Public Readings - JULIA CHILD DOODLE: Google tips its toque with art to celebrate late TV chef’s 100th birthday. Aug. 15 is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Julia Child, the iconic TV chef who made French cooking accessible to many Americans — becoming a jolly presence in our living rooms and an inspiration in our kitchens.
Google is celebrating her centenary with a colorful homepage Doodle that displays the array of her talents, from poultry to dessert — with the top of the Google “G” sitting in the first pot.
Child, who was born in Pasadena, died in nearby Santa Barbara just two days shy of her 92nd birthday.
Beyond her TV series and cookbooks, Child is perhaps best known in wider popular culture for prominent depictions of her: by Dan “Save the Liver!” Aykroyd in the ‘70s on “Saturday Night Live” (Aykroyd being about the same chld height as Child: 6-foot-2); and by Meryl Streep in Nora Ephron’s “Julie & Julia” from 2009 — a role for which she received a best-actress Oscar nomination.
And then there’s the cultural attraction that is Child’s own famed Massachusetts kitchen. The Post’s Bonnie S. Benwick writes that the Smithsonian — which “created one of the National Museum of American History’s most beloved exhibits” out of the chef’s authentic contents — is reopening the kitchen for the anniversarsy, where the Hall of Agriculture once stood.
Also to celebrate the anniversary, PBS Digital Studios auto-tuned another of its longtime icons — on the heels of having put Mr. Rogers and Bob Ross to an auto-tune: