Julia Child Quotes

Good french cooking cannot be produced by a zombie cook.

Come February, all of our off time was spent composing letters for the hundreds of valentines we sent out around the globe. Valentine cards had become a tradition of ours, born of the fact that we could never get ourselves organized in time to send out Christmas cards. With our ever-enlarging network of family, friends, and Foreign Service colleagues, we found that Paul’s hand-designed valentine cards — usually a woodcut or drawing, sometimes a photograph — were a nice way to keep in touch. But they could be labor-intensive. One year’s design was a faux stained-glass window, with five colors in it, each of which had to be hand-painted in watercolors — which took hours. For 1956, we decided to lighten up by doing something different: we posed ourselves for a self-timed valentine photo in the bathtub, wearing nothing but artfully placed soap bubbles.

If you're afraid of butter, use cream.

As Therese Asche used to say “A house without a cat is like a day without sunshine.

If you drop the lamb, just pick it up. Who's going to know?

I am chewing my nails off to the elbow, like Noel Coward’s lady.

You'll never know everything about anything, especially something you love.

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

I'm afraid that surprise, shock, and regret is the fate of authors when they finally see themselves on the page.

My sievelike mind didn't want to lock away dates and details; it wanted to float and meander. If I mixed all those facts and these up with a little gelatine and egg white, I wondered, would they stick together better?

...The more I learned the more I realized how very much one has to know before one is in-the-know at all.

A party without a cake is just a meeting.

Ooh, those lovely roasted, buttery French chickens, they were so good and chickeny!

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

Nothing is too much trouble if it turns out the way it should. Good results require that one take time and care.