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Madame Elisabeth Brassart was the proprietress of the Le Cordon Bleu school in Paris from 1945 to 1984.^[1] The present owner, André J. Cointreau, purchased it from Brassart, who was an old family friend.^[2]

Brassart managed to attract many notable chefs to teach at the Le Cordon Bleu under her tenure. She was a dedicated, smart, astute businesswoman who gave the school its impeccable international reputation. However, she has been painted unfavorably in several printed accounts, notably biographies of Julia Child, who studied at the school under Brassart. Child frequently described her as a "nasty" woman.^[3]

"The truth is that Mme. Brassart and I got on each other's nerves. She seemed to think that awarding a student a diploma was like inducting them into some kind of secret society; as a result the school's hallways were filled with an air of petty jealousy and distrust. From my perspective, Mme. Brassart lacked professional experience, was a terrible administrator and tangled herself up in picayune details and politics..."- from My Life In France, excerpted in The New York Times, Feb. 19, 2006

Not suprinsingly, since she flunked the first course. By many other people's account Madame Brassart had a wonderful personnality. She had a way of winning people's heart with her powerful blue eyes, her sense of humour and her overall kindness.She would rather not speak about someone than to say something negative about them.

In the 2009 film, Julie & Julia, Brassart was mainly portrayed according to how Child described her. The movie has a charicatured version of her just to dramatize a famous historical incident that Julia Child wrote about and others have repeated and it certainly does not properly represent most people's memory of her. Shortly after the film's release, Nina Zagat, who also spent time at Le Cordon Bleu under Brassart, and her husband responded to the film's portrayal with an article comparing Brassart and Child, who they both knew personally and stating that Brassart was more sympathetic in real life. "Having known both women, we can safely say that it's hard to imagine two less compatible people. Julia was tall and assertive with a loud, braying voice in English--one can only imagine what she sounded like in French. Madame Brassart, in contrast, was petite, elegant, and aristocratic, and spoke impeccable French and English, as well as several other languages. She also was an important figure in culinary education, having successfully led Le Cordon Bleu from the late '40s through 1985. As her niece, the distinguished ceramicist Martine Vermeulen, of Feu-Follet Pottery, reminded us just last night, she had the clearest skin and the most piercing blue eyes--"You could never put anything over on her, not with those eyes."From our point of view, Madame Brassart was much more sympathetic than portrayed in the film--she had a great sense of humor and could be very funny in an understated way ("Laughter was de rigueur with her," her niece said)--and her achievements as a culinary educator, much like Julia's, are indisputable.^[4]

[edit] References

Kummer, Corby, Paris reacts to Julie and Julia, sept 17 2009, The Atlantic monthly.