KANSAS CITY, Mo. – In an age of celebrity chefs and weekend cooks, Julia Child represented all that we are not.

Her life was one of hard work and seemingly quaint homespun adages. She believed in practice until perfect. She called for moderation in all things. Anything worth having was worth working for.

As the pioneer of TV cooking shows, she whisked her way into our living rooms and into our hearts and minds as public television’s “The French Chef.” Child turned our attention to a culture that had already developed a cuisine and tried to convince us that good food need not be time-consuming, expensive or intimidating.

In her unself-conscious, self-effacing way, she was the consummate maker of consomme when most American women were serving up casseroles topped with cream of mushroom soup and calling it chic.

Yet nothing in her early life could have predicted the impact she would have on the food world.

In fact, the food of her childhood she recalled as somewhat unremarkable. “We had very good, plain food, and I was very hungry so I ate everything,” she said in a 1994 interview with The Kansas City Star to promote the local chapter of the American Institute of Wine and Food, an organization she founded.

Her now classic “Mastering the Art of French Cooking Vol. One,” published by Knopf, immediately spawned a legion of gourmet groupies who literally cooked their way through the book. More books and TV shows were to follow, with Child setting the pace for a cooking revolution that has left Americans more aware of the bounty of their own cuisine yet often ambivalent about cooking it.

Ironically, says Chris Kimball, editor of Cook’s Illustrated , a technique-based magazine based in Boston that has spawned its own public television shows, Julia Child stood for all the things we were throwing out the window – very rapidly.

“Julia is really the antithesis of Rachel Ray,” Kimball says, referring to the Food Network’s current golden girl whose M.O. is cooking without the work.

“I have a very contrary view of Julia,” he says. “I think she showed up at exactly the wrong time. That was when there was a huge exodus going on in cooking, and she was all about getting back to the whole notion that you have to learn it step by step … She believed cooking and life are not easy. That you really have to practice.”

So why has she become, in life and death, a cultural icon?

“When Dan Aykroyd did her on “Saturday Night Live,’ that was the moment she transferred over from food maven to cultural icon,” says Kimball.

Child found the episode that spoofed her mannerisms and high trilling voice a stitch. “We just happened to turn it on by mistake. It was hilarious, and we were rolling on the floor,” Child told The Star during her 1994 interview.

And that’s probably because she knew she had done the work to earn her celebrity.

Yet Kimball notes Child never used her fame for anything other than trying to educate. She didn’t have a chain of restaurants or a line of cookware. “She never compromised, and she never sold out. She wasn’t there to make a buck,” he says. “She never wanted the mantle of celebrity; she wanted a platform.”

When Child moved from her longtime home in Cambridge, Mass., to California in 2001, she donated the contents of her kitchen to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. A year ago I was in Washington, D.C., and with another food editor friend, we made our pilgrimage to Julia’s shrine.

When I peered through the Plexiglas portholes from the pantry, I was amazed at the extraordinary ordinariness of the kitchen. The 14-by-20-foot space with its commercial six-burner Garland range was a far cry from today’s designer kitchens with sleek granite countertops, Viking ranges and SubZero refrigerators.

The Smithsonian curators noted that certain aspects of her kitchen showed “signs of a curatorial mind.” Child’s famous pegboard that husband Paul designed for her is oddly a reminder of just how a kitchen like hers captures a moment in time that is fading fast.

“I’m very proud indeed that the Smithsonian wants my kitchen,” Child said at the unveiling. “Through this gift to the Smithsonian, if I can influence Americans to make it a real family room and a real part of their lives, I have succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.”