Jacques Pépin is a French chef, author, culinary educator, television personality, and artist. After having been the personal chef of French President Charles de Gaulle, he moved to the US in 1959 and after working in New York's top French restaurants, refused the same job with President John F. Kennedy in the White House and instead took a culinary development job with Howard Johnson's. During his career, he has served in numerous prestigious restaurants, first, in Paris, and then in America. He has appeared on American television and has written for The New York Times, Food & Wine and other publications. He has authored more than 30 cookbooks, some of which have become best sellers. Pépin was a longtime friend of the American chef Julia Child, and their 1999 PBS series Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home won a Daytime Emmy Award. He also holds a BA and a MA from Columbia University in French literature.
Marcella Hazan was an Italian cooking writer whose books were published in English. Her cookbooks are credited with introducing the public in the United States and the United Kingdom to the techniques of traditional Italian cooking. She was considered by chefs and fellow food writers to be the doyenne of Italian cuisine.
Edna Regina Lewis was a renowned American chef, teacher, and author who helped refine the American view of Southern cooking. She championed the use of fresh, in season ingredients and characterized Southern food as fried chicken, pork, and fresh vegetables – most especially greens. She wrote and co-wrote four books which covered Southern cooking and life in a small community of freed slaves and their descendants.
Anne Willan is the founder of the École de Cuisine La Varenne, which operated in Paris and Burgundy France, from 1975 until 2007. La Varenne classes continued in Santa Monica, California, through 2017.
Betty Ellen Fussell is an American writer and is the author of 12 books, ranging from biography to cookbooks, food history and memoir. Over the last 50 years, her essays on food, travel and the arts have appeared in scholarly journals, popular magazines and newspapers as varied as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, Saveur, Vogue, Food & Wine, Metropolitan Home and Gastronomica. Her memoir, My Kitchen Wars, was performed in Hollywood and New York as a one-woman show by actress Dorothy Lyman. Her most recent book is Eat Live Love Die, and she is now working on How to Cook a Coyote: A Manual of Survival.
Eileen Yin-Fei Lo was a chef. She authored eleven cookbooks on Chinese cuisine.
Joan Nathan is an American cookbook author and newspaper journalist. She has produced TV documentaries on the subject of Jewish cuisine. She was a co-founder of New York's Ninth Avenue Food Festival under then-Mayor Abraham Beame. The Jerusalem Post has called her the "matriarch of Jewish cooking".
Irena Chalmers-Taylor was an author and food commentator/essayist, teacher and culinary mentor. Named "the culinary oracle of 100 cookbooks" by noted American restaurant critic and journalist, Gael Greene, Chalmers was recognized as the pioneer of the single subject cookbook. Her life story revealed an unlikely journey to becoming a James Beard Foundation "Who's Who" of Food and Beverage in America 1988 Award Recipient.
Judith Jones was an American writer and editor, best known for having rescued The Diary of Anne Frank from the reject pile. Jones also championed Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She retired as senior editor and vice president at Alfred A. Knopf in 2011 and fully retired in 2013 after more than 60 years at the company.
Paula Wolfert is an American author of nine books on cooking and the winner of numerous cookbook awards including what is arguably the top honor given in the food world: The James Beard Foundation Medal For Lifetime Achievement. A specialist in Mediterranean food, she has written extensively on Moroccan cuisine including two books, one of them a 2012 James Beard Award winner. She also wrote The Cooking of South-West France, and books about the cuisine of the Eastern Mediterranean, slow Mediterranean cooking and Mediterranean clay pot cooking.
Sarah Helen Bradley Toliver Mahammitt was a caterer, chef and author of cookbooks in Omaha, Nebraska. She studied at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris 1927 and sought to bring formal, European style cooking to African-American women in Omaha.
Darra Goldstein is an American author and food scholar who is the Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor of Russian, emerita at Williams College.
Patricia Jinich is a Mexican chef, TV personality, cookbook author, educator, and food writer. She is best known for her James Beard Award-winning and Emmy-nominated public television series Pati's Mexican Table. Her first cookbook, also titled Pati's Mexican Table, was published in March 2013, her second cookbook, Mexican Today, was published in April 2016, and her third cookbook, Treasures of the Mexican Table, was published in November 2021.
Malinda Russell was a free African-American woman from Tennessee who earned her living as a cook and published the first known cookbook by an African-American woman. The book is historically significant, as it shows that African-American Southern cooking was not solely the domain of poverty cooking, but provides evidence of a sophisticated cosmopolitan skill with complex dishes.
Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone is a 1997 cook book by Deborah Madison. It contains 1,400 vegetarian recipes from soups to desserts.
Aunt Priscilla was a pseudonym for the columnist Eleanor Purcell of The Baltimore Sun. Purcell used the image of the Mammy archetype to create a cooking column called Aunt Priscilla's Recipes which was purported to be written by an African American woman. The daily column was written in an exaggerated dialect.
Melissa Clark is an American food writer, cookbook author and New York Times columnist. She is the author of over 40 cookbooks and has received multiple awards from the James Beard Foundation and IACP for her work. Clark is a regular guest on television series such as Today show, Rachael Ray and Iron Chef America and on radio programmes such as The Splendid Table on NPR and The Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC.
Francis Lam is an American food journalist, cookbook editor, and since 2017 the host of American Public Media's The Splendid Table.
Cleora Butler (1901–1985) was a chef, caterer and cookbook writer based in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Joe Yonan is an American vegetarian/plant based food writer and cookbook author who currently serves as the Food and Dining Editor for The Washington Post. He is also a cookbook author whose most recent work is Mastering the Art of Plant-Based Cooking: Vegan Recipes, Tips, and Techniques (2024).
