Don't Buy Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French CookingYou will never cook from it.
Posted Friday, Aug. 28, 2009, at 5:28 PM ET
Anyone weary of the nonstop hype over Nora Ephron's Julie & Julia this summer had to be happy with this week's news that the fuss has not all been in vain: Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking has finally hit the top of the best-seller list, almost 48 years after it was first published. Unfortunately, that will probably send even more Meryl Streep wannabes straight to bookstores looking for food porn. And they will be sold bibles.
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StumbleUponThe inconvenient truth is that although the country's best-loved "French chef" produced an unparalleled recipe collection in Mastering the Art, it has always been daunting. It was never meant for the frivolous or trendy. And it now seems even more overwhelming in a Rachael Ray world: Those thousands and thousands of cookbooks sold are very likely going to wind up where so many of the previous printings have—in pristine condition decorating a kitchen bookshelf or on a nightstand, handy for vicarious cooking and eating.
Thanks to my consort, I have owned the two-volume set of Mastering the Art since 1984, the year after I graduated from restaurant school, but even I have never cooked from it. My copy of Volume 1 is tattered, but only because I've used it for reference over the decades—it is infallible as a sourcebook. I would think the problem is my short attention span, given that I grew up cooking from my mom's 1950s Betty Crocker cookbook and was trained professionally using recipes that had been distilled to their essence so that technique could be taught fast. But Julia's recipes were written for a rigorous cook with endless patience for serious detail.
Consider the boeuf bourguignon depicted so romantically in the movie, which has had restaurant chefs and amateurs alike breaking out their "9- or 10-inch fireproof casseroles" in the hottest month of the year. The ingredients and instructions for its recipe span three pages, and that is before you hit the fine print: The beef stock, braised pearl onions, and sautéed mushrooms all require separate procedures. Step 1 involves making lardons and simmering them for 10 minutes in a precise amount of water; seven steps later, the fat is finally skimmed off the sauce, which is either boiled down to thicken or adjusted with liquid if it's too thick.
And this is considered an entry-level recipe. Everything in the tome looks complicated, which of course guarantees the results will work but also makes cooking feel like brain surgery. Even simple sautéed veal scallops with mushrooms involve 18 ingredients and implements and two pages of instruction.
If after 26 years of cooking for a living, I am worn out just reading those recipes, I can only imagine how a newbie who can barely identify a whisk will do, let alone how someone who has never seen Dover sole in his supermarket could cook sole meunière, the other iconic Julia dish that restaurants and home cooks have been reflexively celebrating since ogling it in the film. It's a plot point, and the recipe is not in the book, although others for sole are, helpfully indexed under "poisson.")
Beyond the careful fussiness, the book has a preserved-in-aspic feel to it. For good or for bad, not many people I know want to sit down most nights to fricassee of chicken or shoulder of lamb stuffed with kidneys and rice. Even for a dinner party, these might seem anachronistic in an age when guests are perfectly frank about sharing their food issues (lactose-intolerant, vegan, gluten-free, etc.).
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Boeuf Bourgignone is harder to spell than make. I first made Julia's recipe for it at the age of 19 to impress a boyfriend. I've made it a number of times since, and I've never thought it difficult, just tedious and involved. Actually nothing in Mastering the Art is difficult, just tedious and involved. The recipes are long because they truly are step by step. I have never wondered "what the heck does that mean" because everything is so thoroughly explained. Yes, it's true, many of the recipes are dated by the ingredients used. So what. Modernize them. Julia certainly would have approved of that.
BTW, my favorite recipe is the dacqouise in Vol II. It takes all day, but OMG it melts in your mouth.
-- mav62
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In My Life in France, Julia Child explains that Paris was "crawling with Americans" during the post-war years, and by the time of the book's publication, many of them had returned home to settle into domestic bliss. The book resounded with this repatriated contingent, at least, because it showed them how to authentically recreate their French cuisine of yore in the comfort of their own homes. (This is also why the book appealed to Judith Jones, the Knopf editor who got it published.)
Ms Schrambling, as she reminds us several times, is a Professional Chef. Restaurant cooking is meant to be prepared at lightning speed and using whatever ingredients are seasonal, i.e. cheapest. Mastering the Art of French Cooking was written for housewives who presumably have the time to dote on an exquisite meal for their loved ones. Now that a lot of us have more time on our hands and not necessarily by choice, the intense labor and showstopping results of producing something from the pages of Mastering... is exactly the type of empowering activity that we unemployeds crave. The resurgence in this book's popularity is not just due to the fact that there was a charming movie made about it-- there are more of us home chefs out there, and we are actually cooking from it.
-- squeezy
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