[5] Kamman first learned to cook as a young girl at her aunt's Michelin-starred restaurant in Touraine, France.
[4]' She returned to Paris at the end of the World War 2 with the hope of attending university, but finances required her to work.
They married and moved to Philadelphia, but, by her own admission, she did not easily adjust to life in the United States, in part because she found American cooking and ingredients in the early 1960s inferior to those of her native France.
"[7][8] Many have attributed Kamman's critique to professional jealousy based on Child's immense popularity with American audiences and the success of her "French chef" brand.
In addition to cooking classes, chef-students were given lessons in kitchen chemistry and science, culinary history, geology, and geography to increase their appreciation of menu planning and terroir.
[14] She dedicated her third book, When French Women Cook (Athenaeum, 1976),[15] to writing down their recipes, most recorded for the first time, in an attempt to preserve a record of a France long since gone, and also determined to "bring back to life" the "women with worn hands stained by vegetables peeled, parched by work in the house, garden or fields, wrinkled by age and experience", so her readers will know "that there was once a civilisation that was human, tender, enjoyable and loveable."
I had transcended the limits imposed on women by generations of professional chefs and found myself succeeding in a so-called male profession.