Comments: Julia Child rhetorically asks where her career would be without Public Television. Many of us might well wonder where Public Television would be without Julia Child. She and her long-time producers put together a show commemorating the nearly 40 years Mrs. Child spent on television educating the American public in the art of cooking. And, since Child says, "You can’t have a food show without a book to go with it," they also produced Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom is a slim volume (just over 125 pages) that is apparently meant to distill and disseminate the 50 or so years that she spent in the kitchen.

It took us a while to warm up to the book, though. Child says it began as her loose-leaf notebook that evolved through the years, and the book has that feeling to a certain extent. The thing about using someone’s notebook is that you have to know how the writer thinks, or it can be hard to find the information you need.

The book is a mixture of recipes and cooking tips, and Child and her co-writer David Nussbaum have done a good job of organizing her personal ideas into an orderly manuscript that others can follow and that can be indexed effectively. But it still has somewhat the feel of someone’s notebook.

The design of the pages is also quite dull, and their sameness keeps useful tidbits from popping out. I assume the book was published on a budget that allows PBS stations to offer it as a premium to donors.

The book follows a convention used extensively in her major book The Way to Cook, in which a "master recipe" is followed by one of more variations. As Child says, "once you have mastered a technique, you hardly need to look at a recipe again." Her point is that so many foods — even quite dissimilar ones — are prepared in much the same way, so presenting a recipe for one dish often provides the instructions necessary for many others.

As with so many other cookbooks, but especially ones for classical cooking, there are references in many recipes to sauces and other building blocks that must be prepared to complete the dish. The Savory Spinach & Mushroom Crêpe Roulades that looked so appealing last night required a béchamel sauce, cooked seasoned spinach, sautéed mushrooms and the crêpes themselves before it could be assembled and popped into the oven. It was delicious, but more involved than we expected for a week-night dinner. And yes, all the auxiliary recipes are included (on four separate pages). It is possible a novice cook could use the book effectively, but he would have to jump around a lot; it might be more appropriate for someone with a bit more cooking knowledge.

At the same time, the more we look through the book, the more recipes call out to us, and, we think, if you had to limit your library to one cookbook, this would not be a bad choice.

That Julia Child has had a major influence on how we cook and eat in this country is inescapable. That she did so when her contemporaries were retiring, and with such apparent grace is commendable. That she continues to share her work with people through this book is an inspiration.