“One thing I learned after sliding the first DVD of “The French Chef” into the player: Cooking shows are much more satisfying in color.
Julia Child started out in black-and-white on Boston public television in 1963. While I could discern that America’s first celebrity chef was making French onion soup, I couldn’t tell how brown the onions should be or how deep brown the broth should turn out. It was all gray.
What I could tell as I watched her slice onion after onion was that I had been using my knife incorrectly for 20 years. Not only that, but I also learned how to keep a good edge on the blade — with a honing steel, just like the neighborhood butcher used to do.
These seem like small things, but they’re not. They are the building blocks of real cooking and the continuation of hundreds of years of tradition. Julia wasn’t showing me a recipe I needed to write down, I realized. She was offering me an apprenticeship in the uniquely human art of cookery.” Read more…
Tags: Julia Child, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, The French Chef, Tonia Moxley
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