Latest news with #JuliaChild
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Jeremy Allen White, Meryl Streep and More Stars Who've Played Chefs Onscreen
Yes, Chef! These actors looked at home playing pros in the kitchen. Here's what inspired them — and how they prepped. 'I spent a lot of time as a fly on the wall, and I'd help them prep where you can't really screw up anything too badly,' the 34-year-old said of shadowing the cooks at Pasjoli — an elevated French restaurant in Santa Monica, Calif. — before taking on the role of the obsessive, talented chef Carmy in the Hulu hit. 'I like spending time in these places, I like all the people that work there, and I like all learning about this craft.' Growing up, the 75-year-old, who played the ebullient Julia Child in the 2009 movie, knew nothing about fine dining. 'I remember when I was 10 years old, going to the little girl's house up the street, and she and her mother were sitting at the kitchen table doing something… She told me they were making mashed potatoes,' Meryl said. 'And I said, 'What do you mean? Mashed potatoes come in a box!' They were peeling boiled potatoes, and I had never seen a potato before.' 'Either eat a lot before or be ready to go eat something afterwards, because the food is spectacular,' the 55-year-old bragged of his new Netflix movie about a grieving man who decides to open a restaurant staffed by Italian grandmothers, also known as nonnas. Talia Shire, Lorraine Bracco, Brenda Vaccaro and Susan Sarandon play the women who bring their family dishes — and spicy personalities — to the table. As Vince says, 'Food is love.' In the 2014 flick, the 58-year-old plays a brilliant chef who ditches his stuffy restaurant job to open a food truck. Jon also directed the indie production on a tight budget. 'We would eat what the stuff after we filmed,' He said of the food prepared by famed chef Roi Choy that was used on set. 'We really made an effort not to waste. Even when we broke down the pig, all those pig parts went home with different crew members.' To prep to play an exacting, murderous chef catering to the ultra-rich in the darkly funny 2022 horror film, the 62-year-old consulted with three-star Michelin chef Dominique Crenn. 'She gave me a lot of tips on how you behave, how you move, how you talk to people. The shorthand of communication in that level of kitchen,' Ralph recalled. Not so much the actual cooking, though: 'Don't ask me to chop an onion!'
San Francisco Chronicle
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Michelin-starred Wine Country restaurant opens new café in unexpected location
A new museum opened last month in St. Helena with an interactive exhibition on the life of famed chef Julia Child — yet the museum's café may be an even bigger draw. Under-study, the highly-anticipated bakery and tapas spot from the Michelin-starred team at Press Restaurant, opens May 26. It's attached to the Napa Valley Museum of Arts & Culture, or the MAC, an expansion of the Napa Valley Museum in Yountville. Intended as the antithesis to the stereotypically underwhelming museum café, Under-study will bring a fine dining approach to the grab-and-go experience, without the tasting menu price tag, owners said. 'It's some of the most highly-trained cooks in America in a café setting,' said Philip Tessier, chef-partner of Press and Under-study. Located next door to Press, Under-study and the museum have taken over the former home of Dean & Deluca, which, more recently was Gary's Wine & Marketplace. Yet Under-study (607 St. Helena Hwy., St. Helena) is a major departure from its predecessors. Tessier described the interior, designed by Studio Terpeluk, the team behind San Francisco's buzzy new French bistro Bon Délire, as 'Willy Wonka meets Hermes.' It's a mix of sophisticated and playful: Sleek marble and Douglas fir finishes merge with bold pink, yellow and teal walls and accents. Instead of deli sandwiches and pre-made salads, the café will serve fancy tapas like Wagyu steak tartare ($18), hamachi crudo ($14) and a caviar-topped lobster corn dog ($32) on luxe Heston cafeteria trays. Customers can dine inside at translucent, yellow resin tabletops that flip up from the wall and people-watch through a window that peers into the museum, but most of the seating is on the patio around a fountain. In the morning, the bakery counter will offer coffee and pastries — to be artfully displayed like museum pieces themselves— including incredibly-flaky croissants ($5.50), carrot and lemon tea cakes ($6) and an adorable mandarin mousse parfait ($12) that imitates a real-life mandarin. There's a daily bread selection featuring sourdough miso baguettes and sesame wheat loaves, and Under-study will serve heartier breakfast items such as a bacon-maple-glazed French toast stick ($12), beef fat hashbrowns ($10) and a Dungeness crab omelette ($24, weekends only). Longtime Press fans will recognize some of the restaurant's 'greatest hits from back in the day,' said Tessier, like the sweet and sour pig ears ($14), grilled octopus served in a black truffle mole ($18) and salsa verde beef reimagined as Wagyu skewers ($18). One of the most notable comebacks is the bacon sampler ($12), a beloved, Instagrammable starter where several cuts of bacon hung from a metal rack by clothespins. (It even came with meat-cutting scissors.) At Under-study, it'll be served at breakfast, albeit with a much simpler presentation. A special 'Julia's Menu' caters to museum guests. The three-course meal ($40) represents Under-study's take on some of Child's classic dishes: asparagus vol-au-vent, roast chicken and her favorite dessert, île flottante, a floating island of meringue in a sea of cream. Hams, charcuterie and herbs hang over a butcher counter, where premium aged meats and cured fish, including whole ducks and swordfish, can be ordered to-go, in addition to prepared dinners, like Press' popular truffle-glazed chicken, lobster tails and miso-cured black cod. These ready-to-make dinners will eventually come with a QR code, which will link to a video of an Under-study chef demonstrating how to finish the dish. The marbled case will also be stocked with delicacies like truffles, rare cheeses and caviar — 'all the fun stuff,' said Tessier. 'The goal is to give people access to what we get in restaurants,' he continued. 'You can't buy 90% of what we get at the restaurant, but the cushion for us is if we don't sell it, it goes next door. Most places you can't find this stuff because it just sits there.' Press is known for having the largest collection of Napa Valley wines in the world. But Tessier said Under-study's wine shop will cater more to locals by highlighting international producers and 'unique and esoteric' grapes from California and beyond, like a Picpoul from Napa Valley's Tres Sabores and a Gruner Veltliner from Austria. Wine will be available by the glass and bottle, but Under-study will have a few beers and a spritz on draft as well. 'It's a place where locals can come and not have to drink their neighbor's Cabernet,' he said. Later this summer, a teaching kitchen will open in the back section of the café. Here, Under-study will host educational classes and events centered on food, wine and local artisans, and also film digital content like recipe videos. Under-study. Opens May 26. 607 St. Helena Hwy., St. Helena.
Forbes
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
New Documentary Features Marcella Hazan, Godmother Of Italian Cooking
The main reason to watch Marcella, a new documentary about Marcella Hazan, the late Italian cook and teacher Julia Child once described as 'my mentor in all things Italian,' may well be because we're all craving the kind of lifestyle that still oozes from her beloved, bestselling cookbooks. Italian cook Marcella Hazan in her Venice kitchen. She never needed to taste, sniffing was enough. Courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment In the introduction to The Classic Italian Cookbook, first published in 1973, she describes the Italian art of eating as the way to make 'art out of life,' and then goes on to clarify that for millions of hungry Italians, the best possible food is cooked at home, not in restaurants. Marcella grew up in a fishing town on the Italian Adriatic Coast, 65 miles or so from Bologna, and when she moved to New York City in the 1950s with her new Italian-American husband, Victor Hazan, she had never really cooked. A scientist at heart, she'd gotten two PhDs, one in biology, the other in natural sciences and had become a teacher. In New York, Victor worked with his father but when he came home at lunchtime, he was hungry. Marcella Hazan and Victor Hazan who would end up transcribing and writing her cookbooks. Courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment Even though Marcella had limited use of her right arm, the result of an injury sustained on a beach when she was six, she taught herself how to cook with what she found in their Queens neighborhood. Soon, she travelled to Manhattan's Ninth Avenue seeking fresh mozzarella, Italian ham and eggplants. Suddenly, she was experimenting in the kitchen and the rest is history. The film, written and directed by Emmy and Peabody Award-winner Peter Miller and released by Greenwich Entertainment, features interviews of Victor Hazan, who would become Marcella's writing partner, and their son, Giuliano Hazan, a chef, teacher and author in his own right. Other celebrity friends recount the impact she had on their lives and include restaurateur Danny Meyer, former Town & Country editor Pamela Fiori, and Saveur co-founder and editor Dorothy Kalins. 'My wife and I had been cooking from her books since the 1980s,' said Miller. 'And one night we wondered, 'Has anybody made a documentary on Marcella?'' Without resources, it would take six years and 371 people through a crowd-funding campaign to get the film made. Through clips drawn from home movies, we follow Marcella as she teaches a class, fries a fish, or shows off the cornucopia of produce at the Rialto market in Venice. Here and there, her raspy voice (she started smoking at 14 and never quit) paired with her killer smile, and the sharp intelligence that sparkles in her eyes, all create the illusion that she's still with us, sniffing the pot ⸺ she never needed to taste, smelling was enough ⸺ and guiding us towards deliciousness. Marcella Hazan at the supermarket Marcella Hazan and Victor Hazan who would end up transcribing and writing her cookbooks. Watching Marcella, we crave to spend some time (a year, perhaps?) living in Venice and shopping at the Rialto. We would happily follow her at the market in Milan or Rome, where the couple lived for a while. The sentence she used often, 'Italian food is simple but it is not easy,' resonates. Perhaps most vividly, we watch Chef April Bloomfield, who now cooks at Sailor in Brooklyn, brown a sizzling veal shank with Marcella. It involves anchovies, onions, garlic, and white wine. 'How much white wine, Marcella?' 'Keep going,' she answers. She was 90 at that point, but keep going, she did, until 2013. Today, food lovers throughout the country may remember her for her 'greatest hits,' her fabulous pared-down tomato sauce, the chicken with two lemons so simple and good Glamour magazine called it 'engagement chicken,' because it often preceded a marriage proposal, her braised artichoke with mortadella stuffing. How timely it is, when so many of us are craving authenticity and comfort, that this film can now be screened in cinemas around the country and on your favorite platforms. Thank you Peter, and thank you Marcella!
Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Julia Child's Boozy Secret To The Best Fruity Crepe Filling
Does anyone do it like Julia Child? I doubt she needs an introduction, but just in case you're not in the know, she's a storied chef who helped make cooking more accessible to the average American. She was a veritable pioneer in the fields of televised cooking, considering she was one of the first to have a cooking show broadcast to a wider audience. Among her many gems of cooking advice and recipes, you can find plenty of French-inspired dishes, since that was a central point of her cooking career. Today we'll take a look at Child's fruit crepes recipe, which she shared in her cookbook, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," and the liquor that makes it so special. Crepes are, in and of themselves, a pretty tricky food to prepare. People spend hours in the kitchen working on their crepe tips and tricks, trying to nail the recipe to perfection. Child has plenty of advice on how to get a buttery, soft, thin crepe with a perfect crispness on the edges, but she also teaches about the joys of alcohol-based fruit marinades. According to her, you should take the fruit you intend to fill your crepe with and soak it in a mixture of sugar and either kirsch, cognac, or orange liqueur for an hour. Only after giving the flavors time to meld should you use them as a filling. Read more: 16 Best Bourbons To Use In Your Old Fashioned Why go through these extra steps to make alcohol-infused fruits for your crepe filling? The answer lies in the flavor profile and balance of the crepe and fruit. Crepes, when eaten alone, are actually a relatively mild-tasting dessert. The batter isn't enormously sweet or decadent, and it can actually lean savory with how much butter and how little sugar is in it. You can really go ham when you're deciding what to fill and top it with, an art that Japan has certainly nailed. Fresh fruits alone are tasty, but adding the sweetness and bite of a sugar and alcohol syrup provides an excellent contrast to the mellow flavors of the crepe itself. Kirsch, orange liqueur, and cognac are the best choices for their own fruity notes. They pair well with whatever fruit you choose for your filling (strawberries and bananas are super popular) and bring dimension to the alcohol, which by itself can be a little flat. You only want to add a sprinkle of liquor to the fruits, though. Too much, and your eyes will be watering. You can leave the fruit alone if you want a more traditional crepe, or heap in some whipped cream to make it decadent. Crepes are a versatile dessert, and Child was one for kitchen creativity, so don't be afraid to give some unique fruit and liquor combos a try. You may just find your new favorite dessert among them. Read the original article on Tasting Table.
Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
6 Julia Child-Inspired Kitchen Gadgets To Buy On Amazon
We may receive a commission on purchases made from links. Whenever we need a quick and easy dressing for our salads, we turn to this go-to vinaigrette that Julia Child swore by. Child was an iconic legend in the culinary world for good reason. She inspired us with her charming, larger-than-life personality and unforgettable recipes, like her famously fluffy chocolate mousse. Not only did she teach us how to bake, cook, and tackle French techniques with ease, Child made us fall in love with the process. And let's not forget how amazing and timeless her kitchen set-up was. The gadgets she used have inspired home cooks and chefs through the ages as well. And who didn't love staring at her beautiful copper cookware on TV or smile when she wielded a whisk like a baseball bat? In fact, Child's actual kitchen — with 1200 original objects and kitchen gadgets from pots to rolling pins — is famously on display at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. Now, you don't have to make a trip to said museum to discover Child's kitchen gadgets; of course, unless you really want to, because the trip is worth it! We've rounded up six must-have gadgets inspired by Child's legendary kitchen to help you bring a little Julia magic into your own home. First up is a tool every baker should have in their kitchen: a French wooden rolling pin. Read more: The Chef's Knife Anthony Bourdain Used In His Home Kitchen Child was exuberant when she clutched her wooden rolling pins. You too can experience this joy like she did while baking. Also a French rolling pin should be your go-to when making pie crust and other pastry doughs. So grab a high-quality French rolling pin, like this Muso Wood one. It's well-reviewed online and costs only $12.99 before shipping, taxes, and tariffs. Just note that you should always clean wooden utensils as soon as possible, and you will need to condition your new French wooden rolling pin with mineral oil. The second Child-inspired kitchen tool we recommend you to buy from Amazon is a long soup spoon from a brand like EnerMagiX. It's no secret that food icon Julia Child loved copper gadgets, so the one we're recommending is made of copper. Copper spoons are durable and versatile. You can use your new spoon to taste your soups, like Child did, then give it a quick rinse, and use it to scoop up some ice cream after dinner. Now, ready for our next recommendation? It's a dicey one! The next new knife you invest in should be a stainless steel mezzaluna, or rocking knife from a brand like Roqila. Note that it is also called a cutter rocker, pizza rocker, or rocker knife. To channel your inner Child, wield your cool new rocking knife in your kitchen to chop up salads, slice pizzas, mince veggies, or dice up some fruits. This gadget makes kitchen prep a breeze. Plus, for the clumsy folks out there, since it requires both hands to operate properly, you're less likely to cut yourself compared to when using traditional knives. Another kitchen tool Child loved wielding was the handy-dandy whisk. You should look up that photo we mentioned where she joyfully swings a large whisk like it's a baseball bat. Every home cook and baker should invest in a good stainless steel whisk from a brand like OXO. This useful gadget will help you mix up perfect salad dressings and chiffon cake batters and allow you to whisk your egg whites into the airiest and fluffiest meringue. A sturdy, stainless steel whisk, like the one we recommended by OXO, is also dishwasher safe. The last thing you want to do is to hand wash a caked up and dirty whisk. There's a reason why Julia Child always used copper pots and pans. French cooking inspired her, and copper cookware conducts heat well and cooks food evenly. Not only that, her copper pots and pans looked aesthetically pleasing on television. So you can't really say that you're channeling your inner Child without investing in a high quality copper frying pan or sturdy copper saucepan from Cuisine Romefort. Just note, however, that copper cookware does not come cheap, as they are usually handmade. The investment is worth it, however, for die-hard fans of Child. Finally, to complete this round-up, we recommend you grabbing a high-quality set of carbon-steel knives from a brand like Wüsthof, as those are the knives that Child preferred to use in her kitchen. Just note that while you won't be able to wash these knives in the dishwasher, you'll be carving steaks and filetting fish perfectly, just as Child did in her kitchen. With these six Julia Child-inspired kitchen gadgets and tools in your kitchen, you'll be well on your way to mastering the art of French cooking, or at the very least, enjoying the process a little more. From the humble French rolling pin to gleaming copper cookware, each item can help you channel a bit of Child's signature confidence and joy, one delicious dish at a time, from her delicious roast chicken recipe to her boozy, fruity crepes. Read the original article on Tasting Table.
