Customer Reviews

Mastering the Art of French Cooking

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

First, I cannot cook. other then basic heat and serve.

So I bought a ton of cookbooks and tried a ton of recipes from the food network. Still could not cook.

Picked up this book at a flea market ( the 1963 printing ).

This book is incredible. My kids not only will eat the food, but they love it. ( and they demand the food now ).

I do not agree with other reviews about complexity and cost of the recipe's. She provides both easy and complex recipes.

The recipes are well thought out, with step by step insrtructions and illustrations. The illustrations are priceless, cooking is alot of technique, and the illustrations walk you through it. Every question I would have had about the ingredients or prep are covered.

Oh, and ingredients.. She assumes that the grocery store is the only place you have to shop. So she notes how to adjust for canned or frozen vs fresh, and what you can substitute. Not some cute ethnic market in New york city where everything is always in season from the 4 corners of the world. You can literally take the book to the grocery store to buy your ingredients. and come out with everything you need. ( I have a 40 year old copy of this book, and Julia's assumptions about what I will be able, and will not, to find in my grocery store is 100% correct. )

Crepes - been trying for a year to make the kids crepes. tried several recipes online. failed. first attempt with Julia, and voila crepes.

Omlette - so I could always make an omlette. or at least I thought. now I am an omlette gourmet cook.


I cannot wait to graduate to her other cookbooks.

My mom was insistent that we kids learn to cook, and when Julia Child came on public television in the 60's, the whole family was glued to the set. We watched with fascination as she did things with food we Americans didn't know you could do. Mom bought this cookbook then, and I still have it, cover hanging by threads and covered in all kinds of saucy stains. It's still going strong, getting more stains every time I give a dinner party.

We learned how to make omelets, roasts, soups like Vichysoisse (surprisingly simple potato and leek soup), and how to cook the bumper crop of garden green beans in a new and very delectable manner.

I still think that this may be one of the best cookbooks for vegetables that I have on my shelf. I prize it for the meat section, especially a veal ragout that is possibly one of the most luxurious company dishes for a dinner party. It can be made ahead, and in fact, improves if you do. There are a lot of delicious desserts, some complicated (like Creme Bavaroise) and some cakes such as Reine de Saba (Queen of Sheba), a darkly moist and modest looking little chocolate cake. This is easy to make, but so rich and delicious it should be banned by the AMA. What's not in here is French Bread. That's in Volume II.

We made French-style green beans and the Reine de Saba cake one memorable Thanksgiving when we were very young, and even the kids (seven cousins, five of which were BOYS) sat politely glued to the table for the ENTIRE meal instead of getting up and running around halfway through the feast. The food was THAT good.

While I don't make French food every day because I watch my weight, I do use this book for the princples of good food preparation, even if omitting cream or substituting lower fat choices.

Rarely are we able to say with certainty that a book is at the top of its subject in regard and quality. This book, `Mastering the Art of French Cooking' by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, and Simone Beck is certainly in that most unique position among cookbooks written in English and published in the United States.

With Julia Child's celebrity arising from her long series of TV cooking shows on PBS, it may be easy to forget how Ms. Child rose to a position with the authority that gave her the cachet to do these shows in the first place. This book is the foundation of that cachet and the basis of Ms. Child's influence with an entire generation of amateur and professional chefs.

It may also be easy to forget that this book has three authors and not just one. The three began as instructors in a school of French cooking, `Les Ecole des Trois Gourmandes' operating in Paris in the 1950's. And, it was from their experience with this school that led them to write this book. To be fair, Julia Child originated a majority of the culinary content and contributed almost all of the grunt work with her editors and publisher to get the book published.

The influence of this book cannot be underestimated. It has been written that the style of recipe writing even influenced James Beard, the leading American culinary authority at the time, to change his style of writing in a major cookbook on which he was working when `...French Cooking' was published. Many major American celebrity experts in culinary matters have cited Child and this book as a major influence. Not the least of these is Martha Stewart and Ina Garten. It is interesting that these first to come to mind are not professional chefs, but caterers and teachers of the household cook. Child was not necessarily teaching `haute cuisine', she was teaching what has been named `la cuisine Bourgeoise' or the cooking of the housewife and, to some extent, the cooking of the bistro and brasserie, not the one or two or three star restaurant.

The table of contents follows a very familiar and very comfortable outline, with major chapters covering Soups, Sauces, Eggs, Entrees and Luncheon Dishes, Fish, Poultry, Meat, Vegetables, Cold Buffet, and Deserts and Cakes. The table of contents does not itemize every recipe, but it does break topics down so that one can come very close to a type of preparation you wish from the table of contents. One of the very attractive schemas used to organize recipes in this book is to take a general topic such as Roast Chicken and give not one, but many different variations on this basic method. Under Roast Chicken, for example, you see Spit-roasted Chicken, Roast Chicken Basted with Cream, Roast Chicken Steeped with Port Wine, Roast Squab Chickens with Chicken Liver Canapes, Casserole-roasted Chicken with Tarragon and Casserole-roasted Chicken with Bacon. Thus, the book is not only a tutorial of techniques, it is also a work of taxonomy, giving one a picture of the whole range of variations possible to a basic technique.

The book goes far beyond being a simple collection of recipes in many other ways without straying from the culinary material. Unlike books combining regional recipes with anecdotal memoirs, this book is all business. Heading the recipes is a wealth of general knowledge on cooking variables such as weights versus cooking time and conditions. Headnotes also include general techniques on, for example, how to truss a chicken (with drawings) and many deep observations on professional technique. The notes on roasting chicken instructing one to attend to all the senses in watching and listening to the cooking meat in order to obtain the very best results. This may have easily come from the pen of Wolfgang Puck or Mario Batali.

The individual recipe writing is detailed in the extreme, and recipes typically run to two to three times as long as you may see in `The Joy of Cooking' or `James Beard's American Cookery'. The recipes are also very `modular'. A single recipe may actually require the cooking of two or three component preparations. This is not an invention of Julia Child. I believe she has captured here an essential characteristic of French culinary tradition. The most common of these advance preparations is a stock. More complicated examples are to make a potato salad, a dish in itself, as a component to a Salade Nicoise. What Child may have originated, at least to the world of American cookbook writing, is the notion of a Master Recipe, where many different dishes are presented as variations on a basic preparation. This notion has been used and misused for decades.

This book has become so important in its field that it seems almost irreverent to question the quality of the recipes. I can only say that I have prepared several dishes from these pages, and have always produced a tasty dish and learned something new with each experience. While there are other excellent introductions to French Cooking such as Madeline Kamman's `The New Making of a Chef', one simply cannot go wrong by using this book as ones entree into cooking in general and French cooking in particular.

The more I read other cooking authorities' writing, the more I respect the work of Julia Child and company. Observations on technique that went right over my head two years ago are now revealed as signs of a deep insight into cooking technique.

As large as the book is, the material presented to Knopf in 1961 was actually much larger and the second volume of the book is largely material created for the original writing. To get a reasonably complete picture of French Cookery, do get both volumes at the same time.

A true classic with both simple and advanced techniques. A superb introduction for someone who is just beginning an interest in food.

I ordered this after seeing the movie. I was a little concerned about whether I really wanted the revised edition or try to find an original. I ordered this one, and was so pleased. It has the original instructions and then a note, like with aspic..It has the instructions for using the calf foot, like in the movie "Julie and Julia" and then tells you how to use boxed gelatin instead, since it is readily available now.
I, a down-home Southern cook, at the age of 53, who thought no one could teach this old dog new tricks, have Boeuf Bourguignon simmering in my oven as I write this, and my husband said the house smells better than it ever has with anything cooking (and he loves my cooking!) The only bad part of this recipe is smelling it, wanting to eat it, and having to wait for it to cook slowly in the oven!
Julia Child is a genius, and I can't wait to try more recipes! Love, Love, Love this cookbook. But now I want new cookware and knives............

I have always enjoyed cooking, but had never read this book. I thought that traditional French cooking would be difficult to master, high in fat and unnecessarily time-consuming. Also -- I'm an Italian-American -- I thought that Hazan was the last word in cooking. Boy, was I wrong.

A few months ago, my teenage son returned from his first trip abroad raving about the meals that he'd had in Paris. I knew from experience how great those meals could be and, to please him and provide my family with a new dinner experience, I bought "Mastering" and tried a few recipes. I am now totally hooked. Julia's recipes are clear, well-organized and easy to follow. The book is exquisitely -- and logically -- organized, with each section beginning with a master recipe and continuing through several variations on that theme. This method of organization teaches the structure as well as the ingredients of each recipe, thus encouraging further experimentation by the reader. In other words, by following the recipes, you learn to cook. (Having recently read "My Life In France," I now know that this was Child's intention: "Mastering" took years to write, with each recipe tested and refined many times.)

Some recipes contain too much butter or cream for modern diets, but these recipes may be easily modified. The techniques, however, are flawless: my pie crust was flaky and did not shrink; the ratatouille (which is low in fat) was perfect and beautiful; the swordfish provencale was so good that my son, who never eats leftovers, ate the leftovers cold out of the refrigerator. Indeed, the pastry dough recipe works so well that, after turning it out into the pan, I exclaimed aloud, "Julia Child is brilliant!", much to the surprise of my plumber, who was working in the house at the time and had walked into the kitchen to ask about a leak. In sum, if you have been afraid of this book, don't be, and if you think that it has become dated or irrelevant -- a mere collector's item -- you are very wrong. I still love Hazan, but "Mastering" is the master class.

This was the first cookbook I bought for myself and my wife after we were married 34 years ago and had migrated to Perth, Australia from San Francisco. I knew almost nothing about cooking and Julia, along with Simone and Louisette, taught me how to cook.

The book is far, far more than a collection of recipes; it is a university course in French cooking but after plumbing the depths of souffle's and quenelles, terrines and crepes, you can attack any recipe from virtually any region of the world. It might be like climbing Everst as your first mountain--after that everything is a piece of cake [pardon the expression].

Even as a total neophyte, and this is not to pat myself on the back, the explicit and extremely clear directions will lead, after a careful reading, to a successfully completed, eminently enjoyable and some would say, very complicated dish suitable for any luncheon or dinner. These three women have drained away from these recipes all the little blank spots that inevitably occur in most recipes; those little places where the recipe does not fully explain the next step. The women that wrote this superb book, really a manual about how to cook, dissected the recipe steps precisely to the extent that there are no blanks anywhere in any of the recipes that I have tried and I have tried a great many in the 30 plus years I have been cooking from the book.

At this point one may well ask, "Why am I writing these comments now, thirty-some years after buying and using the book"? The answer is that last night I made a pork chop with a mustard-cream sauce that was superb, as usual, and believe me that says infinitely more about the clearity of the book than my cooking. I love the number of sauces in the book so I looked specifically at the second chapter about sauces to find some for vegetables. It has been my primary cook book for all these years and I wanted to write something complementyary about this fabulous work.

Treat the book like a university textbook--read it carefully, underline appropriate passages and then go back and take written notes on the material; you won't be disappointed and you will learn cooking, "... the way its 'spossed to be".

A book of unique importance in the culinary (& cultural) history of the United States. Before Child, this country was mired in a cuisine that had never really emerged from the depradations of wartime rationing, was being manhandled into the unsavory tinned world of industrialized food (soup in a can, noodles in a box, adulterated, nothing fresh), & had never had much in the way of a national cuisine. Onto this bare plate Child (& her co-authors) placed a sumptuous feast of perfect French food, & with it, an awareness of a better way of eating, a better way of living.

A watershed, a monument. But how does it stand up as a cookbook? In a word, it remains one of the best cookbooks ever written. The recipes are elegant & their products are nearly without exception delicious. The writing is graceful, witty, & informative. The index & glossary are excellent.

This book can teach you to cook. If you can cook, this book can teach you to cook better. If you can't cook, but love to eat, give it to someone who will cook for you, & you will eat better.

Try the Potage Parmentier. The soul of simplicity & gustatory delight.

First of all, I'm a huge Julia fan, have owned this book since 1973, and saw the movie on opening weekend. I have also been to culinary school and own shelves full of cookbooks. I sometimes spend an entire day planning and cooking dinner. I have to say, however, that all of the gushing about this book surprises me. I have a 48" professional range and cupboards full of pots and pans, and I often run out of stovetop space and cooking vessels while preparing some of her recipes. I'm of the "fine ingredients cooked with respect" school of cooking, and Julia most often cooks her vegetables to death, and I'm not sure "medium rare" is in her vocabulary. Her pastry is to die for, her bread (vol 2) is heavenly, and the chocolate almond cake featured in the movie is one of my all time favorite cake recipes. The instructions in the book are clear, and I'm assuming that they have been updated since my edition was published. By all means this cookbook should be in your collection, but if you're looking for a cookbook with the best sauce instructions, I would choose the little gem from Williams Sonoma that is just sauces with wonderful photos of the whole process, and if you want French flavor with a more modern approach, I'd suggest Ina Garten's Barefoot in Paris. Her beouf is wonderfully tasty and takes just one pot. I'm not a fan of the 30 minutes till dinner cookbooks, but Mastering the Art of French Cooking is not the first cookbook I'd choose for a beginner. And if you're going to eat from Julia every night, be sure to serve French portions as well as French food.

The movie "Julie & Julia" is built around the astonishing idea that a fan of "Mastering The Art of French Cooking, Volume One" would cook her way through the book's almost-600 recipes in a single year. I've been using this book for three decades and I've only made a fraction of the recipes. But I've made that fraction so many times that the pages fall open to my favorite recipes.

The other way to identify my favorites? Greasy pages. Makes sense --- Child knew, when Michael Pollan and Nina Planck were still in their cribs, that it wasn't real food that kills you, it's grotesque American portions. As Child gaily told her television audience, "If you're afraid of butter, as many people are nowadays, just put in cream!"

Such bluntness was her nature --- and her charm. She came from money and privilege; the challenge of her life was to find something worth committing herself to. First came Paul Child. Then, at 37, came the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris. And then, through a bit of luck, came an opportunity to work with Simone Beck on a French cookbook for Americans. As she tells the story in My Life in France, that book took almost a decade.

Judith Jones was the first American editor to read the manuscript. She flipped: "I pored over the recipe for a beef stew and learned the right cuts of meat for braising, the correct fat to use (one that would not burn), the importance of drying the meat and browning it in batches, the secret of the herb bouquet, the value of sautéing the garnish of onions and mushrooms separately. I ran home to make the recipe --- and my first bite told me that I had finally produced an authentic French boeuf bourguignon --- as good as one I could get in Paris. This, I was convinced, was a revolutionary cookbook, and if I was so smitten, certainly others would be."

Quality mattered. So did timing. "Mastering The Art of French Cooking, Volume One" was published in 1961. In the White House was a President with a wife who loved France. Air travel was replacing ocean liners --- Americans in larger numbers were traveling to Europe. Frozen food and TV dinners were clogging the supermarkets; Child lobbied for accessible sophistication, and changed the way some of us ate.

And then there was multi-media. WGBH, Boston's public TV station, invited Child to promote her book. The station had no studio kitchen, so she brought eggs, a whisk and a hot plate. On camera, she made an omelette, narrating the process with wit and confidence. A TV series soon followed --- she was Martha Stewart before there was Martha Stewart.

Actually, she was much more. Back then, cooking was not a respected profession. She showed that it was a discipline --- and an art. And she legitimized the home-gourmet. Was cooking a chore? Not after you'd seen Julia Child, amusing herself as she prepared dinner.

All these years later, I'm still charmed by Child's 13-page screed on omelettes. On the other hand, I never had much use for her pātés or terrines, soufflés or sauces. Dessert still seems like overkill. And the seven recipes for kidney? Non-events. It's the classics that first appealed to me, and still do.

I really can't add anything to the previous reviews. This book is a classic and belongs in every kitchen, as does its companion, Mastering the Art of French Cooking Volume II. Which brings me to the REAL purpose for this review: Have you tried searching for volume two on the Amazon website? Not much luck, eh?

Fear not...here's help! The ISBN number for the second volume is 0394721772. Search using this number to find it.