掌握法式烹饪艺术 (1961)

Mastering the Art of French Cooking is a two-volume French cookbook written by Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, both from France, and Julia Child, from the United States. The book was written for the American market and published by Knopf in 1961 (Volume 1) and 1970 (Volume 2).

The success of Volume 1 resulted in Julia Child being given her own television show, The French Chef, one of the first cooking programs on American television. Historian David Strauss claimed in 2011 that the publication of Mastering the Art of French Cooking "did more than any other event in the last half century to reshape the gourmet dining scene".

History

After World War II, interest in French cuisine rose significantly in the United States. Through the late 1940s and 1950s, Americans interested in preparing French dishes had few options. Gourmet magazine offered French recipes to subscribers monthly, and several dozen French cookbooks were published throughout the 1950s. These recipes, however, were directly translated from French, and consequently were designed for a middle-class French audience that was familiar with French cooking techniques, had access to common French ingredients, and who often had servants cook for them.

In the early 1950s, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, French cooking teachers who had trained at Le Cordon Bleu, sought to capitalize on the American market for French cookbooks and wrote and published a small recipe book for American audiences, What's Cooking in France, in 1952. By the late 1950s, Beck and Bertholle were interested in writing a comprehensive guide to French cuisine that would appeal to serious middle-class American home cooks. Beck and Bertholle wanted an English-speaking partner to help give them insight into American culture, translate their work into English, and bring it to American publishers, so they invited their friend Julia Child, who had also studied at Le Cordon Bleu, to collaborate with them on a book tentatively titled "French Cooking for the American Kitchen". The resulting cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, proved groundbreaking and has since become a standard guide for the culinary community.

Beck, Bertholle, and Child wanted to distinguish their book from others on the market by emphasizing accurate instructions and measurements in their recipes, and authenticity whenever possible. After prototyping dishes in their Paris cooking school, L'École des trois gourmandes, Child would check to make sure the ingredients were available in the average American grocery store; if they were not, she would suggest a substitution and they would begin the prototyping process again with the substituted ingredient, sometimes flying in ingredients from America to perform their tests. While Beck, Bertholle, and Child wanted all of the recipes to be as authentic as possible, they were willing to adapt to American palates and cooking techniques. Child had noted early in the process that Americans would be "scared off" by too many expensive ingredients, like black truffles, and would expect broccoli, not particularly popular in France, to be served with many meals, and adjustments were made to accommodate these tastes. American home cooks at the time were also more inclined to use appliances like garlic presses and mixers than French cooks, and so Child insisted that supplemental instructions for cooks using these appliances be included in the book alongside the normal instructions.

Mastering the Art of French Cooking Volume 1 was originally published in 1961 after some early difficulties. Beck, Bertholle, and Child initially signed a contract with publisher Houghton Mifflin, but Houghton Mifflin grew uninterested in the project. Child recalled one editor telling her, "Americans don't want an encyclopedia, they want to cook something quick, with a mix." Beck, Bertholle, and Child refused to make requested changes to the manuscript, and Houghton Mifflin abandoned the project, writing that the book, as it stood, would be "too formidable to the American housewife." Judith Jones of Alfred A. Knopf became interested in the manuscript after it had been rejected. After spending several years in Paris, Jones had moved to New York, where she grew frustrated with the limited ingredients and recipes commonly available in the United States. Jones felt that the manuscript would offer a lifeline to middle-class women, like her, who were interested in learning how to cook French cuisine in America, and predicted that Mastering the Art of French Cooking, "will do for French cooking here in America what Rombauer's The Joy of Cooking did for standard [American] cooking." While Jones was enthusiastic about the book, Knopf had low expectations and invested very little into promoting it. In order to generate interest in the book, and without support from Knopf, Child appeared on several morning talk shows in 1961 to demonstrate recipes, which she later cited as the impetus for her own cooking show, The French Chef.