or artichoke leaves uncooperatively start to flop out of shape, she just scoops and shoves until natural perfection is unnaturally assembled. Voila!

Misfires on the Floor. Mrs. Child now lives in Cambridge, Mass., and her TV program is taped in the display kitchen of a local electric company, where she puts in about 19 hours of preparation for each half-hour show. If she is going to flute a mushroom on the air, she has to flute one in rehearsal too. For dishes that take time, she cooks to various stages beforehand, so that she can compress an entire process of, say, four hours, into 30 minutes. By the end of a show about the preparation of one duck, for example, there will be a duck in the oven, another freshly stuffed on the counter, a stand-by duck in the ice box, and perhaps a misfired duck on the floor.

She provokes a rating more accurate than Nielsen ever measured: after a Julia Child program, there is always a run on local stores. If broccoli is her subject, broccoli is immediately sold out for 200 miles around.

Meanwhile, back in the studio kitchen, Mrs. Child, her husband, the cameramen, the director, crew and two volunteer dishwashers sit down to eat the subject matter. Is she overweight? No, magically, she is slender as a scallion.

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