Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 2: A Cookbook

The beloved sequel to the bestselling classic, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume II presents more fantastic step-by-step French recipes for home cooks.

Working from the principle that “mastering any art is a continuing process,” Julia Child and Simone Beck gathered together a brilliant selection of new dishes to bring you to a yet higher level of culinary mastery.

They have searched out more of the classic dishes and regional specialties of France, and adapted them so that Americans, working with American ingredients, in American kitchens, can achieve the incomparable flavors and aromas that bring up a rush of memories—of lunch at a country inn in Provence, of an evening at a great Paris restaurant, of the essential cooking of France.

From French bread to salted goose, from peasant ragoûts to royal Napoleons, recipes are written with the same detail, exactness, and clarity that are the soul of Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Julia Child was born in Pasadena, California. She graduated from Smith College and worked for the OSS during World War II; afterward she lived in Paris, studied at the Cordon Bleu, and taught cooking with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, with whom she wrote the first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961). In 1963, Boston’s WGBH launched The French Chef television series, which made Julia Child a national celebrity, earning her the Peabody Award in 1965 and an Emmy in 1966. Several public television shows and numerous cookbooks followed. She died in 2004.

Simone ("Simca") Beck was born in 1904 at Tocqueville en Caux, Normandy. In 1933, she began to study at the Cordon Bleu, then the world’s supreme school of cuisine. In 1948 she was approached by a friend, Louisette Bertholle (now Comtesse de Nalèche), to collaborate on a French cookbook for Americans. In 1951, at the suggestion of her husband, they began to search for an American to help them, and a friend introduced Simca to Julia Child, then studying cooking in Paris. Soon afterward, the three women formed a cooking school, L’École des Trois Gourmandes, and began the collaboration that produced the several volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She died in 1991.