Julia Child Cooking Quotations

It's so beautifully arranged on the plate - you know someone's fingers have been all over it.

I was 32 when I started cooking; up until then, I just ate.

I still feel that French cooking is the most important in the world, one of the few that has rules. If you follow the rules, you can do pretty well.

In the 1970s we got nouvelle cuisine, in which a lot of the old rules were kicked over. And then we had cuisine minceur, which people mixed up with nouvelle cuisine but was actually fancy diet cooking.

I think every woman should have a blowtorch.

Always start out with a larger pot than what you think you need.

The best way to execute French cooking is to get good and loaded and whack the hell out of a chicken.

the more experience you have, the more interesting cooking is because you know what can happen to the food. In the beginning you can look at a chicken and it doesn't mean much, but once you have done some cooking you can see in that chicken a parade of things you will be able to create.

...no one is born a great cook, one learns by doing.

To be a good cook you have to have a love of the good, a love of hard work, and a love of creating.

The more you know, the more you can create. There's no end to imagination in the kitchen.

Cooking is one failure after another, and that's how you finally learn.

Fake food -- I mean those patented substances chemically flavored and mechanically bulked out to kill the appetite and deceive the gut -- is unnatural, almost immoral, a bane to good eating and good cooking.

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

Never apologize for your cooking.

I would far prefer to have things happen as they naturally do, such as the mousse refusing to leave the mold, the potatoes sticking to the skillet, the apple charlotte slowly collapsing. One of the secrets of cooking is to learn to correct something if you can, and bear with it if you cannot.

If you're afraid of butter, use cream.

Until I discovered cooking, I was never really interested in anything.

Mastering the Art of French Cooking... doesn't mean it has to be fancy cooking, although it can be as elaborate as you wish.

Eating is the secret to good cooking.

I think careful cooking is love, don't you?

You have to eat to cook. You can't be a good cook and be a noneater. I think eating is the secret to good cooking.

Cooking well doesn't mean cooking fancy.

One of the secrets, and pleasures, of cooking is to learn to correct something if it goes awry; and one of the lessons is to grin and bear it if it cannot be fixed.

Good french cooking cannot be produced by a zombie cook.

The problem for cookery-bookery writers like me is to understand the extent of our readers' experience. I hope have solved that riddle in my books by simply telling everything. The experienced cook will know to skip through the verbiage, but the explanations will be there for those who still need them.

Cooking may be a creative art, but it's also a wonderful full-time hobby.

Remember, you are all alone in the kitchen and no one can see you.

You don’t spring into good cooking naked. You have to have some training. You have to learn how to eat.

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

Cooking hasn't yet been accepted as the art form it is. It should be on the level with any of the other art forms.