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The new series will bear little resemblance to the gray, grainy, slapdash shows that made Child a kitchen word: no more dropped eggs, lumps in the sauce or uncarvable suckling pigs. Dinner has a slick new format, a grant of about $1 million from Polaroid, one of her previous underwriters, and, of course, mouth-watering color. Instead of concentrating on the making of a single dish, each 30-minute segment will include the preparation of a dinner for ten, an interview with a master chef and a winemaker, a "gathering" sequence in which Julia seeks out her raw materials at their source, be it a crab boat or cheesemaker, and shots of the actual cocktail party and dinner. On one of the first shows, Julia visits a chicken farm, and Austrian-born Chef Wolfgang Puck of West Hollywood's famed Spago continental restaurant concocts a dish called Chicken Winged Victory. On another, Executive Chef Louis Evans of New Orleans' Pontchartrain Hotel prepares crayfish bisque with live crustaceans from home.
The show's setting is a handsome, Colonial-style mansion outside Santa Barbara that has been leased for six months. Says an associate: "The idea is to have fun together, and the show will be fun too." The house has been equipped with what, even for Julia, is the dream kitchen, with two huge central islands and a six-burner Wolf gas stove. "If she turned on all her electric appliances at once, there'd be a blackout from here to Boston," says Russell Morash, the executive producer who has worked with Child for 20 years. (Morash also produces public television's widely acclaimed This Old House and Victory Garden series.) A perfectionist who will go through four crates of pineapples to get a one-minute paring sequence right, the producer teams smoothly but uncompromisingly with his star, even to working out her lines, which are all unscripted. (Sample Juliana: "A recipe is an attractive idea, not a sacrosanct monument." "If you get it wrong, you'll do it better next time. If you remember what you did wrong.")
Under the most trying circumstances, Child shows no sign of strain or temper. At 70, an unstooped 6 ft. 2 in., she strides and chops as energetically as the Smith College basketball player she once was—though to stay at 170 Ibs. she is a periodic Scarsdale Dieter. Out to stalk the wild mushroom, equipped with topee, stout stick, a yellow slicker and blue New Balance sneakers, she slogged through viscous mud that bogged down her party's four-wheel-drive Bronco, gathering a basketful of the yellow, peppery, precious ($8 per Ib.) chanterelles (Cantharellus cibarius) that had been prodigally "planted" on the scene that morning.