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Summary: The essentials of classic French cooking, but not mastery
Review: If you aspire to French cooking, I cannot recommend "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" enough, and you DO need both volumes (the great breads are in the second volume.)But...if you want the most often asked-for French classics like Lobster Thermidor, Cassoulet and the classic desserts to use for your elegant dinner parties, this is a BETTER choice. It is slimmed-down, modernized, has photos and is the best of the best. So it's easy to choose; want to learn and read about French cooking, I like the Mastering series better (even better than Jacques Pepin's book.) Want a handy reference for classic dishes for occasional forays into French cuisine? Choose this one.
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Summary: Old friend re-issued
Review: If you aspire to French cooking, I cannot recommend "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" enough, and you DO need both volumes (the great breads are in the second volume.) But...if you want the most often asked-for French classics like Lobster Thermidor, Cassoulet and the classic desserts to use for your elegant dinner parties, this is a BETTER choice. It is slimmed-down, modernized, has photos and is the best of the best. So it's easy to choose; want to learn and read about French cooking, I like the Mastering series better (even better than Jacques Pepin's book.) Want a handy reference for classic dishes for occasional forays into French cuisine? Choose this one.
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Summary: Hardly her greatest, but still worth the price
Review: In the beginning, there was Mastering the Art of French Cooking, where Julia Child, Simone Beck, and Louise Bertholle got together and made the art of Escoffier accessible to the average home cook. Somebody got Julia to do a couple of TV specials demonstrating her recipes, and this turned into one of WGBH-Boston's first great public television productions, The French Chef. This book is the record of the first few seasons of one of the world's first cooking shows. It's not a great cookbook -- Julia has written three or four of those -- but if nothing else it's an archaeological gem of the culinary world. Organized not by recipe category but by episode, what we have here is a sort of reconstruction of a studio notebook on how to create a cooking show. An introduction describes the process of putting the show together, an occasionally-harrowing story of borrowed kitchens, technical challenges, and accidental stardom, while the recipes (first thirteen shows long since missing, sadly) give not just instructions but themes, even menus, the way Julia and her staff concieved them. Yes, there are many good recipes in here, but that's not the main reason to buy this book. This book interested me because I'm putting together a cooking show of my own, and buying it just before taping my first episode served as inspiration and even a bit of a how-to book on the oddities of mixing TV production and food. Julia has written many books since, and much of what's in here can be found in more effective form in those books, but this is one of the few TV cookbooks I've seen that is truly a record of a cooking show, as opposed to a cookbook that happened to be written by the host of a show. For the price, it's certainly a worthwhile purchase.
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Summary: Julia Child!
Review: Julia Child communicated with humor, grace and intelligence, her enthusiasim for gourmet cooking in order to revolutionize Americans return to fresh healthy and creative cusine through this excellent cookbook.
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Summary: Old friend re-issued
Review: My 30-something son stole my old, old hardcover edition so-o-o I bought a mass market paperback since I couldn't be without it. Now the trade paperback is out and much easier to handle in the kitchen. I've just transferred the notes made in my original copy. Obviously I highly prize this title just as I prize all of Julia Child's EARLY books, i.e. "Mastering the Art ...", Vols. I & II and "From Julia's Kitchen".
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