In this magnificent new cookbook, illustrated with full color throughout, Julia Child give us her magnum opus--the distillation of a lifetime of cooking. And she has an important message for Americans today. . .

--to the health-conscious: make a habit of good home cooking so that you know you are working with the best and freshest ingredients and you can be in control of what goes into every dish
--to the new generation of cooks who have not grown up in the old traditions: learn the basics and understand what you are doing so cooking can be easier, faster, and more enjoyable
--to the more experienced cook: have fun improvising and creating your own versions of traditional dishes
--and to all of us: above all, enjoy the pleasures of the table.

In this spirit, Julia has conceived her most creative and instructive cookbook, blending classic techniques with free-style American cooking and with added emphasis on lightness, freshness, and simpler preparations. Breaking with conventional organization, she structures the chapters (from Soups to Cakes & Cookies) around master recipes, giving all the reassuring details that she is so good at and grouping the recipes according to method; these are followed--in shorthand form--by innumerable variations that are easily made once the basics are understood.

For example, make her simple but impeccably prepared sauté of chicken, and before long you're easily whipping up Chicken with Mushrooms and Cream, Chicken Provençale, Chicken Pipérade, or Chicken Marengo. Or master her perfect broiled butterflied chicken, and next time Deviled Rabbit or Split Cornish Game Hens Broiled with Cheese will be on your menu.

In all, there are more than 800 recipes, including the variations--from a treasure trove of poultry and fish recipes and a vast array of fresh vegetables prepared in new ways to bread doughs (that can be turned into pizzas and calzones and hamburger buns) and delicious indulgences, such as Caramel Apple Mountain or a Queen of Sheba Chocolate Almond Cake with Chocolate Leaves. And if you want to know how a finished dish should look or how to angle your knife or to fashion a pretty rosette on that cake, there are more than 600 color photographs to entice and instruct you along the way.

A one-of-a-kind, brilliant, and inspiring book from the incomparable Julia, which is bound to rekindle interest in the satisfactions of good home cooking.

Average Customer Review: ( 96 customer reviews )
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While Julia covers a wide range of dishes in this book (Soups, Breads, Eggs, Fish, Poultry, Meat, Vegetables, Salads, Pastry, Desserts, and Cakes & Cookies) her emphasis is definitely on French/European cooking. If you are looking for recipes from different ethnic groups, you will need to find other cookbooks to compliment this one.

In the last five years that I've owned this cookbook, I've made a wide selection of recipes and have never been disappointed. From simple dishes such as crepes to complex day-long affairs such as Lamb Stew Printaniere, her instructions have been complete, straightforward, and detailed. If you follow her steps, you're guaranteed to have incredible results.

The book includes both beautiful and useful photographs. This is important, because one of the big drawbacks with most cookbooks are that they have incredible imagery of the finished dish, but don't actually show you how things should look as they are being prepared. The way to cook does an excellent job at showing you both... which is one of the reasons it is such an outstanding book.

Julia's other books are also excellent. Both "Baking with Julia" and "In Julia's Kitchen With Master Chefs" are outstanding.

One last word of advice... if you ever make A Fast Saute of Beef for Two from this book, use heavy creame instead of cornstarch (she says you can use either). The cream will make the difference between a good meal and a great one!

Enjoy!

188 of 190 found the following review helpful:

Julia Child for Everyday Cooking. Excellent Teaching SourceMay 03, 2004
By B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold"
`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 fits the master recipe model is that variations on the ragout master recipe are not limited to recipes for chicken. Rather, the same section includes ragouts of turkey and rabbit. The same principle is used throughout the book where foods are grouped by method of preparation rather than by source (pig, cow, lamb, calf, fowl).

Still, the chapters are true to a fairly classic organization, with some topics you may not find in the usual work. The chapters are: Soups, Breads, Eggs, Fin Fish & Shellfish, Poultry, Meat, Vegetables, Salads, Pastry Doughs, Desserts, Cakes & Cookies.

The chapter on Breads covers just four master recipes, but it will give you a thorough and satisfying experience which will tell you if you have the kind of love for baking which warrents exploring specialized works by such experts as Peter Reinhart or Nancy Silverton.

The chapter on Pastry Doughs also just covers four master recipes, Pate Brisee, Puff Pastry, Pate a Choux, and Crepes. I may not be willing to take on puff pastry any time soon, but I would expect that the other three master recipes should be enticing enough to remove a cooks fears about making pies, crepes, and eclairs. Crepes especially should be an entertainer's best friend in that the batter can be made well in advance and, if necessary, the crepes themselves can be made in advance and reheated. If you want them fresh, it takes but a minute or two to cook a crepe, and it makes great kitchen theater, especially if you master the technique of flipping the crepe.

I suspect the must useful chapter may be the one on eggs. Knowing ones way around egg cookery will take you a goodly distance toward being able to prepare really great dishes from standard pantry. I find that an author's discussion of how to make an omelette is often a good test of the quality of their book as a whole. I can say that Julia comes through for me by citing an omelette technique I have seen nowhere else. That is, the warning to limit oneself to two eggs when you have only a typical household burner available.

As the book is published by Knopf, the layout, editing, and photography are first rate. I was just a little surprised when I could not find `barbecue' in the index, yet there is clearly a master recipe for barbecue in the chapter on meats. The very best feature of the book is Julia's very familiar voice and attitude which carries you on with reassurances that you can do it and these techniques will do you great service in your life.

Very highly recommended. Lots of French recipes and lots of modern appliances put to good use.

95 of 97 found the following review helpful:

The Final Word on CookingDec 09, 1999
By A. Henning "AHenning"
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!

40 of 40 found the following review helpful:

It's been my cooking bible since it was publishedJun 28, 2000
By David J. Huber "Addicted to books!"
I bought this book when it was first published (and it cost me almost 10 hours of wages), and of all the cookbooks I own (maybe 40 or so), this is the one I use the most. Even when I moved to Hawaii for a short-term internship, I used precious luggage and weight restriction space to take this heavy book with me. Why? Not just because it has great recipes, but because it is just what the title says - a book about how to cook (at least, how to cook Northern European). I don't go to it very often for specific recipes (although her French Onion Soup is fantastic), but to see how to do something in general - like, how to make a cream sauce, how to make a chowder base, how to clean mussels, how to clean fowl, etc. If you master this book, you will have mastered the theory of (Northern European) cooking, and will no longer be tied down trying exactly to reproduce a recipe in one of countless thousands of generic cookbooks. You will have courage to experiment, because you'll know what the ingredients are doing and how to handle them - you will, in fact, become your own recipe inventor and creative, tasteful, confident cook that you and your family (and friends!) will appreciate. This is, really, the proper model for what cookbooks should be, and I wish someone would do something similar for other cuisines (and if they have, send me an email about it!).

32 of 32 found the following review helpful:

This book has spawned a culinary success storyFeb 23, 2009
By Avid Reader
I first bought this book many years ago in an attempt to become a better cook. I found it amazing! However, it was not until my autistic son, who is learning to love good cooking, discovered it that I truly appreciated it fully.

Being autistic and OCD, he is unable to do anything without precise, explicit instructions, and is a slave to doing it the 'right way'. We have found this book to be a perfect match to the way he does things. There is no guessing for him, and he is able to follow the directions and complete complex dishes without my vague 'about this much' instructions. I can stay out of the kitchen while he is cooking, knowing that the instructions and pictures are clear enough for him to complete one of the scrumptious dishes that are included without the frustration that accompanies many less detailed cookbooks.

I am sure that if this cookbook works for his need for precision and allows him to produce Julia's marvelous dishes without frustration, that it will allow anyone to duplicate his success.

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