The Way to Cook

by Julia Child

Book Overview

In her most creative and instructive cookbook, Julia Child distills a lifetime of cooking into 800 recipes emphasizing lightness, freshness, and simplicity. Chapters are structured around master recipes, followed by innumerable variations that are easily made once the basics are understood. For example, make Julia's simple but impeccably prepared saute of chicken, and before long you're easily whipping up Chicken with Mushrooms and Cream, Chicken...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394532643
• ISBN13: 9780394532646
• Release Date: September 1989
• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Length: 528 Pages
• Weight: 3.98 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 9.6" x 11.2"

Customer Reviews

It truly doesn’t disappoint!

Was so excited to find this book! It’s like having Julia right with you as you navigate the simplest and most complex recipes.

One of the best books I have read in a long time.

It is a very large book. Full of common sense. She teaches you the very basics and shows how you branch off from there to anywhere with your meals and recipes. I would recommend this book to all young women starting their own households.

Julia Child for Everyday Cooking. Excellent Teaching Source

`The Way to Cook' was written by Julia Child and published by Knopf about 27 years after the first publication of `Mastering the Art of French Cooking' which established Child's reputation. So, it was published when Julia Child was a household name for over two decades. It was meant to be her most important culinary work. It has never replaced Child's first book in the hearts and minds of America's foodies, in spite of the fact that the book opens with a statement that the book means to address Americans' new health consciousness and their diminishing time available to cook.This is still a very, very good book. Unlike the more famous `French Cooking', this book is much more concerned with teaching the art of cooking. In fact, Ms. Child originates an idea here that has reached its fullest fruition in the style of Rachael Ray's 30-Minute Meal rubric. Ray succeeds in putting out fast meals not by using a lot of processed supermarket preparations, but by using knowledge of cooking to make the best of basic ingredients. This is not to say Ms. Child is doing fast cooking. Many recipes are pretty involved. I can still remember doing Julia's take on a barbecue recipe which involved making both a sauce and a rub from a goodly number of ingredients and a substantial amount of time required to slow cook the ribs. I got pretty hungary by the time I was finally finished.Teaching is so important to the object of this book that it is one of the very few books I know which could easily serve as a good textbook for a course on cooking. The only other book I know in this category would be Madeline Kammen's `The New Making of a Cook'. It is important to distinguish both of these books from the `how to cook everything' titles such as the `Joy of Cooking', `James Beard's American Cookery' or Mark Bittman's `How to Cook Everything'. The purpose of these books is to give detailed coverage to a wide range of methods rather than simply be a repository of a large number of recipes.The most distinctive feature in this book which supports it's object to teach cooking is the notion of the master recipe. A classic example of this approach is the master recipe for `Ragout of Chicken and Onions in Red Wine'. If this dish doesn't sound familiar to experienced cooks, it should be, because the very famous French recipe `Coq au Vin' is a variation of this master recipe. The classic simply adds lardons, mushrooms, and brandy and replaces sliced onions with `brown braized white onions'.In addition to master recipes and variations, there is a wealth of notes on techniques to improve your results. In discussing the use of lardons, there is a note which recommends blanching bacon and salt pork before adding it to a recipe to remove salt and smoky flavor. I am certain this is an optional step, but it is welcome to me as I often avoid recipes using salt pork to avoid the somewhat noisome smell of smoked fatty tissue which may come from cooking smoked pork.Another feature of the book which

I will use this book for life

I have had this book for several years, and it's dawning on me how important a work this was, because I use it every time I make certain dishes. For example, I always use it to make rice (who can remember whether it's 2 cups of water or 1 1/2?) and also for hard boiled eggs. These are the types of things that other cookbook writers take it for granted that you know, but which are crucial to the success of the recipe and which Julia Child considers important enough to devote several pages to. I find this book to be an essential tool in my kitchen.I admire her ability to explain, in common sense terms, how to achieve basic cooking recipes (she calls them "Master recipes"), and how to incorporate them into more complicated recipes. This makes the book useful for beginners as well as more experienced cooks.She especially handles the subject of cooking with meat and poultry well, offering a wide range of dishes with an international, yet traditional flair. Many of the recipes are reminiscent of her televsion show, "Julia Child and Company." They have a sort of 60's trendiness to them, which makes them fun and evocative of food one's Mom used to make, while at the same time not being out of date. You just sort of expect that there will be a fondue recipe or two, plus a few "chafing dish" preparations!The pictures are very helpful, as are the instructions that are drafted in laypersons' terms. Her recipes are basic standbys, nothing particularly fancy, but everyone needs at least one of those types of cookbooks in their kitchen. A tour de force for Julia Child, who seems to get better with each succeeding effort.

The Final Word on Cooking

I got this cookbook as a Christmas gift four years ago after taking cooking seriously for four years. The knowledge Child imparts took me to another level of understanding good food and good cooking.I don't consider myself a gourmet. I am a good home cook who appreciates delicious, hearty food and I gravitate towards these types of dishes and chefs. By the time I read The Way to Cook, I'd already owned and read three or four cookbooks (all from the Silver Palate ladies) and I didn't learn about the process and intellectual thought of cooking until Child. Wow. She truly brings everything to its most basic point and then, tell you how to treat the food. Additionally, the book is organized well; written in a straightforward manner; and the recipes are simple to follow and delicious to eat.True, this is more continental than it is American, but I think if you could only have two or three cookbooks, this would be one of them. The others would be Cook's Bible and Joy of Cooking (new ed).One warning, like most cookbooks, the food is rich, so if you're on a diet, eat breakfast, make this for lunch or an early dinner and don't eat anything the rest of the day!