Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 2: A Cookbook

Along with Vol. 1, Mastering the Art of French Cooking Vol. 2 was my inspiration and my guide when I was a young cook. Recently seeing "Julie and Julia" brought back floods of memories of those hours immersed in Julia Child's directions, and the resulting absolutely glorious eating. I embarrassed my dear love -- who wasn't with me during those early culinary adventures -- by moaning and sighing over the food shown in the movie; that movie is like porno for foodies. When we got home, he extracted a promise that I would cook Julia's Boeuf Bourguignon (Vol. 1, on my very splattered page 315) within two weeks. I'm hoping that the movie will send a new generation of cooks to explore this exquisite cuisine. There will be the concern about all that butter, but oddly, when I was cooking and eating a lot of Julia Child butter-drenched recipes I was at my thinnest, and my cholesterol was low. We were in Paris for three days a little over a month ago, and the only overweight people I saw seemed to be tourists. It is a puzzle: we ate all our meals in restaurants, mainly non-touristy ones, and the slender and chic women were eating their croissants and creme brulee right along with the men. No picking at lettuce leaves for them. I highly recommend this book, and hope everyone who buys it will use the recipes as little adventures if they haven't been cooking this way, perhaps setting aside some Sunday afternoons to play and explore (this is not eight minutes in the microwave cooking, for sure). And go see the movie.

Fabulous book. Worth the price simply to learn how treacherously simple it is to astound and amaze your friends with home made chocolate truffles. I recommend 2 tablespoons Grand Marnier in place of 4 tablespoons of any other orange liqueur, though.

Rarely are we able to say with certainty that a book is at the top of its subject in regard and quality. This book, the continuation of `Mastering the Art of French Cooking' by Julia Child and Simone Beck is certainly in that most unique position among cookbooks written in English and published in the United States.This volume is truly a simple extension of the material in the original work, which was recently published in a 40th anniversary edition by its publisher, Alfred E. Knopf and its principle author, Julia Child. As told in Ms. Child's autobiography, the original manuscript brought to Judith Jones at Knopf ran to over a thousand printed pages. About two fifths of that material was put to the side and most of it appears in this second volume. All this means is that you are unlikely to really have a full coverage of the subject of French Cooking as intended by the authors unless you have both volumes.The first chapter has a clear sign that this volume rounds out the work in that it gives soups a much more thorough coverage than the first volume. Most importantly, it includes recipes for that quintessential French dish, bouillabaisse. To complement this subject is coverage of seafood such as a tour of the anatomy of a lobster that would put seafood specialist cookbooks to shame.The biggest single addition to the subject in this book is its coverage of baking and pastry. Here is one place where the book may be seen to diverge from its focus of the French housewife's cooking practice. As the book states clearly in the first chapter, practically no baking is done at home, since there is a Boulangerie on every street corner. I generally find the level of detail on baking in cookbooks specializing on savory dishes to be much too light to give the reader an adequate appreciation of the subject. This book covers baking with a level of detail which would make most baking book authors blush. A sign of this deep, quality coverage is the diagrams used to illustrate baking techniques. The line drawings typically succeed where photographs do not in that they can be easily incorporated into the text and the drawing can eliminate extraneous detail and show the reader only what is important in understanding the technique. The section on making classic French bread ends with a `self-criticism' section we may nowadays call a debugging section. It lists several different things that may go wrong with your product, and how to fix them. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in only baking, let alone the rest of us.The quality of presentation continues with the coverage of pastry. Some books on pastry give one pie dough. Some good books on pastry may give three or four. This book gives eight, with a clear indication of the differences in when to use the various doughs. Some books on pastry describe how to make puff pastry. This book gives a really complete explanation, with abundant diagrams. I suspect that very few people want to make their own puff p