Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol.2

If you don't have a PhD in cuts of meat, then the meat recipes will be tricky.

The actual ingredients suggested in lots of dishes are unimaginative and whole slews of different recipes end up tasting the same, despite massively time-consuming techniques involved.

This book is, however, pretty essential as a complement to the first volume, in order that your training in French cookery be complete.

The book is of more limited use for family cooking or even for entertaining because the recipes are very time-consuming yet not sufficiently imaginative to warrant the effort required.

Use these textbook techniques in conjunction with 'ingredient-combination' ideas in more more modern books and you're literally 'cooking'!!

The actual techniques described, however, are excellent and save going to a finishing school in Switzerland, which is very dull and expensive.


A classic in the truest sense   March 3, 2003
Dommy (Surrey, UK)
21 out of 21 found this review helpful

I have owned this book for many years (since 1977) and it still remains as one of the finest books on the method of French cooking. It is thorough and easy to understand as long as you read the recipe very carefully and fully before you begin. The recipes themselves are presented so that the reader is introduced to the basic way of preparing and cooking something with variations following on from the master recipe in question. Volume 1 takes the reader through Soups (onion, garlic, vichyssoise being fine and tasty examples), through a fabulous chapter on sauces (white, brown, hollandaise, stocks etc) and moves on to some of the classic dishes for which the French are known (Coq au Vin, Pot-au-Fue). The only criticism I could think of was a slightly dissappointing chapter on fish - they only really mention sole (unsurprisingly perhaps). The puddings are particularly straightforward to follow and quite delicious (cheery clafoutie being particularly so). Some of the recipes do call for a particularly long time in the kitchen - especially for the traditional French loaf for example - but if you have time on your hands or a long weekend ahead, it is well worth the effort immersing yourself in the delights of making (perhaps) a wonderful choucroute a l'Alsacienne and enjoying the beautiful meaty aroma of a dish that takes at least 5 hours to cook.


A must have for anyone who takes cooking seriously   January 8, 2001
DownByLaw (Tetbury, Glos United Kingdom)
15 out of 16 found this review helpful

I was given volume 1 for my 23rd birthday - I finally found volume 2 5 years later! How did the fact that I wanted it stick in my mind for so long? Buy them and you will instantly understand. These are *the* definitive cook books - they are to other cookery books what the "Complete works of Shakespeare" are to drama. They are sometimes complex but oh, so thorough (for example, about 70 pages on the core of French cuisine - sauces, alone!) The recipes are listed step by step, forcing you to read and understand each one (indeed, I recommend reading them like novels, if only just the sections on kitchen equipment and technique!) but they are fantastic. Try, for example, "Sauce Venaison" - it spans a number of pages and evolves from "Brown Sauce" through "Sauce Ragout" to this delicious game sauce (takes about 4 hours to make, but when I tasted it I couldn't believe I had actually made it...!) Forget all those self help books - these will *really* change your life! (Ok, maybe that's a bit OTT but they are good).