Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 2

BY JULIA CHILD, SIMONE BECK, AND LOUISETTE BERTHOLLE

Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961)

VOLUME ONE

BY JULIA CHILD

The French Chef Cookbook (1968)

From Julia Child’s Kitchen (1975)

Julia Child & Company (1978)

Julia Child & More Company (1979)

The Way to Cook (1989)

Cooking with Master Chefs (1993)

In Julia’s Kitchen with Master Chefs (1995)

Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom (2000)

My Life in France, with Alex Prud’homme (2006)

BY JULIA CHILD AND JACQUES PÉPIN

Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home (1999)

BY SIMONE BECK

Simca’s Cuisine (1972)

These are Borzoi Books, published in New York by Alfred A. Knopf

Illustrations by
SIDONIE CORYN
BASED ON PHOTOGRAPHS BY PAUL CHILD
WHO ALSO CONTRIBUTED 36 DRAWINGS TO THE TEXT

VOL. 11
PUBLISHED OCTOBER 22, 1970
HARDCOVER EDITION REPRINTED THIRTY-SEVEN TIMES
THIRTY-NINTH PRINTING, JANUARY 2011

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

Copyright © 1970, 1983 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York. Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Child, Julia.
Mastering the art of French cooking.

Rev. ed. of: Mastering the art of French cooking
by Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle, Julia Child.
Vol. 2 by Julia Child and Simone Beck.
Includes index.
1. Cookery, French. I. Bertholle, Louisette.
II. Beck, Simone. III. Beck, Simone.
Mastering the art of French cooking. IV. Title.
TX719.C454 1983 641.5944 83–48113
ISBN 0-394-53628-2 (set)
ISBN 0-394-72114-4 (pbk.: set)
ISBN 0-394-53399-2 (v. 1)
ISBN 0-394-72178-0 (pbk.: v. 1)
ISBN 0-394-40152-2 (v. 2)
ISBN 0-394-72177-2 (pbk.: v. 2)
eISBN: 978-0-307-95818-1

v3.1

Jacket design by Jason Booher, based on an original design by Jay J. Smith Design Studio, Inc.

To
Alfred Knopf

who is as much an appreciator of good writing, type faces, layout, and paper as he is of fresh
foie gras, truite au bleu
, and Meursault Les Perrières. In short, he is the ideal publisher for this kind of book, just as he is the ideal dinner guest for those who have mastered the art of French cooking.

Foreword

M
ASTERING ANY ART
is a continuing process, and that explains
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
, Volume II, which came about in the following way. When the idea of our first book was forming in the early 1950’s, we were so naïve as to propose not only to ourselves but also to an indulgent publisher, who invested two hundred and fifty dollars in the project, a complete one-volume treatise covering the whole of
la cuisine française
. After laboring for six years it was clear that our detailed method of approach called for a multivolume study; we therefore sent our publisher eight hundred pages of manuscript on French sauces and French poultry. This early outpouring was quickly rejected as unpublishable, although it covered every conceivable sauce and every imaginable poultry detail, including such marginal esoterica as advice on what to do if you have a bloodless
canard
for the duck press—we shall not reveal the solution other than to say it involved a quick trip to the slaughterhouse. That first publishing rebuff, cruel as it was, shook us into a more rational and realistic approach. Meanwhile, we had opened our cooking school in Paris, L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes, first located in a rooftop kitchen on the rue de l’Université and later in the comfortable apartment of Louisette, the third member of our team. Now married to Henri de Nalèche, and living in the beautiful hunting country near Bourges, La Sologne, Louisette did not collaborate with us on Volume II. It was through her inspiration, however, that we three started both the first book and the school together.

The cooking school catapulted us into almost all areas of French cooking, because you cannot teach the subject and not include the standard dishes that everyone has heard about—
quiche lorraine
, onion soup,
boeuf bourguignon, coq au vin, sole bonne femme, mousse au chocolat
, and
soufflé Grand Marnier
—to name a very familiar handful. Thus Volume I in its final form was the natural result of our teaching. It also goes into the fundamental techniques of
la cuisine bourgeoise
, meaning expert French home-style cooking—how to make the flour and butter
roux
for the sauce
velouté
, how to beat egg whites and fold them into the soufflé to get the maximum puff, how to sauté the meat so that it will brown, and the mushrooms so they will not exude their juice,
how to peel and seed the tomato, boil the beans, peel the asparagus, and fold the omelette. Volume I is, in fact, a long introduction to French cooking, and anyone who has mastered it has covered most of the primary methods and recipes.

Volume II is a continuation. But rather than continuing on every front, we have selected seven subjects, and having so long ago rejected complete treatises, we have pursued each only in the directions that we felt were most useful or interesting. We wanted to add to the repertoire of informal vegetable soups, for example, and these take up a large part of the first chapter. We felt the need for a fine lobster bisque; this gave rise to a study of lobster cutting, and in turn led us to crabs, which are not adequately explored in most recipes (the whole matter of crab tomalley is almost never mentioned, yet it is every bit as precious as lobster tomalley). Then, although we adore
bouillabaisse
(which is in Volume I), there are other French fish stews that make marvelous one-dish meals, so we have added a
marmite
, a
matelote
, and a
bourride
. Thus the soup chapter is an enlargement in breadth.

Meat, poultry, and vegetables we have attacked in depth, following the same system of theme and variations used in Volume I, but taking it perhaps even further.
Poulet poché au vin blanc
, is a prime example. Ordinary pieces of frying chicken are poached in white wine and aromatic vegetables, making a deliciously non-fattening dish that you can serve informally as is, with boiled rice and a green vegetable. Nothing could be simpler, yet you can take this same chicken out of the peasant kitchen, as it were, and serve it at the château. You can transform it into an elegant aspic or
chaud-froid
, or turn its poaching liquid into a creamy
velouté
and create a
gratin
of chicken Mornay, a splendid dish for a buffet supper. With egg yolks and cream the original chicken dish becomes a Belgian
waterzooi
, with garlic mayonnaise it is a chicken
bourride
, and with slightly different vegetable flavors but the same cooking methods it is a
bouillabaisse
of chicken. Thus, starting with one master technique, you are putting your cooking vocabulary to use the way it should be used, and if you are just beginning to cook, this is an exercise in recognition. You will begin to relate the sauce you used for the casserole of chicken to the
velouté
you made for the
coquilles Saint-Jacques
in another recipe, as well as to the
velouté
base you made for a cream of crab soup; the flavors are different, the proportions are not identical, especially for the soup, but the basic method is the same. You will recognize that sauce when you run into it again in some other guise. Again, if you are new to it, and have finally conquered your fear of scrambling the egg yolks as you stir them over the burner for that lovely custard sauce,
crème anglaise
, you will be nonchalant about heating egg yolks in the sauce for a
bourride
—or vice versa: you know what to expect, you have been there before, and, in effect, you are beginning to
feel like a cook. For the experienced, we hope these ideas will start you off on further ventures in other categories.