Today I want to write about a woman who is a reference for me. If you know its history, you will immediately understand what my tastes and style are in the kitchen.

In addition, Julia Child also influenced the name of our project. For the name Claudia&Julia we were inspired by the film Julie&Julia which represents the parallel life between Julia Child and the cooking blogger Julie (who recreated all her recipes in 365 days). My name is Claudia and Julia was the name that my husband Jordi and I wanted to give our future daughter. We had talked about it thousands of times. But fate had other plans for us and now we are the parents of three beautiful boys but no girls (although we don't rule out having a little Julia one day). As you can see this is a special post for me!

I would like to introduce Julia Child with a phrase: "You can cook if you put your mind to it" that was her maxim (which also inspired the cartoon movie Ratatouille). This great woman introduced French gastronomy to American society with her book of techniques and recipes “The Art of French Cuisine”.

Let's start at the beginning of his story:

Julia was the oldest of three children and after graduating from high school in California she moved to New York, where she worked in advertising. During World War II he enlisted in the Office of Strategic Services in Washington.

So far and for the time that Julia Child lived, her career is impressive. Well, we've only just begun with his story yet.

She married Paul Cushing Child, a member of the American diplomacy. He was the one who introduced her to French cooking. She grew up savoring the typical beef of the region, when she arrived in Paris she fell in love with the refined style of local gastronomy. The passion of both for French cuisine and the refusal of this imperious woman to stay renegade at home like a housewife, meant that after some diplomatic adventures she was able to pursue her training at the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu cooking academy.

She entered Le Cercle des Gourmets, a women's club, and there she met Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholie, with whom she decided to write a French cookbook for Americans. It should also be added that at that time there was no book of French recipes translated into English, with which Julia Child was a pioneer and the link between two cultures that were so far apart geographically and gastronomically. In 1951 the three friends founded the French cooking school for United States residents in Paris: "L'Ecole des Trois Gourmandes" Until the Child couple had to return to the United States and move to Cambridge, Massachusetts.

She wrote for the Boston Globe and debuted for the first time on television with her show "The French Chef" being a success with audiences.

Julia brought the complexity of French cuisine closer to the Americans, creating a style, a philosophy and even a spirit. It wasn't just French cuisine and its traditional method, it was his passion, the details, his way of moving, speaking and above all: enjoying food.

Julia and her book, The Art of French Cuisine

Martín Berasategui and David de Jorge point out in the prologue of "The Art of French Cuisine" that it is "a compendium of the perfect hedonist" and a "heartfelt declaration of love for food", bringing together "the key elements of great cuisine of the West”

If you want Julia Child's book " The art of French cuisine " you can get it in our new Claudia&Julia cookbook section.

In the book, she delves into the recommendations on the most suitable utensils for each type of cooking (by the way, Julia was a great lover of Le Creuset utensils). He recommends "not skipping the basic instructions" and dedicating oneself to the kitchen, because mastering it "is a matter of practice". "My goal is to teach cooking," he says, and he pursues it with more than 500 recipes in which "the most important ingredient is the love of cooking itself."

Love that begins with the product -already warning in 1961 about the insipidness of fast-growing chicken- and culminates in the details of delicate and elegant presentations, so much to the Gallic taste.

His is a classic cookbook: bouillabaisse, quiches, soufflés, crêpes, stews, mousses, pâtés and cakes such as the tatin or charlotte, which opened the doors of television for him, where he made his debut with "The French Chef" on NBC in 1962 and continued to spread French cuisine until 2000, four years before his death, at the age of 92. He also published more than a dozen books. In the photograph we can see their typical Bourguignon stew served in a white Le Creuset cocotte .

Her "careful cuisine", as she defined it, gastronomically educated her native country, of which she said that "in the fifties you ate in any way". That role as ambassador of French cuisine earned her the award of the Legion of Honor by the country where she was born as a cook.