Rating: 
Summary: A must for every library
Review: I'm delighted to see that Julia's cornerstone book has been re-issued. It is a must. If I were sent to a desert island and allowed to bring only two cookbooks I'd take this and Joy of Cooking. Julia adds not only relatively more sophisticated recipes, but the techniques Joy lacks. Beard's Theory and Practice of Cooking would be third on my list for a new cook. Begining cooks need not be intimidated by Julia's book. At the time it was written most Americans had no knowledge of French cooking. This was THE book designed to introduce Frence ingredients, recipes and techniques. It still does that with good illustrations and recipes any cook can execute to perfection. Experienced cooks will be delighted with the variety of excellent recipes, many well suited to low carb cooking. This a book that has served me well for over 30 years.
Rating:
Summary: A must for every library
Review: I'm delighted to see that Julia's cornerstone book has been re-issued. It is a must. If I were sent to a desert island and allowed to bring only two cookbooks I'd take this and Joy of Cooking. Julia adds not only relatively more sophisticated recipes, but the techniques Joy lacks. Beard's Theory and Practice of Cooking would be third on my list for a new cook. Begining cooks need not be intimidated by Julia's book. At the time it was written most Americans had no knowledge of French cooking. This was THE book designed to introduce Frence ingredients, recipes and techniques. It still does that with good illustrations and recipes any cook can execute to perfection. Experienced cooks will be delighted with the variety of excellent recipes, many well suited to low carb cooking. This a book that has served me well for over 30 years.
Rating:
Summary: best all-purpose, chef recommended
Review: I've been in the restaurant business for 10 years... over the past 3 years I have bought several books including french laundry, sauces (James Peterson), CIA professional chef, along with other less pricey books... but Julia Child Mastering french cooking is the one I always turn to (aside from to look at pictures.) All the recipes I have used so far have turned out perfect. Plus it is so diverse and thorough... I think it is the best all around fundamentally sound cookbook out there.
Chef recommended
Rating: 
Summary: tentative , depends on authenticity
Review: Is this a true version of the original 1960s version of this book? I have that and wish to acquire another copy for my son. I don't want a modernized version. In the older Volume I, turn to almost any page(s) and if you follow the instructions you'll discover recreational-eating heaven ( as opposed to nutritional-eating heaven). However be warned this is not for anyone who is in a hurry; the preparations are exacting and sometimes laborious. But the results are wonderful. The only exceptions are (IMHO)the cake/frosting recipes. Ack.
Rating:
Summary: good, informative, easy to use book
Review: Julia Child is a master in the art of French cooking. I read this book after reading her biography. I am 15 and all I have seen of Julia Child is her in her old age.... I highly suggest buying thid book and also Volume I which has a phenominal recipe for French Onion Soup. Jen
Rating:
Summary: A Classic for Every Bookshelf
Review: My current, first-edition hardcover of this book, purchased last year with mildew and mold aplenty at a junk store in Kentucky, is on its last leg. I'm waiting for the 50th-anniversery edition to come out, so I won't have to look for a non-mildewed place to grab the book and pull it off the shelf anymore. ( The 50th-anniversery edition is also going to be cheaper, thank heavens. Fifty bucks is a ridiculous price for any hardback book. )
Rating:
Summary: must have
Review: My first cookbook was Joy of Cooking, my second, Mastering the Art of French Cooking; both were solid, basic, accessible, world-expanding, indispensable guides for me when I was young and learning to do more in the kitchen than I had grown up with. An appreciation of food and a view toward a larger world started here for me. It is an excellent place still, this set, to start an education in classic French cuisine. Julia Child wrote the recipes with an inexperienced cook and American audience in mind, and 35-40 years ago, probably, so the dishes are imminently do-able. Get all the volumes.
Rating:
Summary: My cooking textbook and still my favorite "all-purpose" book
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: This cookbook is one of the good things in life
Review: My mother bought this book back in the early 1970's when she was a busy working mother. On one of my visits home from college, I expressed a newly found interest in cooking. So Mom gifted me with "Mastering the Art of French Cooking". She liked to bake but had left cooking as a priority for that time in her life. Now it's 1999, and I will send a copy of this book to my sister for her birthday in May. Mom wants one too. Her birthday is in May as well, and she is tired of hearing about the wonderful dishes I prepare from this book. So I will return the favor of twenty years ago and send her a copy. In retirement, cooking has become once again a priority for her. The French took the wonderful cuisine of the Florentines, themselves heirs to the Roman way with food, and refined it exquisitely. If you have any doubts, take a recipe that interests you from the book at the bookstore. Go home and prepare it. If you are a novice cook, you will be rewarded by savory, tasteful results beyond any hopes you might have held out for yourself. Just follow the recipes scrupulously. If you love to cook and you're American, this book is your right arm. It's the base from which you can extend yourself confidently into other cuisines.
Rating:
Summary: Most Important Cookbook of the Last 50 Years. Period.
Review: 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.
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