Julia Child Quotes

Julia Child offers warm, humorous advice on cooking, wine and the joy of indulgent food.

27 quotes

1. A cookbook is only as good as its worst recipe.

2. The only time to eat diet food is while you're waiting for the steak to cook.

3. Everything in moderation, including moderation.

4. I enjoy cooking with wine, sometimes I even put it in the food I'm cooking.

5. I was thirty-two when I started cooking; up until then, I just ate.

6. If you're afraid of butter, use cream.

7. Life itself is the proper binge.

8. Noncooks think it's silly to invest two hours' work in two minutes' enjoyment; but if cooking is evanescent, well, so is the ballet.

9. The best way to execute french cooking is to get good and loaded and whack the hell out of a chicken. Bon appetit.

10. Usually, one's cooking is better than one thinks it is.

11. I had my first French meal and I never got over it. It was just marvelous. We had oysters and a lovely dry white wine. And then we had one of those lovely scalloped dishes and the lovely, creamery buttery sauce. Then we had a roast duck and I don't know what else.

12. If you are going to flip something, you must have the courage of your convictions.

13. My father was in real estate, banking, and land management. As family life, it was very conventional, happy, and comfortable. We weren't wealthy, but we were well-off.

14. I never feel lonely in the kitchen. Food is very friendly.

15. We are so bemused by our own petard, that we are unable to look at things objectively.

16. If you're buying tomatoes pick them up and smell them-they should have a lovely perfume. They need to be kept at fifty degrees or above, particularly during the growing season, because that's when they develop their flavor.

17. The perfect dressing is essential to the perfect salad, and I see no reason whatsoever for using a bottled dressing, which may have been sitting on the grocery shelf for weeks, even months - even years.

18. I think one of the terrible things today is that people have this deathly fear of food: fear of eggs, say, or fear of butter. Most doctors feel that you can have a little bit of everything.

19. The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you've got to have a what-the-hell attitude.

20. In the 1960s, you could eat anything you wanted, and of course, people were smoking cigarettes and all kinds of things, and there was no talk about fat and anything like that, and butter and cream were rife. Those were lovely days for gastronomy, I must say.

21. I was kind of an innocent hayseed from a middle-class, utterly nonintellectual background.

22. There are only four great arts: music, painting, sculpture, and ornamental pastry- architecture being perhaps the least banal derivative of the latter.

23. Many of the delicious soups you eat in French homes and little restaurants are made just this way, with a leek-and-potato base to which leftover vegetables or sauces and a few fresh items are added.

24. Learn how to cook! That's the way to save money. You don't save it buying hamburger helpers, and prepared foods; you save it by buying fresh foods in season or in large supply, when they are cheapest and usually best, and you prepare them from scratch at home. Why pay for someone else's work, when if you know how to do it, you can save all that money for yourself?

25. Just like becoming an expert in wine–you learn by drinking it, the best you can afford–you learn about great food by finding the best there is, whether simply or luxurious. The you savor it, analyze it, and discuss it with your companions, and you compare it with other experiences.

26. Cooking was taken with such seriousness in France that even ordinary chefs were proud of their profession. That's what appealed to me.

27. In department stores, so much kitchen equipment is bought indiscriminately by people who just come in for men's underwear.