Julia Child and The Art of French Cuisine

Today I want to write about a woman who is a role model for me. If you know her story, you will immediately understand my tastes and my style in the kitchen.

I would like to introduce Julia Child with a quote: “You can cook if you put your mind to it” was her motto (which also inspired the animated film Ratatouille). Julia Child was an influential chef and cookbook author, and the person responsible for introducing French cuisine to the American public through her cookbook “Mastering the Art of French Cooking ” (definitely one of the most popular books in our store), as well as through her popular television show “The French Chef”.

Julia Child also influenced the name of our project. The name Claudia&Julia was inspired by the movie Julie&Julia, which depicts 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 my husband Jordi and I wanted to give to our future daughter. We had talked about it thousands of times. But fate had other plans for us and now we are parents to 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!

Let's start at the beginning of your story:

Julia was the eldest 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 she enlisted in the Office of Strategic Services in Washington.

So far, and considering the time in which Julia Child lived, her career is impressive. Well, we have only just begun to tell her story.

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

She joined the Cercle des Gourmets, a women's club, where she met Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholie, with whom she decided to write a French cookbook for Americans. It should also be noted that at that time there were no French recipe books translated into English, so Julia Child was a pioneer and the link between two cultures as far apart geographically as gastronomically. In 1951, the three friends founded the French cooking school for residents of the United States 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 made her television debut with her show “The French Chef,” which was a ratings success.

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

Julia and her book, The Art of French Cooking

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

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

In the book, she goes into great detail about the most suitable utensils for each type of cooking (incidentally, Julia was a great lover of Le Creuset utensils). She recommends "not skipping the basic instructions" and devoting oneself to cooking with determination, because mastering it "is a matter of practice." "My goal is to teach people how to cook," she says, and she pursues this with more than 500 recipes in which "the most important ingredient is the love of cooking itself."

Love that begins with the product - he already warned in 1961 about the tastelessness of fast-fattening chicken - and culminates in the detail of delicate and elegant presentations, so much to the taste of France.

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

Her "exquisite cooking", as she described it, educated her native country, where she said that "in the fifties people ate in any way". This role as ambassador of French cuisine earned her the Legion of Honour from the country where she was born as a cook.

Julia Child's Recipes

Julia popularized a large number of cooking recipes. On our blog you will find some of the most popular ones:

• Cheese soufflé (how to make an authentic soufflé)
• Quiche Lorraine (surely one of the most popular quiches in history)
• Creamed spinach (Julia's original recipe, with some notes on the cream used)
• Quiche à la tomato, niçoise (different from the quiches we are used to, without cream)
• Coq au vin (chicken in wine)
• Boeuf bourgingnos (a classic slow-cooked stew)