Let's talk about women chefs

Today Italy (and many other countries) celebrate the Women's Day. On this occasion, I'd like to write about the most acclaimed wonen chefs in the world. According to Mario Batali, celebrity chef and owner of Babbo, in Bill Buford’s Book Heat: “I know it doesn’t make sense, and I don’t understand it. But it is consistently the case: Women are better cooks. They approach food differently.”

Women certainly don’t have it easy in the kitchen though. In a predominantly male dominated industry, female chefs are still an exception, but women are moving to stake their claim as the best out there. Women who want to cook professionally, then, often have to be tougher, meaner, and stronger than their male counterparts

The Culinary Institute of America, the nation’s premier culinary school, didn’t accept women until 1970, but now 44% of its students (out of 3,000) are women. Enrollment of women in the last 20 years has doubled, from 21 percent in 1980 to 41 percent in 2007

Let's celebrate the outstanding female chefs who have pushed their field, made way for other female chefs, and have created delicious food.

1. Julia Child

Julia Child followed her husband to Paris, where she attended Le Cordon Bleu and discovered a love of French cuisine. From there, she went on to write the seminal text Mastering the Art of French Cooking as well as eighteen other books. In 1963, her first television show, The French Chef, debuted. While it was not the first food show, it was certainly the most successful to date and made Julia Child the household name she is today. Interestingly, The French Chef was also the first show to be closed-captioned for the hearing-impaired.
Today she is fondly remembered as the person who brought real French cuisine to the average American table.

2. Alice Waters

Known as the inventor of California Cuisine, Alice Waters is the promoter and co-owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, CA. Just out of college she found her love of fresh, local ingredients on a trip to France in 1964 and founded Chez Panisse in 1971.

Waters is credited with writing 12 food-related books, largely about the California Cuisine movement she was instrumental in founding. In addition, she was the first female chef to win the James Beard Award for Outstanding Chef in 1992 — Chez Panisse won Best Restaurant that year as well.

3. Paula Deen

Butter! Butter! Butter! This Food Network star was famous even before her kindly face was on the TV. Deen, with her sons Jaime and Bobby, owns and has operated the restaurant Lady & Sons in Savannah, GA for years. The family serves traditional southern fare and, not surprisingly, is a perennial favorite with Southerners. In 1999, USA Today named Lady & Sons “International Meal of the Year”.

4. Cat Cora

Cat Cora came to fame as the first — and still only — female Iron Chef in the franchise’s history.
Cora is also the Executive Chef for Bon Appetit magazine and a spokesperson for UNICEF and InSinkErator. Talk about combining food and philanthropy.

5. Elizabeth Falkner

Elizabeth Falkner graduated from art school in 1989 but changed gears when she took a job as a chef at Café Claude in 1990. This lead her to pastry arts from there to opening her first restaurant, Citizen Cake, in San Francisco in 1997. She still owns and is the executive pastry chef at Citizen Cake while also being the executive chef and co-owner of Orson.

Known for her platinum, spiky hair and her inventive desserts, Falkner is working to break down the boundaries between savory cuisine and pastry.

6. Lidia Matticchio Bastianich

  

 

Lidia Bastianich has lived the true American Dream. Her family arrived in New York City in 1958 after having escaped from Pola, Istria (in present day Croatia) when Lidia was 11 years old. Married at 19, by 25 she had two children. However, before her second child was born, the Bastianich family opened an Italian restaurant called Buonovia, meaning “on the good road” in Forest Hills, Queens. The restaurant was so successful that the family opened a second restaurant in Queens, Villa Secondo, where Lidia both gained the notice of food critics. From there she began giving live cooking demonstrations, leading to her career as a TV cooking show hostess.

 

7. Nancy Silverton

  

Nancy Silverton’s career as a chef began when she was just 18 years old and living in the Cal State University dorm, where she worked as a vegetarian cook in the dormitory kitchen. Eventually, she started a career as a pastry chef and became the first woman to win a James Beard award in 1991 for Oustanding Pastry Chef — an award Elizabeth Falkner was nominated for in 2005.

 8. Cristeta Comerford 

  

Cristeta Comerford is another great example of the American Dream, moving from the Philippines to the United States at just 23. Walter Scheib, the executive chef during the Clinton White House, recruited her to be a chef, and in 2005, when Scheib left, Comerford became the first female executive chef of the White House, a position she has held during both the Bush and Obama administrations.

 9. Stephanie Izard 

 

Hailing from Chicago, Stephanie Izard first came to America’s attention as a contestant on — and eventual winner of and first female winner of — Top Chef. Known on the show for her meticulous attention to taste, presentation, and blend of flavors, she went on to be one of the most successful post Top Chef participants. She will be opening a small plates and charcuterie-focused restaurant this year. At age 33, this will be the second restaurant she has owned.

 10. Ruth Reichl   She was chef and co-owner of the collectively owned Swallow Restaurant in Berkeley, CA from 1973 to 1977. She played an important role in the California Food movement in Berkeley along with fellow female chef superstar Alice Waters.

Reichl’s love of food eventually lead her not only to cook but also to write about food for the LA Times, where she was restaurant editor; the New York Times, where she was the restaurant critic; and, most recently Gourmet, where she was Editor-in-Chief until 2009.  11. Sonya Coté   She runs her kitchen with Big Texas-style, making her own croissants and charcuterie. She’s a Twitter fiend, dispensing her cooking advice in 140-character snippets. Lately it’s: “If your tomato sauce is bitter add a date! It’s what my grandma used to do.” And: “When rendering pork lard add a potato. It will absorb the impurities & make your lard snow white!” 12. Michelle Bernstein  She puts her Jewish-Argentinean roots and love of Spain to use at her funky Latin-inspired restaurants and isn’t afraid to mix genres when she wants. She makes fettucine carbonara with smoked bacon, jamón serrano, prosciutto, and St. André cheese. 13. Jennifer Carroll    She’s a tough-talking Catholic University law school drop-out whose outsize attitude is matched by a particularly delicate way with fish and seafood that caught master French chef Eric Ripert’s eye. She hung with the boys, often out-cooking them all, on two seasons of Top Chef 14. Sue Zemanick  She wasn’t afraid to make friends (butting against the reality show cliché “I’m not here to make friends!”) and help out other chefs, even when it cost it her time and points, on Top Chef Masters. Just weeks after she was promoted to executive chef at the storied New Orleans restaurant Gautreau’s in 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the city; she stayed, painstakingly helped rebuild the restaurant, and reopened the kitchen in 2007.
•15. Traci Des Jardins  As a college dropout she petitioned star chef Joachim Splichal to give her a chance in his kitchen; he gave her two weeks to prove herself. "It was an atmosphere of militarism, aggression, abuse, yelling," she has said. But she made it. She left Splichal and went to France to study at the famed Troisgros, where she was the only woman of 25 kitchen apprentices. Again, she made it. 16. Barbara Lynch  She grew up as the youngest of seven kids raised by a single mother in a South Boston housing project and found her passion in a high school home ec class. She went from narrowly avoiding welfare to employing more than 200 people.When a sous-chef screws up, she’s been known to throw a vase (and then cook at his or her wedding).17. Gabrielle Hamilton   She turned a 30-seat restaurant on a grungy block of the East Village into one of the city’s hippest dining rooms. Her food is messy, lusty, and full of attitude: shrimp in anchovy butter; thick-cut pork chops with lots of fried cabbage; hunks of chocolate on the table offered with the check. 18. April Bloomfield  Her original goal was to be a policewoman, but when she missed the application deadline, she went to work in a restaurant instead. She’s an English expat who taught scene-it-all New Yorkers how to appreciate a good bar menu. She's a 100 times more likely to be seen cooking on the line in her restaurants than in front of a television camera. She’s not afraid to put pig’s ear or peanuts fried in pork fat on the menu. 19. Lydia Shire  At the age of 21, she became the “salad girl” at one of Boston’s most venerable French restaurants, then took herself to a London cooking school, opened the Four Seasons Hotel dining room in L.A. (becoming the prestigious chain's first-ever female executive chef), then went home again to open her own joint, the award-winning BIBA. In 2001 she took over Locke-Ober, a Boston institution that had refused to allow women in the main dining room for more than 100 years, and became its first female chef. (She is not currently involved with the restaurant.) No matter what’s trendy, her food is always daring and always “big,” made with butter, cream, and offal. And her menus include “sort of burnt Maui onions” and lobster pizza. You can see that the list is long and can reach hundreds and hundreds of names. I hope this time you'll appreciate more when you go to your favourite restaurant and notice that this delicious pasta dish that you craved so much was made by a woman! 

For this post, I used articles from http://chefsblade.monster.com and http://www.thedailymeal.com