Mastering the Art of French Cooking: The Essential Cooking Classics - Hardcover

Child, Julia; Bertholle, Louisette; Beck, Simone

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307593525 ISBN 13: 9780307593528

Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2023

Synopsis

The perfect gift for any follower of Julia Child—and any lover of French food. This boxed set brings together Mastering the Art of French Cooking, first published in 1961, and its sequel, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume Two, published in 1970.

Volume One is the classic cookbook, in its entirety—524 recipes.
“Anyone can cook in the French manner anywhere,” wrote Mesdames Beck, Bertholle, and Child, “with the right instruction.” And here is the book that, for nearly fifty years, has been teaching Americans how.

Mastering the Art of French Cooking is for both seasoned cooks and beginners who love good food and long to reproduce at home the savory delights of the classic cuisine, from the historic Gallic masterpieces to the seemingly artless perfection of a dish of spring-green peas. The techniques learned in this beautiful book, with more than one hundred instructive illustrations, can be applied to recipes in all other French cookbooks, making them infinitely usable. In compiling the secrets of famous Cordon Bleu chefs, the authors produced a magnificent volume that continues to have a place of honor in American kitchens.

Volume Two is the sequel to the great cooking classic—with 257 additional recipes.
Following the publication of the celebrated Volume One, Julia Child and Simone Beck continued to search out and sample new recipes among the classic dishes and regional specialties of France—cooking, conferring, tasting, revising, perfecting. Out of their discoveries they made, for Volume Two, a brilliant selection of precisely those recipes that not only add to the repertory but, above all, bring the reader to a new level of mastery of the art of French cooking.

Each of these recipes is worked out step-by-step, with the clarity and precision that are the essence of the first volume. Five times as many drawings as in Volume One make the clear instructions even more so.

Perhaps the most remarkable achievement of this volume is that it will make Americans actually more expert than their French contemporaries in two supreme areas of cookery: baking and charcuterie. In France one can turn to the local bakery for fresh and expertly baked bread, or to neighborhood charcuterie for pâtés and terrines and sausages. Here, most of us have no choice but to create them for ourselves.
Bon appétit!

About this title

Review:

Praise for Julia Child and Mastering the Art of French Cooking

"Julia Child paved the way for Chez Panisse and so many others by demystifying French food and by reconnecting pleasure and delight with cooking and eating at the table. She brought forth a culture of American ingredients and gave us all the confidence to cook with them in the pursuit of flavor." --Alice Waters, Chez Panisse

"Mastering the Art of French Cooking was one of my first introductions to my foundation of understanding the art of French cooking. The combination of reading Julia's book, working in the kitchen, and watching her television shows helped lead me to my beginnings in serious cuisine. Julia is . . . the grande dame of cooking, who has touched all of our lives with her immense respect and appreciation of cuisine." --Emeril Lagasse, Emeril's Restaurant

"Julia has slowly but surely altered our way of thinking about food. She has taken the fear out of the term 'haute cuisine.' She has increased gastronomic awareness a thousandfold by stressing the importance of good foundation and technique, and she has elevated our consciousness to the refined pleasures of dining. Through the years her shows have kept me in rapt attention, and her humor has kept me in stitches. She is a national treasure, a culinary trendsetter, and a born educator beloved by all." --Thomas Keller, The French Laundry

"Julia freed the American public from their fears of cooking French. By doing so, she greatly expanded the audience for all serious food writers. Her demystification prepared that public for the rest of us. I believe that the television shows based on that landmark book did even more to encourage reluctant cooks to try their hands . . . much to our benefit." --Mimi Sheraton

"1961 A.D. Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking is published. Her black-and-white TV show on WGBH in Boston soon follows. Child is one of the great teachers of the millennium: She is intelligent and charismatic, and her undistinguished manual skills are not daunting to her viewers. An entire generation of ambitious American home cooks is instantly born." --Jeffrey Steingarten

About the Author:

Julia Child was born in Pasadena, California. She graduated from Smith College and worked for the OSS during World War II in Ceylon and China, where she met Paul Child. After they were married they lived in Paris, where Ms. Child studied at the Cordon Bleu and taught cooking with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, with whom she wrote the first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961).
In 1963 Boston’s WGBH launched The French Chef television series, which made Julia Child a national celebrity, earning her the Peabody Award in 1965 and an Emmy in 1966. Her subsequent public television shows—Julia Child & Company (1978), Julia Child & More Company (1980), Cooking with Master Chefs (1993), In Julia’s Kitchen with Master Chefs (1995), Baking with Julia (1996), and her one-on-one collaboration with Jacques Pépin, Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home (1999)—were all accompanied by books of the same names. The Way to Cook, her magnum opus, was published in 1989, and in 2000 she gave us Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom, a distillation of her years of cooking experience. Her memoir, My Life in France, was published posthumously in 2006. She died in 2004.

About this edition

• Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Publication date: 2023
• ISBN 10: 0307593525
• ISBN 13: 9780307593528
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1