Julia ChildCredited with bringing French cooking to Americans, Julia Child was a lady who once stated: “I believe in cooking with wine, sometimes I even put it in the food”. A female equivalent of Keith Floyd and born in Pasadena, California, Child was too tall to enlist in the Women’s Army Corps in the Second World War but found work in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). She was sent to Ceylon to register, catalogue and channel “a great deal of highly classified communications” and after the war moved to France with her husband (who had also worked for the OSS). Having attended the renowned Le Cordon Bleu cooking school, cookery became Child’s love, life and vocation and a whole series of books and television series followed. Her kitchen is now on display in the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. and her legacy lives on in the form of The Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and Culinary Arts.

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Dame Norma Major DBE
From the same Steeple territory

Dame Norma Major DBE

Her husband may have been minor as Prime Minister but she is definitely a star. She put up with John Major’s dalliances with Edwina Currie and “kept a low profile” whilst her husband ran the country. Norma Major is thought of as “strong willed” and was rightly made a Dame Commander of the British Empire […]

Keith Floyd (1943 – 2009)
From the same Steeple territory

Keith Floyd (1943 – 2009)

This wine loving chef was brought up in a council house but educated at Wellington. After finding that he and the army were “mutually incompatible”, Keith Floyd took a job as a vegetable peeler. From this humble start, he progressed to owning a number of restaurants and presenting cooking shows for the BBC. Married four […]