”Noncooks think it's silly to invest two hours' work in two minutes' enjoyment; but if cooking is evanescent, so is the ballet.”
- Julia ChildYou know what I love about Julia Child? That famous chef, who became a household name and whose kitchen is still preserved at the Smithsonian, did not begin to study cooking until the age of 36. She married Paul Child, a high-ranking OSS cartographer and a man who was known for his sophisticated palate, when she was 34. They moved to Paris two years later when he was assigned a position as exhibits officer with the United States Information Agency and that is when she enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu Cooking School.
She went on to start her own cooking school, write some of the most enduring classics on the subject, and helm several highly successful cooking shows on television. All from a woman who knew little about fine cuisine prior to her early thirties. Before that she was a copyrighter with a degree in History and had joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1941 after the bombing of Pearl Harbor (the United States Navy turned her down for being too tall, she was 6'2"). How incredible and inspiring it is that an entirely new and tremendously successful career can start at 36.
I also recommend reading the popular Julie and Julia book written by Julie Powell, a blogger who challenged herself to cook everything in the first edition of Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” in the course of one year. She blogged the whole year at the Julie/Julia project and landed a book deal after the blog took off.
Uh oh... I'm one of those people who thinks it's silly to invest two hours of work in two minutes worth of enjoyment. But that's only when it comes to cooking, cause i'll wait in a long line for a roller coaster... kind of the same thing isn't it. I guess it depends if the wait or the work is worth the short term enjoyment. Some activities it is.
ReplyDeleteI don't see the point in cooking for hours but that's cause i hate cooking.
I do however see the point of sex whose very function is to end in orgasm... which to me is something worth the time and effort involved.
I need a self help book about how to stay passionate about something you're tremendously interested in. You think it would come simply? No, no. My tremendous interest can be categorized as a "hobby" and therefore falls to the wayside of my relationship, my career, my household even.
ReplyDeleteThere should have been a class in college about how to live life. You would think it would come naturally, but I feel most of the time as though I am clumsily fumbling along.