Julia Child quotes:

Because of media hype and woefully inadequate information, too many people nowadays are deathly afraid of their food, and what does fear of food do to the digestive system? I am sure that an unhappy or suspicious stomach, constricted and uneasy with worry, cannot digest properly.

Animals that we eat are raised for food in the most economical way possible, and the serious food producers do it in the most humane way possible. I think anyone who is a carnivore needs to understand that meat does not originally come in these neat little packages.

As we say in the American Institute of Wine and Food, small helpings, no seconds. A little bit of everything. No snacking. And have a good time.

In France, cooking is a serious art form and a national sport.

When I got to France I realized I didn't know very much about food at all. I'd never had a real cake. I'd had those cakes from cake mixes or the ones that have a lot of baking powder in them. A really good French cake doesn't have anything like that in it - it's all egg power.

The secret of a happy marriage is finding the right person. You know they're right if you love to be with them all the time.

Being tall is an advantage, especially in business. People will always remember you. And if you're in a crowd, you'll always have some clean air to breathe.

In Paris and later in Marseille, I was surrounded by some of the best food in the world, and I had an enthusiastic audience in my husband, so it seemed only logical that I should learn how to cook 'la cuisine bourgeoise' - good, traditional French home cooking.

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.

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

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

I was lucky to marry Paul. He was a great inspiration, his enthusiasm about wine and food helped to shape my tastes, and his encouragement saw me through discouraging moments. I never would have had my career without Paul Child.

I hate organized religion. I think you have to love thy neighbor as thyself. I think you have to pick your own God and be true to him. I always say 'him' rather than 'her.' Maybe it's because of my generation, but I don't like the idea of a female God. I see God as a benevolent male.

I found that the recipes in most - in all - the books I had were really not adequate. They didn't tell you enough... I won't do anything unless I'm told why I'm doing it. So I felt that we needed fuller explanations so that if you followed one of those recipes, it should turn out exactly right.

Drama is very important in life: You have to come on with a bang. You never want to go out with a whimper. Everything can have drama if it's done right. Even a pancake.

What a marvelous resource soup is for the thrifty cook - it solves the ham-bone and lamb-bone problems, the everlasting Thanksgiving turkey, the extra vegetables.

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.

Find something you're passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it.

Cassoulet, that best of bean feasts, is everyday fare for a peasant but ambrosia for a gastronome, though its ideal consumer is a 300-pound blocking back who has been splitting firewood nonstop for the last twelve hours on a subzero day in Manitoba.

Someone may offer you a freshly caught whole large fish, like a salmon or striped bass. Don't panic - take it!

Julie's cookery is actually improving, Paul wrote Charlie [his twin]. I didn't quite believe it would, just between us, but it really is. It's simpler, more classical.I envy her this chance. It would be such fun to be doing it at the same time with her.

You learn to cook so that you don't have to be a slave to recipes. You get what's in season and you know what to do with it.

I fell in love with the public, the public fell in love with me, and I tried to keep it that way.

The art of bread making can become a consuming hobby, and no matter how often and how many kinds of bread one has made, there always seems to be something new to learn.

If variety is the spice of life, then my life must be one of the spiciest you ever heard of. A curry of a life. -Paul Child

In my generation, except for a few people who'd gone into banking or nursing or something like that, middle-class women didn't have careers. You were to marry and have children and be a nice mother. You didn't go out and do anything. I found that I got restless.

I was never a spy. I was with the OSS organization. We had a number of women, but we were all office help.

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

I discovered that when one follows the artist's eye one sees unexpected treasures in so many seemingly ordinary scenes.

In France, Paul explained, good cooking was regarded as a combination of national sport and high art, and wine was always served with lunch and dinner. The trick is moderation, he said.

I'm a beet freak. I put them in the pressure cooker.

People liked to eat veal until they saw pictures of these darling little animals with brown eyes. Veal calves been raised the same way for centuries.

I would happily die with a bottle of white Burgundy in my mouth,

I think anyone who is a carnivore needs to understand that meat does not originally come in these neat little packages.

Some people like to paint pictures, or do gardening, or build a boat in the basement. Other people get a tremendous pleasure out of the kitchen, because cooking is just as creative and imaginative an activity as drawing, or wood carving, or music.

I don't use the word gourmet. The word doesn't mean anything anymore. 'Gourmet' makes it sound like someone is putting sherry wine in the corn-flake casserole.

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.

Without peanuts, it isn't a cocktail party.

You don't have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces - just good food from fresh ingredients.

A cookbook is only as good as its poorest recipe.

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

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

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

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

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

This is my invariable advice to people: Learn how to cook- try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless, and above all have fun!

Life itself is the proper binge.

Good french cooking cannot be produced by a zombie cook.

Dining with one's friends and beloved family is certainly one of life's primal and most innocent delights, one that is both soul-satisfying and eternal.

In the blood-heat of pursuing the enemy, many people are forgetting what we are fighting for. We are fighting for our hard-won liberty and freedom; for our Constitution and the due processes of our laws; and for the right to differ in ideas, religion and politics. I am convinced that in your zeal to fight against our enemies, you, too, have forgotten what you are fighting for.

In spite of food fads, fitness programs, and health concerns, we must never lose sight of a beautifully conceived meal.

People were hysterical about Communism the way people today are hysterical about flag burning. I'm really against these people who try to show that they're great patriots, because they're not thinking, they're just being hysterical.

People who love to eat are always the best people.

I love good, fresh food cooked by someone who knows what he's doing.

Because I've done a lot of television, I'm sort of a generalist. I'm not a pastry cook, but I've had to learn a certain amount about it. I'm not a baker, though I've had to learn how to do it. I'm sort of a general cook.

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.

Eating is the secret to good cooking.

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

MODERATION.SMALL HELPINGS. SAMPLE A LITTLE BIT OF EVERYTHING. THESE ARE THE SECRETS OF HAPPINESS AND GOOD HEALTH.

I don't believe in twisting yourself into knots of excuses and explanations over the food you make.... Usually one's cooking is better than one thinks it is. And if the food is truly vile...then the cook must simply grit her teeth and bear it with a smile.

People who are not interested in food always seem rather dry and unloving and don't have a real gusto for life.

We had a happy marriage because we were together all the time. We were friends as well as husband and wife. We just had a good time.

It is the Americans who have managed to crown minced beef as hamburger, and to send it round the world so that even the fussy French have taken to le boeuf hache, le hambourgaire.

Some children like to make castles out of their rice pudding, or faces with raisins for eyes. It is forbidden -- so sternly that, when they grow up, they take a horrid revenge by dying meringues pale blue or baking birthday cakes in the form of horseshoes or lyres or whatnot.

Romance is the icing but love is the cake.

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.

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.

The sweetness and generosity and politeness and gentleness and humanity of the French had shown me how lovely life can be if one takes time to be friendly.

How lovely life can be if one takes time to be friendly.

...the waiters carried themselves with a quiet joy, as if their entire mission in life was to make their customers feel comfortable and well tended.

It is hard to imagine a civilization without onions.

Everything can have drama if it's done right. Even a pancake.

I love root vegetables: carrots, parsnips, and turnips.

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.

The American poultry industry had made it possible to grow a fine-looking fryer in record time and sell it at a reasonable price, but no one mentioned that the result usually tasted like the stuffing inside of a teddy bear.

It was fun, although we felt like pawns, or prawns, in the maelstrom.

I think careful cooking is love, don't you? The loveliest thing you can cook for someone who's close to you is about as nice a valentine as you can give.

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

As a girl, I had zero interest in the stove. I've always had a healthy appetite, especially for the wonderful meat and the fresh produce of California, but I was never encouraged to cook and just didn't see the point in it.

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

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

The shellfish thing is very scary. You have to know the people you buy from and exactly where their wholesalers are getting the fish from.

The measure of achievement is not winning awards. It's doing something that you appreciate, something you believe is worthwhile.

The war broke out, and I wanted to do something to aid my country in a time of crisis. I was too tall for the WACs and WAVES, but eventually joined the OSS and set out into the world looking for adventure.

To be able to serve and to eat a whole fish, especially a trout, is part of civilized dining. This applies particularly to the young, who should take to it as soon as they can handle knife and fork; this is a fine way for them to begin taking pride in themselves and their abilities.

I don't believe in twisting yourself into knots of excuses and explanations over the food you make.

Once you have mastered a technique, you hardly need look at a recipe again and can take off on your own.

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.

When you have a few cake formulas and filling ideas in your repertoire, you will find that it's pretty much an assembly job - you can mix and match a different way every time.

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.

...nothing is too much trouble if it turns out the way it should.

I think every woman should have a blowtorch.

When you flip anything, you really you just have to have the courage of your convictions.

Always remember: If you're alone in the kitchen and you drop the lamb, you can always just pick it up. Who's going to know?

In France cooking is a serious art form and a national sport. I think the French enjoy the complication of the art form and the cooking for cooking's sake. You can talk with a concierge or police officer about food in France as a general rule. It is not the general rule here. Classical cuisine, which I hope we are going back to, means certain ways of doing things and certain ways of not doing things. If you know classical French cooking you can do anything. If you don't know the basics, you turn out slop.

Never apologize for your cooking.

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

Cooking well doesn't mean cooking fancy.

Freshness is essential. That makes all the difference.

There are reasons, and then there are excuses.

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

If you're not ready to fail, you're not going to learn how to cook.

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

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

A party without cake is really just a meeting.

A passionate interest in what you do is the secret of enjoying life...whether it is helping old people or children, or making cheese or growing earthworms.

It's fun to get together and have something good to eat at least once a day. That's what human life is all about - enjoying things.

Remember, 'No one's more important than people'! In other words, friendship is the most important thing--not career or housework, or one's fatigue--and it needs to be tended and nurtured.

How can a nation be called great if its bread tastes like kleenex?

Just speak very loudly and quickly, and state your position with utter conviction, as the French do, and you'll have a marvelous time!

With enough butter, anything is good

I always give my bird a generous butter massage before I put it in the oven. Why? Because I think the chicken likes it -- and, more important, I like to give it.

A house without a cat is like a day without sunshine, a pie without fromage, a dinner without wine.

One of the important requirements for learning how to cook is that you also learn how to eat.

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

Cooking is just as creative and imaginative an activity as drawing, or wood carving, or music. And cooking draws upon your every talent--science, mathematics, energy, history, experience--and the more experience you have, the less likely are your experiments to end in drivel and disaster. The more you know, the more you can create.

We ought to enjoy our food, we ought to take time and care and prepare it correctly, and we ought to have fun doing it and make it a communal event.

Just like becoming an expert in wine, you learn by drinking it, the best you can afford.

You are the butter to my bread,and the breath to my life