Julia Child is a culinary legend whose remarkable career remains synonymous with great French cooking. However, food wasn’t a first or even second career for Child. “I was 32 when I started cooking,” she joked, “up until then, I just ate.”
Her "early" chef training consisted of buying several dozen cookbooks and valiantly recreating the complex recipes her husband favored. Consequently, dinner rarely got served before 10 P.M.! Fortunately, Paul Child proved an appreciative and enabling audience. A sophisticated man, he introduced Julia to the pleasures of food and France.
Julia's Le Cordon Bleu Years
“I just became passionate. I had been looking for a career all my life." Julia Child
By her own admission, Julia Child couldn’t “boil an egg” when she arrived in Paris. Nevertheless, she ended up in the City of Light’s most famous cooking school. A stranger to basic cooking terms, she found Le Cordon Bleu to be a “lesson in language as well as cookery.” Her 10-month course included hands-on cooking in the mornings and three-hour demonstration classes in the afternoons. Between the two, Julia rushed home to cook lunch for Paul. Evenings, she treated him to Cordon Bleu suppers. Today, Julia Child’s alma mater still signifies a love for fine food in the tradition of Auguste Escoffier, “the father of French cuisine"--for students from more than 70 countries.
How to Be Julia Child
“Life itself is the proper binge.” Julia Child
Together with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle (who both became renowned chefs), Julia Child published the book that made her fortune: Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Television, however, made her fame. The 6’2” “French Chef” with abundant energy and endless good humor, taught America to love French cooking.
Julia's Le Cordon Bleu mentors had noted her strength--an important trait when working with cast iron roasting pans and heavy metal skillets all day long--and the vitality with which she managed a kitchen. “You have to…think on your feet,” advises culinary school teacher Christopher Burgos. “There is stress, heat, hot oils, boiling water, sharp knives. You have to be organized and focused and have a real passion for it.” If there is a single great role model for culinary passion, it remains Julia Child.
Culinary School Newsflash! Women Now Welcome
“I think Julia opened cooking for women.” Gregory Usher, owner of Chalone Vineyard co- founder (with Child and others) of the American Institute of Wine and Food
Julia Child entered enrollment in Le Cordon Bleu with eleven men, all veterans funded by the G.I. bill. (Thanks to her wartime service in the Far East, Child, too, was on the G.I. bill.) By the 1970s, women still accounted for only 3-5% of the culinary student population. Today, women make up nearly half of culinary school entrants.
More female chefs “will bring a female flair to commercial cooking,” says Nation’s Restaurant News executive food editor Pamela Parseghian. She notes that women are naturals to run restaurant kitchens since they’re “skilled at multitasking and organizing.” “Women chefs can go places,” Child once remarked. World renowned chefs like Rachel Ray, and Alice Waters, and Grande Dames d'Escoffier like Marcella Hazan, Abigail Kirsch and Rosemary Kowalski have proved her right.
Cooking School as Career Change
“Once you have mastered a technique, you hardly need look at a recipe again.” Julia Child
Unlike Food Network bad boy Jamie Oliver or chef-restaurateur Bobby Flay, who conquered chef training in their teens, Julia Child was 37 years old when she strode through the doors of Paris’s Le Cordon Bleu. As a result, she remains both an icon of enormous culinary success and an exemplar of later in life culinary education. Now culinary students like 56-year-old former North Carolina business executive Bill Bingham can follow in Julia’s footsteps, choosing the culinary arts as a second career. In fact, culinary schools are courting career-shifters with shorter programs that help mature students out of the classroom and into the kitchen in months rather than years.
After Julia: Chefs in the World of Work
"You don't have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces--just good food from fresh ingredients." Julia Child
When culinary arts graduates enter the workplace, they’ll find salaries that vary as dramatically as chef school tuitions—from $11,000 for a fast food job to $50,000 for a career chef position, according to the 2005 National Survey published in Chef Educator Today. Where will the jobs be found? Everywhere, according to culinary school career development executive Donna Yena. “Demand for foodservice management and culinary graduates in general, across all sectors—hotels and corporate restaurant groups,” she says, “continues to be very, very high.” In fact, the National Restaurant Association estimates that the food industry will hire as many as 1.8 million new "Julias" by 2014. Those who want to follow in Childs' legendary footsteps can begin with a culinary education and enjoy a life in food.