One of America’s most popular cookbook authors didn’t start cooking until she was well into her thirties, which is an odd fact when you stop and think about it. During World War II, Julia Child worked as a copywriter in New York in her twenties and created shark repellent for the OSS in her early forties. The final sentence seems fictitious. It isn’t. And somehow, when you hold one of her cookbooks in your hands, none of it seems unimportant because they have the same quality that she seems to have brought to everything: a thorough, almost stubborn refusal to leave things half-explained.
After being rejected by Houghton Mifflin for looking too much like an encyclopedia, Alfred A. Knopf published Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 1961 at a peculiar time in American history. The Kennedys were in the White House, Jacqueline was admired, and all of a sudden a 726-page guide to boeuf bourguignon felt appropriate rather than extravagant. French culture was fashionable in the way that sometimes happens when an administration makes it so. Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle co-wrote the book, which included over 100 illustrations and 524 recipes. It wasn’t written with serious chefs in mind. It was written to explain the importance of learning how to make a proper stock to those who had never done so. That seemingly insignificant difference was crucial.
A nearly pedagogical seriousness about failure was what set Child’s method apart from what was already available. She sincerely thought that a recipe should alert the cook to potential problems before they arise. Now that you’re reading Volume 1, you can see how much of it is devoted to “what if” scenarios: what if the chicken is still pink, what if your sauce breaks, or what if your soufflé deflates? Cookbooks were not written in this manner back then, and to be honest, most cookbooks are still not written in this manner today. It has a generosity that is difficult to describe but immediately apparent.
Co-authored once more with Beck, Volume 2 debuted in 1970 and delved deeper into bread, baking, and more intricate meat cuts. Perhaps because it requires more of the reader, it is not as well-known as the first. However, those who approach it methodically tend to talk about it in the same way that musicians discuss a technically challenging piece that they eventually mastered.
Another type of artifact is the 1968 publication of the French Chef Cookbook. It gathers the recipes from her ground-breaking PBS television program, which essentially created the modern cooking program. When you read it alongside old footage, you can see how carefully she calibrated everything for an audience that might be watching from a living room in Ohio with a tight grocery budget and no idea what crème fraîche was. The expectations in the book are more relaxed, conversational, and forgiving. Perhaps more than any other, this one reflects her true thoughts on cooking at home.
Published late in her career, The Way to Cook (1989) is essentially an overview of everything she had discovered about how people actually use cookbooks, which is to say, they improvise, substitute, and skip around. With almost 800 master recipes and variations, the book takes that into account by structuring around technique rather than rigid recipes. This book is intended for anyone who has cooked a little and wants to know why it works. Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom, published in 2000, is a more compact and useful book that you should place next to the stove instead of on the shelf.
When you consider everything at once, it’s difficult to avoid realizing that the cookbooks had nothing to do with France. They dealt with self-assurance. Child seemed to genuinely think that anyone could create something extraordinary out of common ingredients if they were given the correct guidance and enough self-patience. The reader was likely to determine whether that belief was realistic or optimistic. However, the books sold and continue to sell, which is a sort of response in and of itself.
The posthumously released memoir My Life in France, which was released in 2006, provides the personal background of the cookbooks, including the years spent in Paris, the relationship with Paul, and the arduous and occasionally frustrating process of getting them published. Although it isn’t a cookbook, it may be the most effective way to comprehend the emotions found in cookbooks. Someone who had come to Paris without any cooking experience, fallen utterly and helplessly in love with the cuisine, and spent the next forty years attempting to impart that feeling to someone else was behind every exact instruction and meticulously tested recipe.
FAQs
1. When was Mastering the Art of French Cooking first published?
Alfred A. Knopf published it in 1961 after Houghton Mifflin rejected the manuscript.
2. How many recipes does Volume 1 of Mastering the Art of French Cooking contain?
It features 524 recipes alongside more than 100 instructional illustrations.
3. What made Julia Child’s cookbook approach different from others?
She warned readers about what could go wrong before it actually happened.
4. What is The Way to Cook organized around?
Technique rather than strict recipes, with nearly 800 master recipes and variations.
5. Did Julia Child know how to cook before moving to France?
No — she didn’t seriously learn to cook until her late thirties in Paris.
