Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1

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.


Most Important Cookbook of the Last 50 Years. Period.   April 6, 2004
B. Marold (Bethlehem, PA United States)
465 out of 479 found this review helpful

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.


A Learning Experience   July 8, 2006
rctnyc (NY, NY USA)
97 out of 99 found this review helpful

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 Revised One is the One to Get   August 14, 2009
Just Loves Books (Southern US)
66 out of 66 found this review helpful

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............