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For this special edition, Julia Child has written a Introduction that recalls the nascent food scene in America at the time of the book s original publication. Forty years ago, Mastering the Art of French Cooking ignited America s passion for good food, and brought that food into our homes. 100 illustrations. Anyone can cook in the French manner anywhere, wrote Mesdames Beck, Bertholle, and Child, with the right instruction. And here is the book that, for forty years, has been teaching Americans how. Mastering the Art of French Cooking is for both seasoned cooks and beginners who love good food and long to reproduce at home the savory delights of the classic cuisine, from the historic Gallic masterpieces to the seemingly artless perfection of a dish of spring-green peas. This beautiful book, with more than one hundred instructive illustrations, is revolutionary in its approach because: It leads the cook infallibly from the buying and handling of raw ingredients, through each essential step of a recipe, to

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The perfect gift for any follower of Julia Child-and any lover of French food. This boxed set brings together Mastering the Art of French Cooking, first published in 1961, and its sequel, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume Two, published in 1970.

Volume One is the classic cookbook, in its entirety-524 recipes.
"Anyone can cook in the French manner anywhere," wrote Mesdames Beck, Bertholle, and Child, "with the right instruction." And here is the book that, for nearly fifty years, has been teaching Americans how.

Mastering the Art of French Cooking is for both seasoned cooks and beginners who love good food and long to reproduce at home the savory delights of the classic cuisine, from the historic Gallic masterpieces to the seemingly artless perfection of a dish of spring-green peas. The techniques learned in this beautiful book, with more than one hundred instructive illustrations, can be applied to recipes in all other French cookbooks, making them infinitely usable. In compiling the secrets of famous Cordon Bleu chefs, the authors produced a magnificent volume that continues to have a place of honor in American kitchens.

Volume Two is the sequel to the great cooking classic-with 257 additional recipes.
Following the publication of the celebrated Volume One, Julia Child and Simone Beck continued to search out and sample new recipes among the classic dishes and regional specialties of France-cooking, conferring, tasting, revising, perfecting. Out of their discoveries they made, for Volume Two, a brilliant selection of precisely those recipes that not only add to the repertory but, above all, bring the reader to a new level of mastery of the art of French cooking.

Each of these recipes is worked out step-by-step, with the clarity and precision that are the essence of the first volume. Five times as many drawings as in Volume One make the clear instructions even more so.

Perhaps the most remarkable achievement of this volume is that it will make Americans actually more expert than their French contemporaries in two supreme areas of cookery: baking and charcuterie. In France one can turn to the local bakery for fresh and expertly baked bread, or to neighborhood charcuterie for pâtés and terrines and sausages. Here, most of us have no choice but to create them for ourselves.
Bon appétit!

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Featured Recipe: No Cream-No Cry Penne Alla Vodka

The dirty little secret about Penne alla Vodka is not the vodka but the hefty amount of heavy cream. Vodka is colorless, odorless, and without much flavor-not really attributes of a superstar ingredient. It's the combination of cream and tomato sauce that gives this dish its signature flavor. The traditional cream is swapped here for low-fat Greek yogurt. --Rocco DiSpirito

Ingredients

• 8 ounces whole- wheat penne
• 2 cups Rocco's How Low Can You Go Low-Fat Marinara Sauce (page 206 of Now Eat This!) or store-bought low- fat marinara sauce
• Pinch of crushed red pepper
• One 7-ounce container 2% Greek yogurt
• 1 cup chopped fresh basil
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 6 tablespoons grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese

(Serves 4)

Directions

1. Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil. Add the pasta and cook according to the package directions, about 9 minutes; drain.

2. While the pasta is cooking, bring the marinara sauce and crushed red pepper to a simmer in a large nonstick saute pan over medium heat. Cook the sauce, stirring it occasionally with a heat-resistant rubber spatula, until it is slightly thickened, about 5 minutes. Remove the saute pan from the heat.

3. Stir about 1/2 cup of the marinara sauce into the yogurt until smooth (this tempers it and prevents the yogurt from curdling). Then whisk the yogurt mixture back into the marinara sauce.

4. In a large serving bowl, toss the sauce with the drained penne and the basil. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Sprinkle the cheese on top, and serve.

Healthy Tips

Whole-wheat pasta has a dense texture that makes it a little tougher than regular pasta. Some people like that chewiness; some don't. If you're in the latter category, overcook it a bit. Toward the end of the cooking time, keep testing it until it's as tender as you like it.

Fat: 4.8 g
Calories: 320
Protein: 18 g
Carbohydrates: 55 g
Cholesterol: 11 mg
Fiber: 6 g
Sodium: 416 mg

Featured Recipe: Seared Tuna With Green Beans, Lemon, And Wasabi

This dish isn't a makeover, per se. But there are so many beloved--and believe it or not, unhealthy--seared tuna dishes out there in the restaurant world that I thought I should offer at least one healthy version. The tuna is never the problem. Tuna is rich in nutrients, low in fat, delicious, and just a good bet all around. It's the stuff that's put on top that's the problem--anything from seared foie gras to deep-fried tempura crispies. Sure, it tastes great, but those additions turn a healthful dish into an artery-clogging one. --Rocco DiSpirito

Ingredients

• 4 sushi-grade tuna steaks (3 ounces each)
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper
• Nonstick cooking spray
• 12 ounces haricots verts or slim green beans, trimmed
• Juice and grated zest of 1 lemon
• 1 garlic clove, minced
• 2 tablespoons wasabi paste
• 4 scallions (white and green parts), sliced thin on the diagonal
• 3 tablespoons black sesame seeds

(Serves 4)

Directions

1. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Preheat a grill or grill pan over high heat.

2. Season the tuna steaks with salt and pepper to taste, and spray them lightly with cooking spray. When the grill is hot, add the tuna and cook for 1 1/2 minutes per side for medium-rare. Transfer the tuna to a platter and allow it to rest, uncovered, for 5 minutes.

3. Meanwhile, cook the haricots verts in the boiling water until they are just tender, about 3 minutes; drain.

4. In a medium bowl, whisk together the lemon juice and zest, garlic, and wasabi paste. Add the haricots verts, scallions, and sesame seeds. Toss to coat, adding salt and pepper to taste.

5. Thinly slice the tuna. Fan each portion onto each of 4 plates. Pile a mound of dressed haricots verts on top of the tuna, and serve.

Fat: 3.8 g
Calories: 166
Protein: 23 g
Carbohydrates: 11 g
Cholesterol: 38 mg
Fiber: 5 g
Sodium: 211 mg

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The ultimate Italian summer cookbook. It is a must have for anyone who enjoyed "The Silver Spoon" and "The Silver Spoon Pasta". Delicious, easy-to-make seasonal recipes for picnics, barbecues, salads, light lunches and suppers, summer entertaining, ice creams and drinks. Perfect for getting the best out of tasty summer produce with over 400 unpublished recipes from "The Silver Spoon" collection.

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Regional and Ethnic - French Cooking & Cookbooks - The only cookbook that explains how to create authentic French dishes in American kitchens with American foods. Teaches the key techniques of French cooking, permitting many ... - Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1 (Books)

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Pages: 336, Edition: 2, Hardcover, Artisan

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In this updated and greatly enlarged edition of her Book of Middle Eastern Food, Claudia Roden re-creates a classic. The book was originally published here in 1972 and was hailed by James Beard as "a landmark in the field of cookery"; this new version represents the accumulation of the author's thirty years of further extensive travel throughout the ever-changing landscape of the Middle East, gathering recipes and stories.Now Ms. Roden gives us more than 800 recipes, including the aromatic variations that accent a dish and define the country of origin: fried garlic and cumin and coriander from Egypt, cinnamon and allspice from Turkey, sumac and tamarind from Syria and Lebanon, pomegranate syrup from Iran, preserved lemon and harissa from North Africa. She has worked out simpler approaches to traditional dishes, using healthier ingredients and time-saving methods without ever sacrificing any of the extraordinary flavor, freshness, and texture that distinguish the cooking of this part of the world.Throughout these pages she draws on all four of the region's major cooking styles:??-??The refined haute cuisine of Iran, based on rice exquisitely prepared and embellished with a range of meats, vegetables, fruits, and nuts??-??Arab cooking from Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan--at its finest today, and a good source for vegetable and bulgur wheat dishes??-??The legendary Turkish cuisine, with its kebabs, wheat and rice dishes, yogurt salads, savory pies, and syrupy pastries??-??North African cooking, particularly the splendid fare of Morocco, with its heady mix of hot and sweet, orchestrated to perfection in its couscous dishes and taginesFrom the tantalizing mezze--those succulent bites of filled fillo crescents and cigars, chopped salads, and stuffed morsels, as well as tahina, chickpeas, and eggplant in their many guises--to the skewered meats and savory stews and hearty grain and vegetable dishes, here is a rich array of the cooking that Americans embrace today. No longer considered exotic--all the essential ingredients are now available in supermarkets, and the more rare can be obtained through mail order sources (readily available on the Internet)--the foods of the Middle East are a boon to the home cook looking for healthy, inexpensive, flavorful, and wonderfully satisfying dishes, both for everyday eating and for special occasions.Claudia Roden has updated and expanded her popular 1968 cookbook for a more savvy and knowledgeable audience. While still filled with old favorites, the third edition acknowledges food processors and other handy kitchen tools, as well as this generation's preference for lower-fat recipes. Not that every recipe is changed; many are not, but Roden does attempt not to rely too much on butter and oils. Begin your meal with mezze, derived from the Arabic t'mazza, meaning "to savor in little bites." Try Cevisli Biber (Roasted Pepper and Walnut Paste) spread on warm pita bread. Serve with Salata Horiatiki (Greek Country Salad) and then move on to a main dish of Roast Fish with Lemon and Honeyed Onions or Lamb Tagine with Artichokes and Fava Beans. The cookbook wouldn't be complete without sections on rice, couscous, and bulgur--try Addis Polow (Rice with Lentils and Dates) or Kesksou Bidaoui bel Khodra (Beber Couscous with Seven Vegetables). Finish with a traditional dessert like Orass bi Loz (Almond Balls). Mixed in with the recipes are Roden's personal experiences as a cook and recipe archivist, and Middle Eastern tales that illustrate the history of a particular recipe or food group. "It was once believed olive oil could cure any illness except the one by which a person was fated to die," Roden writes. "People still believe in its beneficial qualities and sometimes drink it neat when they feel anemic of tired." She also includes a detailed introduction to the terrain, history, politics, and society of the Middle East so her readers can more fully understand why the cuisine has evolved the way it has. "Cooking in the Middle East is deeply traditional and nonintellectual," she says, "an inherited art." It's our good fortune to inherit such a rich tradition. --Dana Van Nest

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"The trick to cooking is that there is no trick." --Mario Batali

The only mandatory Italian cookbook for the home cook, Mario Batali's MOLTO ITALIANO is rich in local lore, with Batali's humorous and enthusiastic voice, familiar to those who have come to know him on his popular Food Network programs, larded through about 220 recipes of simple, healthy, seasonal Italian cooking for the American audience.

Easy to use and simple to read, some of these recipes will be those "as seen" on TV in the eight years of "Molto Mario" programs on the Food Network, including those from "Mediterranean Mario," "Mario Eats Italy," and the all-new "Ciao America with Mario Batali." Batali's distinctive voice will provide a historical and cultural perspective with a humorous bent to demystify even the more elaborate dishes as well as showing ways to shorten or simplify everything from the purchasing of good ingredients to pre-production and countdown schedules of holiday meals. Informative head notes will include bits about the provenance of the recipes and the odd historical fact.

Mario Batali's MOLTO ITALIANO will feature ten soups, thirty antipasti (many vegetarian or vegetable based), forty pasta dishes representing many of the twenty-one regions of Italy, twenty fish and shellfish dishes, twenty chicken dishes, twenty pork or lamb dishes and twenty side dishes, each of which can be served as a light meal. Add twenty desserts and a foundation of basic formation recipes and this book will be the only Italian cooking book needed in the home cook's library.

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Regional and Ethnic - French Cooking & Cookbooks - As viewers of her Barefoot Contessa show can attest, Ina Garten favors simple, sophisticated dishes, main courses that evoke the best of cozy bistro meals. In Barefoot in ... - Barefoot in Paris: Easy French Food You Can Make at Home (Books)

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