Mastering The Art Of French Cooking

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The definitive cookbook on French cuisine for American readers: "What a cookbook should be: packed with sumptuous recipes, detailed instructions, and precise line drawings. Some of the instructions look daunting, but as Child herself says in the introduction, 'If you can read, you can cook.'" —Entertainment Weekly “I only wish that I had written it myself.” —James Beard Featuring 524 delicious recipes and over 100 instructive illustrations to guide readers every step of the way, Mastering the Art of French Cooking offers something for everyone, from seasoned experts to beginners who love good food and long to reproduce the savory delights of French cuisine. Julia Child, Simone Beck, and Louisette Bertholle break down the classic foods of France into a logical sequence of themes and variations rather than presenting an endless and diffuse catalogue of dishes—from historic Gallic masterpieces to the seemingly artless perfection of a dish of spring-green peas. Throughout, the focus is on key recipes that form the backbone of French cookery and lend themselves to an infinite number of elaborations—bound to increase anyone’s culinary repertoire. “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." —Thomas Keller, The French Laundry

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 forty 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. This beautiful book, with more than one hundred instructive illustrations, is revolutionary in its approach because: It leads the cook infallibly from the buying and handling of raw ingredients, through each essential step of a recipe, to the final creation of a delicate confection. It breaks down the classic cuisine into a logical sequence of themes and variations rather than presenting an endless and diffuse catalogue of recipes; the focus is on key recipes that form the backbone of French cookery and lend themselves to an infinite number of elaborations bound to increase anyone s culinary repertoire.

A landmark book from the test kitchen that has been teaching America how to cook for 20 years. We launched the America's Test Kitchen Cooking School two years ago to teach home cooks how to cook the test kitchen way, and since then thousands of students have taken our interactive video-based online courses. The America's Test Kitchen Cooking School Cookbook shares the same goal as our online school and brings all our best practices—along with 600 all-time favorite recipes—into one place so that you can become a better, more confident cook. There is no better way to learn than seeing an expert in action, so we've included over 2,500 color photos that bring you into the test kitchen so you can see how to prepare recipes step-by-step. The book starts off with an exhaustive 46-page Cooking Basics chapter that covers everything from what equipment you need (and how to care for it) to test-kitchen tricks for how to make food taste better. Then we move on to cover all the major cooking and baking categories, from meat, poultry, and pasta to breads, cakes, and pies. Illustrated Core Techniques, like how to whip egg whites, roast a chicken, or bake flawless pie dough, focus on the building block recipes everyone should know. Recipe Tutorials that each feature 20-35 color photos then walk readers through recipes that are either more complicated or simply benefit from the visual clues of step photography, like Extra-Crunchy Fried Chicken, Sticky Buns with Pecans, and Deep-Dish Apple Pie. Every chapter ends with a library of the test kitchen's all-time favorite recipes, such as Pan-Seared Steaks with Red Wine Pan Sauce, Meatballs and Marinara, Best Vegetarian Chili, Memphis-Style Barbecued Ribs, and New York-Style Cheesecake—more than 600 in total—that will allow home cooks to expand their repertoire. The America's Test Kitchen Cooking School Cookbook is a how-to-cook book that also explains why recipes succeed or fail, which makes it the ideal book for anyone looking to cook better.

A beautiful new edition of the beloved cookbook capturing the spirit of Julia Child's debut TV show, which made her a star and is now featured as the centerpiece of Max's Julia. The French Chef Cookbook is a comprehensive (Aïoli to Velouté, Bouillabaisse to Ratatouille) collection of more than 300 classic French recipes. By 1963, Julia Child had already achieved widespread recognition as the bestselling author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but it wasn’t until her television debut with The French Chef that she became the superstar we know and love today. Over the course of ten seasons, millions of Americans learned not only how to cook, but how to embrace food. The series completely changing the way that we eat today, and it earned Julia a Peabody Award in 1965 and an Emmy Award in 1966. From that success came The French Chef Cookbook, Julia’s first solo cookbook, written with all the wit, wisdom, and joie de vivre for which she is rightly remembered. Organized by episode—”Dinner in a Pot,” “Caramel Desserts,” “Beef Gets Stewed Two Ways”—the book, like the television show on which it is based, is a complete French culinary education, packed with more than 300 delectable recipes—including timeless classics like Cassoulet, Vichyssoise, Coq au Vin, Croissants, and Chocolate Mousse. The definitive companion to Julia's groundbreaking television series, The French Chef Cookbook is now available in a beautiful new edition, sixty years after Julia first took to the airwaves.

The ultimate recipe resource: an indispensable treasury of more than 2,000 foolproof recipes and 150 test kitchen discoveries from the pages of Cook's Illustrated magazine. There is a lot to know about cooking, more than can be learned in a lifetime, and for the last 20 years we have been eager to share our discoveries with you, our friends and readers. The Cook's Illustrated Cookbook represents the fruit of that labor. It contains 2,000 recipes, representing almost our entire repertoire. Looking back over this work as we edited this volume, we were reminded of some of our greatest hits, from Foolproof Pie Dough (we add vodka for an easy-to-roll-out but flaky crust), innumerable recipes based on brining and salting meats (our Brined Thanksgiving Turkey in 1993 launched a nationwide trend), Slow-Roasted Beef(we salt a roast a day in advance and then use a very low oven to promote a tender, juicy result), Poached Salmon (a very shallow poaching liquid steams the fish instead of simmering it in water and robbing it of flavor), and the Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookies (we brown the butter for better flavor). Our editors handpicked more than 2,000 recipes from the pages of the magazine to form this wide-ranging compendium of our greatest hits. More than just a great collection of foolproof recipes, The Cook's Illustrated Cookbook is also an authoritative cooking reference with clear hand-drawn illustrations for preparing the perfect omelet, carving a turkey, removing meat from lobsters, frosting a layer cake, shaping sandwich bread, and more. 150 test kitchen tips throughout the book solve real home-cooking problems such as how to revive tired herbs, why you shouldn't buy trimmed leeks, what you need to know about freezing and thawing chicken, when to rinse rice, and the best method for seasoning cast-iron (you can even run it through the dishwasher). An essential collection for fans of Cook's Illustrated (and any discerning cook), The Cook's Illustrated Cookbook will keep you cooking for a lifetime - and guarantees impeccable results.

Simone (“Simca”) Beck is known to millions of Americans as Julia Child’s French partner in the creation of the two classic volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Now, she gives us her own delectable recipes—the ones she most treasures out of a lifetime of cooking creativity that has made her one of the great cuisinières of her day. Here are recipes that were inspired by old French family specialties found in her mother’s and grandmother’s well-thumbed notebooks; recipes that grew out of Simca’s life in the provinces (particularly Normandy, Alsace, and Provence) where she has gardened, cooked, dined out, and entertained; simple delights and fabulous concoctions all set down with a beautiful French clarity. Skillfully adapting her French ways to American needs, she presents over 100 recipes in 31 alluring menus designed for every sort of occasion—a warming dinner after a winter walk in the woods, a feast to dazzle your friends, a buffet for winter and one for summer, even an elegant picnic. For each menu Simca has written a charming, altogether personal introduction filled with nuggets of useful information, like what can be cooked ahead of time or how long last-minute preparations will take. Specific wines are always suggested with the menus, along with specific cheeses when called for. In addition, this volume features a small collection of other favorite dishes that did not fit into the menus but were simply too good to leave out. All in all, Simca’s Cuisine is a lasting treasure for everyone in search of new delicacies to serve, new menus that will enchant, new aromas and flavors in the French tradition, and new ways to find expertise in the kitchen and joy at the table.

The memoir of a young diplomat’s wife who must reinvent her dream of living in Paris—one dish at a time When journalist Ann Mah’s diplomat husband is given a three-year assignment in Paris, Ann is overjoyed. A lifelong foodie and Francophile, she immediately begins plotting gastronomic adventures à deux. Then her husband is called away to Iraq on a year-long post—alone. Suddenly, Ann’s vision of a romantic sojourn in the City of Light is turned upside down. So, not unlike another diplomatic wife, Julia Child, Ann must find a life for herself in a new city. Journeying through Paris and the surrounding regions of France, Ann combats her loneliness by seeking out the perfect pain au chocolat and learning the way the andouillette sausage is really made. She explores the history and taste of everything from boeuf Bourguignon to soupe au pistou to the crispiest of buckwheat crepes. And somewhere between Paris and the south of France, she uncovers a few of life’s truths. Like Sarah Turnbull’s Almost French and Julie Powell’s New York Times bestseller Julie and Julia, Mastering the Art of French Eating is interwoven with the lively characters Ann meets and the traditional recipes she samples. Both funny and intelligent, this is a story about love—of food, family, and France.

An instructive cookbook with more than eight hundred recipes in which Julia Child blends classic techniques with American cooking and emphasizes freshness and simpler preparation.