Large Print Reviews - Julia's Kitchen Wisdom

Large Print Reviews

Julia's Kitchen Wisdom
Essential Techniques and Recipes from a Lifetime of Cooking
By Julia Child

Julia's Kitchen Wisdom: Essential Techniques and Recipes from a Lifetime in Cooking
Large Print Edition
By Julia Child
Random House - Large Print, (2000)
ISBN: 0-375-43093-8
Genre: Cooking, Cookbook

Reviewed by Rochelle Caviness - April 3, 2002

Julia Child has long been acknowledged as the Queen of French cooking, and rightly so. Not only is she a phenomenal chef, but she is also an excellent cooking instructor. She has verified this fact numerous times over through her various televised cooking shows and cookbooks. The newest entry to her long list of cook books is Julia's Kitchen Wisdom. In this book, Child distills her years of experience in the kitchen into one, easy to read book. Whether you are a novice cook or a respected chef, you are sure to find numerous gems of wisdom within the pages of this book.

While this book does include a number of recipes, it is not a traditional cookbook. Rather it is a book of hints, tips, and useful techniques that Child has garnered over the years. It also includes such important details as how to vary a recipe by substituting various ingredients, and what to do if you don't want to use a particular ingredient, such a wine, in your cooking.

Rather than simply listing the techniques she has uncovered, Child explains her cooking techniques by offering the reading real-life examples, in the form of recipes, in which a specific technique is used. In doing this she has organized this book into various food categories, such as soups, sauces, salads, vegetables, meets, poultry, fish, eggs, breads, cakes, and cookies. Within each category, she offers a host of basic recipes, using them to explain the information which she wants to convey. This information runs the gamut from how to wash vegetable greens, saute foods, and how to make a souffle, to how to tell when a loaf of bread is done. She also offers a variety of handy charts that illustrate a variety of methods that can be used to cook vegetables.

I highly recommend this book to novice cooks. It provides a handy collection of basic recipes for just about everything from soup stocks to how to roast a leg a lamb. Once you have mastered the techniques in this book, you will be ready to tackle some of more challenging recipes in Child's other cookbooks, such as Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Julia's Kitchen Wisdom will also serve as a handy reference book, for novice and advanced cooks, on basic cooking techniques, timesaving tips, and useful advice that will save you years of trial-and-error in the kitchen.

This delightful and practicable cookbook is embellished with a variety of illustrations of Julia Child, from her numerous television cooking shows.

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