| America owns a great debt to Julia Child, who brought the techniques and recipes of French cuisine to the United States, and made them easy and accessible to everyone.
She revolutionized American cuisine through her French cooking school, award-winning cookbooks and world-renowned television programs on PBS where she was infamous for making cooking mistakes on the air. She began with a sincere passion for good food and the pleasures of cooking. She studied in France in the 1950s with chef/friend Simone Beck. With the help of Louisette Bertolle, another dedicated food lover, they created a cooking school called L'Ecole des Trois Gourmandes and later, in 1961, completed their groundbreaking cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
Her book and the popular television show that followed made the mysteries of fancy French cuisine approachable, introducing gourmet ingredients, demonstrating culinary techniques, and most importantly, encouraging everyday "home chefs" to practice cooking as art, not to dread it as a chore.
One of her tips from Mastering the Art of French Cooking seems too easy: always read the recipe first, even if the dish is familiar to you. By visualizing each step you will know exactly what techniques, ingredients, time, and equipment are required and you will encounter no surprises. A trick in the kitchen was to put all of her cooking utensils and pans on the wall. She outlined the outside of them with marker so she’d know precisely where they needed to be put back. No time wasted! You can see her kitchen today at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C.
In Julia Child’s The Way to Cook, she gives master recipes with variations. For example, she has a very simple chowder recipe, and then gives variants and how to add them to create new and different soups. After the master chowder recipe, she tells you how to make clam chowder, corn chowder or crab and corn chowder. With these master French recipes, you can even try to make your own variations. French food recipes often use butter, garlic, mustard, cream, cheese, leeks, wine, game, beef and chicken.
As Julia Child would say, food in France is not just for nutrition, but for pleasure and to share with friends and families. She always urged everyone to have fun while in the kitchen and not to be afraid of making mistakes.
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