http://live.gourmet.com/2011/05/app-...game-changers/
Julia Child
The great Julia needs no introduction. Especially not after the great Meryl played her in the movie.
Alice Waters
The great Alice needs no introduction. OK, just this: Chez Panisse, farmers markets, locavore movement, Edible Schoolyard. As yet, theyve only made documentary movies about her life.
Fannie Farmer
If it werent for her wed still be cooking with handfuls and pinches. Farmers 1896 Boston CookingSchool Cook Book introduced standardized measurements. She also explained the chemical stuff a century before Harold McGee.
Martha Stewart
Cooking as an ingredient of homemaking; homemaking as a craft; crafts as a competitive sport; the art of multimedia saturationall this we blame on Martha.
M.F.K. Fisher
Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher invented food writing. All food bloggers would like to be her.
Marcella Hazan
Marcella made Italian cucina make sense. She broke it down for us, explained the regions, and her meticulous recipes are so reliable. She banished the redsauce image forever.
Madhur Jaffrey
As Marcella is to Italy, so is Madhur to the Indian subcontinent. She also is a great spokesperson for vegetarian, and assorted other Asian cuisines. And she is beautiful. And can act.
Judith Jones
Without her there may have been no Julia (not to mention Hazan, Jaffrey, and so many more), because Jones was Childs early, only champion, and lifelong editor. She also rescued Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl from the slush pile, but thats another story.
Irma S. Rombauer
In all its eight versions, and all its 75+ years (and counting), Joy of Cooking is arguably the essential American cookbook. Irma wrote (and published) the first version in 1931, giving birthliterallyto a culinary dynasty.
Hannah Glasse and Mrs. Beeton
Mrs. Glasses The Art of Cookery (1747) and Mrs. Isabella Beetons Book of Household Management (1861) are Important Foundation Cookbooks.
Patricia Wells
Milwaukeeborn Wells gave us France, spreading the bistro love as the Parisbased restaurant critic of LExpress and the Herald Tribune. She taught usand reminded the Frenchabout Provençal cooking, and quoi? An American woman is telling the French what to eat? Oui.
Lidia Bastianich (and her brood)
Everybodys nonna, Lidia founded an empire, and she does it all: cookbooks, TV shows, restaurants, and wines galore. Then last summerwith son Joe, Mario Batali, and Oscar Farinettishe opened Eataly, the cucina italiana Manhattan multiverse and, basically, took over the world.
Rachael Ray
Shes heee-eere. Your TVs haunted by her, and, love or hate the woman, her always easy recipes have cured millions of their kitchen phobia.
Elizabeth David
Not that this is a competition, but Davids French Country Cooking predated Childs Mastering the Art of French Cooking by a decade. The terribly influential British writer didnt so much teach a nation to cook French as inspire one to think Mediterranean.
Sheila Lukins and Julee Rosso
Its hard to overstate the influence of The Silver Palatethe 1982 cookbook named after the gourmet emporium this pair opened in 1977 on Manhattans Upper West Side. Before, there was no ratatouille; after, there was chicken Marbella.
Maida Heatter
The beloved goddess of apple pieand coconut layer cake, chocolate Bavarian, lemon squares, cherry cobbleryou name it. She makes every dessert in the land perfect.
Dorothy Hamilton
Educator extraordinaire, Hamilton founded Manhattans International Culinary Center, formerly known as the French Culinary Institute: It counts among its many alumni a triumvirate of iconoclasts dominant in 21stcentury food world U.S.A.: David Chang, Dan Barber, and Wylie Dufresne.
Clotilde Dusoulier
Dusouliers 2003vintage blog Chocolate & Zucchini is the Francophiles dream. She posts from Montmartre about cheese and briochebut also, to be fair, mochi and muffins. Her fifth bookher translation and adaptation of the 1932 French equivalent of Joy of Cooking, Ginette Mathiots Je Sais Cuisiner (I Know How to Cook),is already iconic.