Mastering The Art Of French Cooking Quotes

Just like becoming an expert in wine–you learn by drinking it, the best you can afford–you learn about great food by finding the best there is, whether simply or luxurious. The you savor it, analyze it, and discuss it with your companions, and you compare it with other experiences.

Sometimes, if you want to be happy, you've got to run away to Bath and marry a punk rocker. Sometimes you've got to dye your hair cobalt blue, or wander remote islands in Sicily, or cook your way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year, for no very good reason.

I didn't understand for a long time, but what attracted me to MtAoFC [Mastering the Art of French Cooking] was the deeply buried aroma of hope and discovery of fulfillment in it. I thought I was using the Book to learn to cook French food, but really I was learning to sniff out the secret doors of possibility.

I have never looked to religion for comfort - belief is just not in my genes. But reading Mastering the Art of French Cooking - childishly simple and dauntingly complex, incantatory and comforting - I thought this was what prayer must feel like. Sustenance bound up with anticipation and want. Reading MtAoFC was like reading pornographic Bible verses.

An asbestos mat, if necessary

If it weren’t for Julia Child, I might never have moved past brown rice and tofu. Worse, I might still be afraid of being less than perfect.

Do you know Mastering the Art of French Cooking? You must, at least, know of it- it's a cultural landmark, for Pete's sake. Even if you just think of it as the book by that lady who looks like Dan Aykroyd and bleeds a lot, you know of it. But do you know the book itself? Try to get your hands on one of the early hardback editions- they're not exactly rare. For a while there, every American housewife who could boil water had a copy, or so I've heard. It's not lushly illustrated; there are no shiny soft-core images of the glossy-haired author sinking her teeth into a juicy strawberry or smiling stonily before a perfectly rustic tart with carving knife in hand, like some chilly blonde kitchen dominatrix. The dishes are hopelessly dated- the cooking times outrageously long, the use of butter and cream beyond the pale, and not a single reference to pancetta or sea salt or wasabi.

But there too fine cooking would become inescapably French. Its greatest proselytiser was Julia Childs, who had an infectious passion for sauce. Her book of 1961, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and her TV show, The French Chef, encouraged the ‘servantless American cook’ to abandon all concern for ‘budgets, waistlines, time schedules’ and ‘children’s meals’ in order to throw him- or herself into ‘producing something wonderful to eat’. Elizabeth Bennet would have been horrified.

In France dining is meant to be a special, pleasurable part of the day; food offers not only fuel for the body but also a connection—between the people who have joined you at the table, between the generations who have shared a recipe, between the terroir (the earth) and the culture and cuisine that have sprung from it. Separate from cooking, the very act of eating is in itself an art to master.

A sous-chef with dreams of her own restaurant empire may have mastered the art of classical French sauce making, but not yet have developed the signature cooking style she imagines as the cornerstone of her own chain of restaurants. She gauges her progress not only by whether she is moving toward her aspirations, but also by her improving skills. Our chef may not yet have the stature of Chef Auguste Escoffier or Emeril Lagasse, but she can remember a time when she could not name the five French mother sauces, let alone execute them. She's made progress. Appreciating the skills she has developed is a marker along the path toward her culinary aspirations. The sense of accomplishment that accompanies improved skills is one of the rewards we reap when we dedicate ourselves to mastery.

Now, I was unemployed in Beijing, and my former ambition seemed like the pollution that smudged the sky, a great green cloud composed of a billion different particles of fear and uncertainty. Without a career I hardly knew who I was anymore.

I have never looked to religion for comfort—belief is just not in my genes. But reading Mastering the Art of French Cooking—childishly simple and dauntingly complex, incantatory and comforting—I thought this was what prayer must feel like.

Sometimes it seems that for nineteenth-century Russian writers, food was what landscape (or maybe class?) was for the English. Or war for the Germans, love for the French - a subject encompassing the great themes of comedy, tragedy, ecstasy, and doom.

IN EGGPLANT CASSEROLE,