The perfect gift for any follower of
Julia Child—and any lover of French food. This boxed set brings together
Mastering the Art of French Cooking, first published in 1961, and
its sequel, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume Two,
published in 1970.
Volume One is the classic cookbook, in its entirety—524 recipes.
“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 nearly fifty 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. The techniques learned in this beautiful book, with
more than one hundred instructive illustrations, can be applied to
recipes in all other French cookbooks, making them infinitely usable. In
compiling the secrets of famous Cordon Bleu chefs, the authors produced
a magnificent volume that continues to have a place of honor in American
kitchens.
Volume Two is the sequel to the great cooking classic—with 257
additional recipes.
Following the publication of the celebrated Volume One, Julia Child and
Simone Beck continued to search out and sample new recipes among the
classic dishes and regional specialties of France—cooking, conferring,
tasting, revising, perfecting. Out of their discoveries they made, for
Volume Two, a brilliant selection of precisely those recipes that not
only add to the repertory but, above all, bring the reader to a new
level of mastery of the art of French cooking.
Each of these recipes is worked out step-by-step, with the clarity and
precision that are the essence of the first volume. Five times as many
drawings as in Volume One make the clear instructions even more so.
Perhaps the most remarkable achievement of this volume is that it will
make Americans actually more expert than their French contemporaries in
two supreme areas of cookery: baking and charcuterie. In France one can
turn to the local bakery for fresh and expertly baked bread, or to
neighborhood charcuterie for pâtés and terrines and sausages. Here, most
of us have no choice but to create them for ourselves.