Aug. 15 would have been the 100th birthday of Julia Child, the doyenne of the culinary world who died in 2004.

You could call her the original top chef — she not only deciphered French cooking techniques, but brought them to us through TV.

Child didn’t find her calling until she was in her late 30s and living in Paris. There, she enrolled in the famed Le Cordon Bleu cooking school and later joined a cooking club, where she met Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck, Child’s coauthors of the groundbreaking “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” (Knopf, $40).