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Summary: The cookbook you go back to over and over again
Review: I am an avid cook, and home baker. I also have an extensive collection of cookbooks. Some cookbooks, French Laundry, Aquavit, Amuse Bouche, and the like are beautiful books, with wonderful recipes for the more advanced home chef. I use them all the time, but consider them very focused and specific in their scope. The Way to Cook is more like the cooking "Kama Sutra" in my house. I continue to go back to Julia's methods of preparing the staples. In a very easy to understand and often illustrated way, this book covers hundreds of food preperations. I highly, highly recommend this book. I have a second copy on hand, because mine is so tattered, splattered, and earmarked!
Rating:
Summary: The cookbook you go back to over and over again
Review: I am an avid cook, and home baker. I also have an extensive collection of cookbooks. Some cookbooks, French Laundry, Aquavit, Amuse Bouche, and the like are beautiful books, with wonderful recipes for the more advanced home chef. I use them all the time, but consider them very focused and specific in their scope. The Way to Cook is more like the cooking "Kama Sutra" in my house. I continue to go back to Julia's methods of preparing the staples. In a very easy to understand and often illustrated way, this book covers hundreds of food preperations. I highly, highly recommend this book. I have a second copy on hand, because mine is so tattered, splattered, and earmarked!
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Summary: It's been my cooking bible since it was published
Review: 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!).
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Summary: The Final Word on Cooking
Review: 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!
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Summary: this really is "the way to cook"
Review: I have a few dozen cookbooks on my shelves -several of them by Julia Child- but as its tattered binding and the food stains on almost every page show, "the way to cook" is the one book I use the most. The reason I keep going back to "the way to cook" is its unique combination of being a cooking course, a collection of good classic recipes and a reference manual on food.
Unlike too many other cookbook authors, Child never tries to dazzle nor does she condescend. And while the writing is always entertaining and sometimes even hilarious the book's clear focus is on teaching the readers how to cook with proper technique, confidence and outright joy. The only thing Child expects of her readers is a willingness to pay attention, but the reward is outstanding food.
In the first year after buying this book I systematically cooked my way from cover to cover - from potato leek soup to tarte tartine. On the way I learned how to make good chicken stock, mayonnaise, pot roasts, sauce béarnaise, braised brusselles sprouts, chicken pipperade, flan and classic genoise cakes. I doubt that any cooking course could have taught me more - certainly not any of the courses I attended at my local cooking schools.
Now, 10 years later I go back to "the way to cook" if I want to look up a recipe for a classic dish or I need a recipe for a cake batter or some pastry cream. But sometimes I just read some of Child's comments and enjoy her command of both the English language and French cooking.
So if you are serious about cooking, get this book, and I am sure a few years down the line your copy will have as many splotches of great tasting sauces on it as mine does now.
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Summary: Truly the Finest Cookbook Available
Review: I have dozens and dozens of cookbooks and have yet to find one that I turn to as frequently and with as much confidence as this one. The real success of this book is that is assumes all readers are novices in the kitchen and therefore must explain each step of the process. In doing so, otherwise complicated recipes become approachable. I have won rave reviews with the coq au vin recipe and the brussel sprouts with chestnuts has become a new Thanksgiving tradition. Definitely buy this cookbook.
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Summary: I will use this book for life
Review: 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.
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Summary: Even the things you've always made can be amazing
Review: I've owned this book for years and am constantly amazed at the new stuff I learn every time I use it. Try the recipe for pot roast -- it's a HUGE hit at my house!!!
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Summary: The best of the best
Review: If you are truly clueless about how to cook, or you are a seasoned professional, this book can teach you whatever you need to know to pull off an intimate dinner for two or a fabulous dinner party for 8. Anything that you need to know about the day-to-day business of cooking can be found here in easy to understand terms with lots of pictures. Julia doesn't looks at good cooking as something that anyone can do and gladly shares her secrets to making it fun and easy and scrumptious.
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Summary: Don't Be Put Off!
Review: If you could only have one cook book, this would be it. Excellent gift for people who don't or can't cook as well as for more experienced cooks. It's not so much about recipes (though there are plenty of wonderful recipes) it's more about the ..well, the WAY to cook. I still go to my ten year old copy more often than any other book.
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