Food and Friends

View recipes from Food and Friends.The coauthor of Mastering the Art of French Cooking shares an irresistible feast of reminiscence and recipes.

Simone "Simca" Beck first met Julia Child in 1949 in the women's cooking club Cercle des Gourmettes in Paris. Soon afterwards, the two began collaborating on what would become Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

During her extraordinary career, Simca was mentor and friend to a generation of cooks and food writers. In Food and Friends, she interweaves tantalizing recipes and menus with a wonderfully evocative account of her Normandy childhood, her madcap escapades in 1920s Paris, her work with Julia Child, and her friendships with James Beard, Craig Claiborne, M.F.K. Fisher, and Richard Olney, among others.Simone Beck was born in 1904 at Tocqueville en Caux, Normandy. In 1933, she began to study at the Cordon Bleu, then the world’s supreme school of cuisine. In 1948 she was approached by a friend, Louisette Bertholle (now Comtesse de Nalèche), to collaborate on a French cookbook for Americans. In 1951, at the suggestion of her husband, they began to search for an American to help them, and a friend introduced Simca to Julia Child, then studying cooking in Paris. Soon afterward, the three women formed a cooking school, L’École des Trois Gourmandes, and began the collaboration that produced the several volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She died in 1991.