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Results so far:
| Child | 62% | 45 votes | Total: 73 votes | |
| Pepin | 38% | 28 votes |
Child
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Add to FavoritesMy reasons for voting for Julia Child are simple. I learned to bake "Pan de Mie" from her cookbook "From Julia Child's Kitchen". Thanks to Julia, I overcame my fear of bread making. I never had to rely on a bread machine. I never had to suffer "rope" infections or yeast infections. From my first effort, with careful measuring and reading and re-reading, my bread had the ultimate rise and the ultimate crumb. I have her book with me now, its pages crusted with flour and stiff from age.
Her book has survived my college career, my career as an officer in the Air Force, my loves and losses, my travels to Europe and my many moves to many households. That book falls open to that exact and reassuring page where the bread recipes are to be found.
Over the decades, I have expanded her recipe to serve 40 and contracted it to serve just me. I have added fruit, made it sweeter, and made it richer (with evaporated milk to replace some of the one percent milk that I use). I have proofed the yeast, smashed the butter, and formed the Baps exactly as she instructed for over 30 years.
I watched her cooking demonstrations on the Public Broadcasting Network and learned to love the art of cooking. She was the first to solve the mysteries that my mother would not solve. She was the first to give the warnings and to add the codicils, exclusions therefrom and inclusions thereto, as if she were writing the deeds to property.
To a California native and a country girl, she was a strange creature. She was oddly formidable, yet comfortable at the same time. Her speech patterns were strange. Her delight in root vegetables and boiled foods was dismaying. Her delight in butter and alcohol made her human. Her size made her as formidable as my mother and her sisters. Her substance made her almost as profound as my mother and her sisters.
I have to admit that it was challenging to decide between her and Jacques Pepin. But my decision was made when I remembered the historical broadcast of the Julia and Jacques show. Their bickering will stay with me forever. Julia could not tolerate the use of so much garlic. Jacques could not tolerate the use of so much butter. I love both, preferably together and with crusty bread. Bread and butter won out over garlic and olive oil.
I have to admit that Jacques Pepin stole my heart when I recalled his preference for well cooked fowl, not that undercooked travesty that the young chefs are pushing.
But Julia was the first, and she shall be the foremost to this world class eater and amateur cook.
Bon appetit!
Learn more about this author, Elizabeth M. Young.
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Pepin
Pepin hands down! Being french and indeed having written my own Cookbook in concert with my family.. "Grandmere Awesome Family Cookbook." I think I can tell you that by the very nature of things Pepin is a Natural whereas Mme Child, was self made and tended to make things too complicated. She was however and excellent business woman and it might explain why she lasted so long on T.V. She also didn't have a french accent so she was able to be better understood by the T.V vievers.
This might also explain why so few great cooks like the most famous of all Paul Bocuse , never made it big in our country. Yet when He came on he , like Jacques Pepin, he made everything look appetising and somehow looking at him , you knew right away this was a CHEF! Indeed his family had been in the restaurant business since 1765! Cooking is thought as one of the great art in France and is never taken lightly, even tho they have tried "cuisine minceur" without much sucess, for even as Paul Bocuse himself said about it: "Life is too short for cuisine minceur and for diet. Dietic meals are like an opera without the orchestra."
When you go on the Cooking TV channels today, it is one succession of chefs after another. One making it look easier then the other..not realizing that cooking is not about how easy it can be made, but how good it should taste! It is sad to see that eating has become just another part of our busy life, with no pleasure taking in preparing a meal and thus eating it, it might also explain the epidemic of overweight people we now have, even children in our schools! who most likely eat half their meals in fast food joints. Sad indeed.
Just to give you the importance that Chefs have in France..when the late Fernand Point of the restaurant "La Pyramide" in Vienne a small city outside of Lyon died..The president of France attended his funerals, it was even shown on television. and in the kitchen on top of the unlighted and scrubbed stove. laid the tallest chef's hat that Mr Point had worn all his life. It was said by the way that American clients sometimes reserved their tables at La pyramide months in advance! and thus we go back to Madame Child, unlike Jacques Pepin, she never owned a restaurant anywhere, the ultimate taste for a chef's excellence.
In fact she took herself much too seriously, when reading her life story written by her nephew after she died, I was amused to see that she had said, that after she became famous on T.V. she tried to avoid people eyes so as not to be aknowledged!Oh my my this would never happen with Jacques Pepin..non non non!
Learn more about this author, Pierrette Komarek.
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