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Julia Child could not cook. She had worked for US intelligence during the war, married Paul Child and followed him to Paris in 1948, and she was 36 when she ate her first proper French meal. It was sole in a restaurant in Rouen, and for the rest of her life she described it as the turning point.
She enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu, where she was the only woman in a class of returning servicemen, and then began working with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle on a book that would teach Americans how to cook French food. It took them nearly ten years. Houghton Mifflin rejected the manuscript on the grounds that it read like an encyclopaedia. Knopf published it in 1961, when Child was 49.
What still makes it unbeatable is the patience. Every task is explained in sequence, every step comes with a note on what happens when it goes wrong, and nothing is assumed. When they set out to develop a recipe for French bread that would work in an ordinary American home oven, they baked nearly 300 test loaves before they were satisfied.
There are more than 1,000 recipes across two volumes in a slipcase. The book is 65 years old and remains the best English-language introduction to French cooking, which tells you everything about how thoroughly the work was done.
Format: Hardback, two volumes in a slipcase
Language: English
First published: Volume one 1961, volume two 1970
The Kitchen Lab Selection
Before Child, a cookbook was a collection of recipes for someone who could already cook. French recipes in English were either translated straight across, and therefore unusable, or simplified beyond recognition.
She assumed instead that the reader could read but could not necessarily cook using French technique. That sounds obvious today and it was not then, and it is why the book still works while almost everything else from the same period is useless.
That she learned French cooking from nothing at the age of 36 is probably the whole explanation. She knew exactly where it breaks down.
