European Cooking, General & Miscellaneous Biography, U.S. Cooking, General & Miscellaneous Cooking, TV Cooks & Celebrity Chefs

In Julia's Kitchen with Master Chefs

Name: In Julia's Kitchen with Master Chefs
Author: Julia Child, Nancy V. Barr, Michael McLaughlin
ISBN: 9780679760054

by Julia Child, Nancy V. Barr, Michael McLaughlin

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Overview

Cooking with the twenty-six chefs who, one by one, performed in her kitchen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for her new television series, Julia was able to sample the wonderful variety of flavors they brought to her and to analyze and question everything that went into each dish. Now she brings us all those recipes (and many more), carefully translated for the home cook so that we can reproduce for friends and family the exciting diversity that is American cooking today.

Julia invites 26 great cooks from across the country into her own kitchen to unearth their culinary secrets. The imaginative dishes and the variety of ingredients reflect the exciting range of cooking across America today, including Mexican, French-Oriental, Italian, and Indian. The book includes 150 superb recipes, all carefully translated for the home cook. 120 color photos.

Synopsis

About the Author, Julia Child, Nancy V. Barr, Michael McLaughlin

Julia Child

Before celebrity chefs like Emeril and Nigella came onto the culinary scene, Julia Child was teaching America how to flambé. When her groundbreaking television program, The French Chef, came into our kitchens, thousands of viewers tuned in to watch Julia flip crepes, blanch beans, and sear steaks, and to hear her signature sign-off: "Bon appétit!"

Biography

If leeks, shallots, and sea salt are available at your local supermarket, you probably have Julia Child to thank for it. At a time when many home cooks had nothing more ambitious in their repertoires than Jell-O salad, Child revolutionized the American kitchen, demonstrating that with good ingredients and a few French techniques, even the novice chef could turn out bistro-worthy dinners of boeuf bourguignon and tarte Tatin.

Child's interest in teaching techniques, rather than simply listing fancy recipes, was evident from her first cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which took years of collaboration (with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle) and experimentation to write. Craig Claiborne, reviewing the book for The New York Times in 1961, wrote: "Probably the most comprehensive, laudable, and monumental work on [French cuisine] was published this week, and it will probably remain the definitive work for nonprofessionals." He was right -- it's been a top seller ever since.

To promote the book, the Cordon Bleu–trained Child made an appearance on WGBH in Boston. Not content merely to talk about cooking, she brought along eggs, a hot plate, and a whisk, and demonstrated the proper way to make an omelette. The station producers recognized a potential star, and Child's first television show, The French Chef, was born. Soon thousands of viewers were tuning in to watch Julia flip crepes, blanch beans, and sear steaks. Each show ended with her signature sign-off: "Bon appétit!"

Since then, Child has hosted hundreds of television episodes, and her cookbooks have continued to be both inspiring and practical. Volume two of Mastering the Art of French Cooking was followed by titles like The Way to Cook, Cooking with Master Chefs and Julia's Kitchen Wisdom. Child also co-founded the American Institute of Wine and Food, an educational organization devoted to gastronomy. Many top-flight professional and celebrity chefs -- including Alice Waters, Emeril Lagasse, and Thomas Keller -- have cited Julia Child as an inspiration. "My own copy of volume one [of French Cooking] is so worn that the duct tape holding it together looks natural," chef Jasper White once noted.

Still, Child remains best known for bringing good food into the home, where she championed "food as an art form, as a delightful part of civilized life." And though she's expanded her range to include American, Mediterranean, and Asian cuisines, she hasn't been influenced by fad diets or fat phobias. She still cooks with butter and cream. As she told Nightline, "Small helpings, no seconds, a little bit of everything, no snacking and have a good time. I think if you follow that, you're going to be healthy, wealthy and wise."

Good To Know

During World War II, Julia McWilliams served in the Office of Strategic Services -- the forerunner of the CIA -- in Ceylon and China, where she met Paul Child. After the war, the two married and moved to Paris, where Julia Child fell in love with French food. Years later, she could still recount her first meal in Paris, which included oysters, scallops in cream sauce, and duck.

After Child moved from her Cambridge, Massachusetts, house to a retirement community in California, she donated her famous kitchen -- where three of her television series were taped -- to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

Child stands tall at a statuesque 6' 2".

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Editorials

Library Journal

What a treat! For her new PBS series, Child invited 26 chefs into her own kitchen in her Cambridge home to show their stuff while she cooked with them and asked questions. Although this is the companion volume to the series, it stands on its own as a collaboration between some of our best chefs and our longtime favorite chef of all. Child's guests include not only talented restaurant chefs but also such luminaries as cookbook author and authority Carol Field (The Italian Baker, LJ 11/15/85). Menus are quite complicated, with Child often emphasizing that a particular dish is for those who "love to cook," but she and her staff have made the recipes accessible to home cooks. There are ahead-of-time notes, suggestions for less-complicated substitutions, and lots of boxes on techniques and ingredients. Throughout it all, Child's inimitable voice and indomitable enthusiasm comes through, whether she is describing how to make a particularly complicated dish-"rapidly prepare the following, juggling pans and spoons and cooking everything all at once"-or explaining an unusual technique for pastry dough that fascinated her. An essential purchase, of course. [HomeStyle main selection and BOMC selection; previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/94.]