Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I: 50th Anniversary Edition

About the author
Julia Child was born in Pasadena, California. She was graduated from Smith College and worked for the OSS during World War II in Ceylon and China, where she met Paul Child. After they married they lived in Paris, where she studied at the Cordon Bleu and taught cooking with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, with whom she wrote the first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961). In 1963, Boston's WGBH launched The French Chef television series, which made her a national celebrity, earning her the Peabody Award in 1965 and an Emmy in 1966. Several public television shows and numerous cookbooks followed. She died in 2004.

Simone (“Simca”) Beck was a French cookbook author and cooking teacher who, along with colleagues Julia Child and Louisette Bertholle, played a significant role in introducing French cooking to Americans. Best known as a partner in the creation of the two classic volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, she was born in 1904 at Tocqueville en Caux, Normandy. After her first marriage ended in 1933, she began to study at the Cordon Bleu. A few years later, Beck, along with Julia Child and Louisette Bertholle, formed l'École des trois gourmandes to give lessons in French cooking to American women living in Paris. The school continued, on and off, into the late 1970s, and Beck and Child would continue to wear the school's badge on TV and in publicity photos for years to follow. While Child became a successful television chef and author in the United States, Beck continued teaching at home. In 1972 she published her own cookbook, Simca's Cuisine (with Patricia Simon), and a second volume, New Menus from Simca's Cuisine (with Michael James), followed in 1979. Food and Friends: Recipes and Memories from Simca's Cuisine (with Suzy Patterson), a joint memoir-cookbook, was published in 1991.