Charlotte Snyder Turgeon, whose cookbooks helped popularize French cuisine in America, even before those of her college classmate Julia Child, died Sept. 22 in Amherst, Mass. She was 97.

She died of natural causes, said her son Charles, who said she had Alzheimer’s disease.

Turgeon worked on dozens of books with a number of emphases — healthy cooking, Scandinavian cooking, cooking for large numbers of people and seasonal cooking, among others — but her central interest was French food. Notably, she was an editor and translator of the first English version of the French cooking encyclopedia and culinary bible Larousse Gastronomique.

Her friendship with Child began at Smith College, where they were both in the class of 1934. But while her friend did not discover the joy of eating in Paris until the 1940s, Turgeon jumped right in. Marrying after college, she traveled to France, where her new husband, a college professor, was taking a sabbatical. At his suggestion she went to the Cordon Bleu cooking school in 1937.

“Before that, she would tell you she didn’t know how to boil an egg,” her son said.

Her first book came about after a dinner party she gave. A surprise guest had turned out to be a book editor who needed a substitute for a writer who had abandoned a project, the translation of a family cookbook first published in France in 1903. Turgeon took on the project, and the book, “Tante Marie’s Kitchen,” was published in 1949. Several more followed over the next decade, a time when Turgeon also became a regular reviewer of cookbooks for The New York Times.

Turgeon and Child were lifelong friends until Child’s death in 2004.