Julia Child and The Art of French Cuisine

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

In addition, Julia Child also influenced the name of our project. The name Claudia&Julia was inspired by the movie 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 discussed 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 do not rule out having a little Julia one day). How do you see this is a special post for me!

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

Let's start at the beginning of his story:

Julia was the eldest of three children and after graduating from the art 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.

Until now and for the time that Julia Child lived, her career is impressive. Well, we have only just begun with his story.

She married Paul Cushing Child, a member of American diplomacy. He was the one who introduced her to French cuisine. She grew up savoring the typical beef of the region, when she arrived in Paris she fell in love with the refined style of the local gastronomy. Their passion for French cuisine and the refusal of this imperious woman to remain a renegade at home as a housewife, meant that after some diplomatic adventures she was able to study 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. In addition, it must 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 as far apart geographically as 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 made her television debut for the first time with her show "The French Chef" being a ratings success.

Julia brought the complexity of French cuisine to the American ones, created a style, a philosophy and even a spirit. It wasn't just French cooking and its traditional method, it was his passion, the details, his way of talking 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 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 cooking " you can get it in our new Claudia&Julia cookbooks 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 yourself to cooking, 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 warned in 1961 of how tasteless fast-broiler chicken is- and culminates in the detail of delicate and elegant presentations, so much to the Gallic taste.

His is a classic recipe book: bouillabaisse, quiches, soufflés, crêpes, stews, mousses, pâtés and tarts such as tatin or charlotte, which opened the doors of television for him, where he debuted with "The French Chef" on NBC in 1962 and continued to promote 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 his typical Bourguignon stew served in a white Le Creuset cocotte .

Her "caring 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 an ambassador for French cuisine earned her a decoration with the Legion of Honor by the country that saw her born as a cook.