Julia Child - Mastering the Art of French Cooking volume One

Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1970)
VOLUME TWO BY JULIA CHILD The French Chef Cookbook (1968)
From Julia Childs Kitchen (1975)
Julia Child & Company (1978)
Julia Child & More Company (1979)
The Way to Cook (1989)
Cooking with Master Chefs (1993)
In Julias Kitchen with Master Chefs (1995)
Julias Kitchen Wisdom (2000)
My Life in France, with Alex Prudhomme (2006) BY JULIA CHILD AND JACQUES PPIN Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home (1999) BY SIMONE BECK Simcas Cuisine (1972)
More Recipes From Simcas Cuisine (1979)Illustrations by Sidonie Coryn THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF Copyright 1961, 1983, 2001 by Alfred A. Knopf
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Child, Julia.

Mastering the art of French cooking.
Rev. ed. of: Mastering the art of French cooking / Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle, Julia Child.
Vol. 2 by Julia Child and Simone Beck.
Includes index.
1. Cookery, French. I.

Bertholle, Louisette. II. Beck, Simone. III. Beck, Simone. IV. IV.

Title.
TX719.C454 1983 641.5944 8348113
eISBN: 978-0-307-95817-4 PUBLISHED OCTOBER 16, 1961
REPRINTED FROM NEW PLATES, OCTOBER 1971
THIRTY-FOURTH PRINTING (REVISED), SEPTEMBER 1983
FORTIETH ANNIVERSARY HARDCOVER EDITION, OCTOBER 16, 2001
TWENTY-SECOND PRINTING, JANUARY 2011
FIRST FORTIETH ANNIVERSARY PAPERBACK EDITION, OCTOBER 2004
THIRTEENTH PRINTING, JANUARY 2011 v3.1 TO La Belle France WHOSE PEASANTS, FISHERMEN, HOUSEWIVES,
AND PRINCES NOT TO MENTION HER CHEFS
THROUGH GENERATIONS OF INVENTIVE AND
LOVING CONCENTRATION HAVE CREATED ONE
OF THE WORLDS GREAT ARTS

by Julia Child W HAT WAS A MERICAN food like forty years ago when this book first appeared? Its hard for me to remember since the now is so much with me. I grew up in Southern California, in a comfortable family, with a New England background since my mother was from Massachusetts. We ate in the typically middle-class WASP American way of the teens and twentiesa big prime-rib roast of beef for the traditional family Sunday lunch of twelve to fourteen people. If not beef we might have a fine, big, well-aged leg of lambalways cooked medium gray, never pinky-red rare, and always served with mint sauce as well as gravy. Or there would be a fat roasted chicken with creamed onions and mashed potatoes. Always an enthusiastic carnivore, I particularly remember the beef, not only rib roasts but also magnificent big well-marbled porterhouse steaks.

They were full of real beefy flavor in those days, and they were juicy. Of course, that was the happy era when emphasis was on the quality of the beef, not the fat content. Our family cooking was essentially simple and straightforward, and since it was California we always had plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables. As to specifics, I remember aspics. Jellied madrilene was a favorite fancy soup of the period, a beef consomm flavored with fresh tomato and topped with a splash of whipped creamthat was before sour cream came upon us. Melba toast was a standard accompaniment to the soup at ladies luncheonsand there were many of them then because running a household rather than having a career gave many women the leisure time.

These carefully orchestrated meals often featured a large molded ring of tomato aspic, its center filled with chicken, crab, or lobster salad. I cannot forget one ladies lunch back in the 1950s. Our hostess proudly led us to our seats around a nicely appointed table where we each sat down to a pretty china plate upon which stood an upright, somewhat phallic-shaped molded aspic holding in suspension diced green grapes, diced marshmallows, and diced bananas. Surrounded lavishly but neatly with squirts of whipped cream, this lovingly constructed edifice rested on several leaves of iceberg lettuce far too small to hide anything under. After the main course, and grandly brought in to the acclaim of the guests, was a very large and high coconut cake, almost certainly made from a cake mix and, again, constructed with utmost care. That was a quite typical, dressy example of the period, created earnestly and with the most generous intentions.

When Paul and I married in the mid 1940s I had very little kitchen experience, but since his mother was a fine cook and he had lived in France, I went into it seriously with Gourmet magazine and Joy of Cooking as my guides. It took hours to get dinner on the table, but he was encouraging. A year or so after our marriage he was offered a position at the American embassy in Paris. It was a dream fulfilled. I had always yearned to know France, and Paul, having lived there for several years as a penniless young man, dreamed of returning. He had a gift for languages and spoke beautiful French.

As for me, although I had taken French all during my school years, it was taught in that useless old-fashioned way where you rarely heard the spoken language but you knew the declensions of all the verbs. Thus, I could neither speak French nor understand it. We were fortunate indeed to rent the top floor of a fine old Louis XVI-style private house, and as soon as we settled ourselves I enrolled in the Berlitz school of languages for two hours every day. Then, when I had a foot on the language, I enrolled in the Cordon Bleu cooking school. With Pauls help plus the Berlitz, and especially being at the Cordon Bleu where at that time all the lessons were in French, conversation was slowly beginning to come. Nobody I knew, either American or French, seemed at all interested in la cuisine franaise. My American colleagues had little femmes de mnage who did the housekeeping, shopping, and cooking, and I was considered more than a little odd because I did all the cooking and marketingsuch fun!as well as the serving when we had company.

Then one day a friend in the embassy introduced me to Simone Beck Fischbachera tall, blond, vivacious Frenchwoman, known as Simca. She was passionate about cooking, had grown up in a household of fine food, and had taken many lessons with the Cordon Bleu schools master chef, Henri Pellaprat. We took to each other at once, and she introduced me to Le Cercle des Gourmettes, a French ladies gastronomical club that met every other Tuesday to cook and eat lunch in the kitchens of the electric company. The members of Les Gourmettes were mostly in their sixties and seventies and came just for the luncheon. Simcas friend and colleague Louisette Bertholle was also a member, and the three of us made a point of arriving at 9:00 a.m. so that we could work with the chef.