Beck was a cookbook author and cooking instructor. In the 1950s she was part of the Cercle des Gourmettes, an exclusive women's culinary club. She and Louisette Bertholle, who also joined the Cercle, began working on a French cookbook for Americans. After an unsuccessful attempt at writing a full-length cookbook, they published the brief What's Cooking in France? in 1952. Beck followed with the booklet, Le Pruneau Devant le Forneau: Recettes de Cuisine (ca. 1952), her only publication in French. After she met Julia Child in 1949 the idea of writing a cookbook for Americans was rekindled. Child joined the Cercle too, and the three worked closely together. They formed their own Ecole des Trois Gourmandes in 1951 to give lessons in French cooking to American women living in Paris; the school continued on and off into the late 1970s. In 1961 they published Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I. Volume II, co-authored by Beck and Child alone, followed in 1970.

The daughter of Samuel and Narcissa G. Chamberlain, Narcisse Chamberlain was an editor at William Morrow and Company, specializing in cookbooks. She worked with her parents on many volumes, including The Flavor of France in Recipes and Pictures (1962) and French Menus for Parties (1968). She was also a contributor to the 1988 and 2001 editions of Clémentine in the Kitchen, originally authored by her father.

Julia Child, an author of French cookbooks, teacher, and television personality, was born in California and graduated from Smith College. She served with the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, married Paul Cushing Child in 1946, and studied at the Cordon Bleu while he was in Paris with the U.S. Information Agency. Her television series, The French Chef, first aired in 1963. It launched a revolution in cooking and eating in the United States and was followed by later programs, including Julia Child & Company, Julia Child & More Company, and Dinner with Julia. Her book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking (written with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle), and many subsequent cookbooks and articles demonstrated methods and recipes of classic French cooking. See also the Additional papers of Julia Child, the Audio collection of Julia Child, and the Video collection of Julia Child. For more information about collections relating to Child, see the Julia Child research guide.

Chu was a Chinese American culinary instructor and author. In 1954 Madame Chu established her career as an instructor of Chinese cooking when she was invited to New York City to teach at the China Institute in America. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, she taught many classes on Chinese cooking, including at the Mandarin House School of Cooking, the Culinary Institute of America, and in her own apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She published two cookbooks, The Pleasures of Chinese Cooking (1962) and Madame Chu's Chinese Cooking School (1975), which were both praised for their clear and concise approach to preparing Chinese dishes for an American audience.

Les Dames d'Escoffier, Boston Chapter, is part of an international society representing distinguished women chefs, restaurateurs, caterers, culinary educators and historians, food journalists, fine food purveyors, hospitality executives, etc. It was founded on April 12, 1959, as Les Dames des Amis d'Escoffier, as a collaboration between Eda Saccone and Charles L. Banino, then the executive chef and managing director at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston. In 1966 the chapter became the first women's chapter to be affiliated with Les Amis d'Escoffier, and in 1992 it was officially renamed Les Dames d'Escoffier, Boston Chapter, part of Les Dames d'Escoffier International, which seeks to promote the "understanding, appreciation, and knowledge of food, wine, and other beverages, nutrition, the arts of the table and other fields as they are related to these disciplines." The chapter also funds scholarships for students in the food industry through the Charles L. Banino Scholarship Foundation.

Elizabeth David was the foremost British food writer of her day, publishing nine definitive books that helped reawaken the postwar British palate while educating a generation of cooks about food and its joys. David wrote cooking articles and published A Book of Mediterranean Food (1950), a mixture of recipes and culinary lore and an introduction to culture as food. David's first book was followed by French Country Cooking (1951), Italian Food (1954), Summer Cooking (1955) and French Provincial Cooking (1960). She then wrote two books on the traditions of English food: Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen (1970) and English Bread and Yeast Cookery (1977). An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, a collection of her work for Vogue, The Spectator, and Nova, was published in 1984, and another collection of articles, Is There a Nutmeg in the House?, was published posthumously in 2000.

Avis DeVoto was an editor for Alfred A. Knopf, specializing in cookbooks, from 1956 to 1958. The bulk of this collection concerns the editing and publishing of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking (Volumes I and II), Elizabeth David's Italian Cooking, Simone Beck's Simca's Cuisine, and Peggy Harvey's Season to Taste. Correspondence between DeVoto and Child also includes discussions of McCarthyism, the U.S. Foreign Service, Child's husband Paul being cultural attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Paris, and the couple's experiences during their time in Germany and Norway.

The Epicurean Club of Boston and Vicinity was incorporated in 1894 for "the purpose of the maintenance of a reading room, where members may meet for literary and social entertainment, and for educating members to a higher degree of proficiency in the Art of Cooking, and for extending aid and relief to unfortunate and needy members." By 2004, it had more than 200 members, and its work centered on providing professional education, community service, and culinary scholarships and grants.

Fisher was an author and food writer. She published her first book, Serve It Forth, in 1937, and a second, Consider the Oyster, in 1941. As a freelance writer in Hollywood and later New York, she published cookbooks, novels, travel books, and an autobiography. She wrote a column for the New Yorker, "Gastronomy Recalled," in 1968 and 1969, and published essays and short stories in House Beautiful, Saturday Review, and other publications.

Culinary historian and educator Patricia M. Kelly was the daughter of Dorothy (Vigneault) and Joseph Kelly and the sister of James F. Kelly. She studied at Regis College (BA) and Northeastern University (MA) and taught history and anthropology at Hull High School (Hull, Massachusetts) before developing culinary arts programs at Essex Agricultural School and North Shore Community College. A founder of the Culinary Historians of Boston, she co-authored the Bibliography of Culinary History: Food Resources in Eastern Massachusetts, and published Luncheonette: Ice Cream, Beverage, and Sandwich Recipes from the Golden Age of the Soda Fountain (1989). She also assisted Julia Child in indexing some of her best-selling cookbooks and contributed articles to the Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink.

Food and garden writer Leslie Mann Land was born in 1947 and grew up on a farm near Reading, Pennsylvania. She attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she became one of the first chefs at Chez Panisse shortly after it opened in 1971. Land wrote the syndicated newspaper column "Good Food" for twenty years and the “Garden Q&A” column for The New York Times from the 1980s to 2008. She also served as editor at Yankee Magazine and First for Women magazine. Much of her writing was informed by her life in the coastal town of Cushing, Maine, where she had lived since the 1970s, and celebrated the cultivation and use of local food. She was the author of Reading Between the Recipes and The 3,000 Mile Garden, a collection of correspondence with the British horticulturalist Roger Phillips that became a series on public television.

Lucas was a restaurateur, author, and teacher. In the early 1930s she opened Le Petit Cordon Bleu Restaurant and Cooking School in London with Rosemary Hume. Moving to the United States in 1940, she opened her first Cordon Bleu restaurant and school in New York City in 1942, and in the mid-1940s she launched a television cooking show. She traveled widely, demonstrating and teaching cooking, and published many cookbooks including Cordon Bleu Cook Book (1947) and The Gourmet Cooking School Cookbook (1964, with Darlene Geis). In 1956 she opened the Egg Basket Restaurant in New York, followed by the Ginger Man Restaurant in Lincoln Center, the Brasserie Restaurant in Bennington, Vermont, the Dione Lucas Gourmet Center in New York, and the Heritage Village Restaurant in Southbury. See also Recipes of Dione Lucas

Martinez is a chef, restaurateur, television host, and cookbook author. She has been instrumental in introducing Americans to authentic Mexican food through her restaurants and writings. She has written three cookbooks: Food from my Heart: Cuisines of Mexico Remembered and Reimagined (1992), which includes autobiographical sections as well as recipes; The Food and Life of Oaxaca: Traditional Recipes from Mexico's Heart (1997); and, with Anne Mendelson, Zarela's Veracruz: Cooking and Culture in Mexico's Tropical Melting Pot (2001), the companion volume to her 13-part PBS show ¡Zarela! La Cocina Veracruzana.

Irma von Starkloff Rombauer (1877-1962) and her daughter, Marion Rombauer Becker (1903-1976), were the co-authors of the classic best-selling cookbook, Joy of Cooking. Rombauer came to cookbook writing as a complete amateur after her husband's suicide in 1930. From her first effort, published in 1931 at her own expense, Joy evolved into a general cookbook notable for its ingenious new recipe format; it was published commercially in 1936 and met with national success in 1943. Marion Rombauer Becker joined as co-author in 1951. Becker steered the cookbook as it developed into one of the most important American culinary reference works of the twentieth century.

Food writer and cooking teacher Martha Rose Shulman attended Radcliffe College (Class of 1972) but dropped out to help organize farm workers in Michigan and Texas. In the 1970s she ran a supper club in Austin, Texas, and later in Paris. The author of a number of cookbooks, many inspired by Mexican and Mediterranean cuisines, Shulman was also a food columnist for The New York Times. The papers of Martha Rose Shulman include personal and professional correspondence; personal journals; drafts of Shulman's cookbooks and columns; publicity and clippings; recipes; notebooks regarding her catering work and Supper Clubs in Austin, Texas, and Paris, France; photographs; and audiovisual materials consisting of interviews and cooking demonstrations.