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The Way to Cook
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The Way to Cook (Canada, UK)
By Julia Child
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Publication Date: Sept. 1989
ISBN: 0679747656Even if you’re Julia Child, even if you’ve spent half your life teaching people how to cook, how to choose and work with ingredients, how to enjoy good food and entertaining; even if your name is synonymous with good cooking and comedians parody your career and distinctive voice on Saturday Night Live, even then, I imagine, it would take a certain amount of audacity to call your book “The Way to Cook.”
The suggestion probably came from her publisher (publishers not necessarily being known for their modesty). At the same time, what else would you call Julia Child’s magnum opus?
If Mastering The Art of French Cooking was her humble, two-volume appetizer, The Way to Cook is a wonderful main course in a great career of teaching people how to cook and what to eat.
More than a dozen years since publication, The Way to Cook is still my favorite cookbook. I have yet to prepare a dish from it that has not turned out well, that has not been delicious, satisfying, and easy-enough to prepare.
The production of cookbooks these days is a lot like the recording business — an album has to have an A song and a B song, and the rest is filler. Unlike most cookbooks, The Way to Cook is filled with A recipes.
Among the favorites in our household are:
- A Fast Sauté of Beef for Two (which we make with pork tenderloin instead of beef, carrots instead of pearl onions, and for five instead of two), and which is an incredibly satisfying mainstay in our household.
- Granny’s Ham and Potato Gratin for a Crowd, which we make every time we have ham leftovers, and for which we sometimes buy a ham just to have leftovers.
- The best Sino-Italian combination since the days of Marco Polo — Chinese Manicotti, which is an absolutely delicious, if not spectacularly beautiful dish.
- The little hamburger buns — they may take half a day to prepare, but are absolutely worth it.
- The Free-Form Fresh Apple Tart, which is both simple and delicious.
- The French Butter-Cream Frosting, which is by far the wickedest thing I have learned how to make.
We also regularly consult the book for information on how long to roast a turkey, how to season a roast, what spices and herbs to add to a stew, and for answers to other basic cooking questions.
Even though I know Julia Child to be a stickler about cookbook indexes (she has her publisher guarantee a certain number of index pages before she will sign a book contract), The Way to Cook does not index recipes by title. So it is very, very hard, for example, to find the recipe for Chinese Manicotti (look under pasta). If you try to find Granny’s Ham and Potato Gratin for a Crowd and look under the heading for ham, you have to know that it is meant to use leftovers, in which case, you have to turn to “feasting on remains,” at which point you can find it (mysteriously, though, it does show up under the potato heading.) A book of this caliber deserves a better index.
We have hundreds of cookbooks, but if I were stranded on a desert isle with a full kitchen and unlimited access to groceries, this is the one cookbook I’d take.
For whatever reason — the pace of life, too much reliance on prepared and processed foods, mass-produced but less-flavorful ingredients, etc. — it seems harder and harder to find satisfying meals these days, at home or in a restaurant. Julia Child’s The Way to Cook is chock full of them. If you don’t have it, get it!
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