| The French Chef With Julia Child 2 |
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Product Details
A regular program on WGBH Boston from 1963 to 1972, The French Chef is perhaps best known for its down-to-earth hostess Julia Child with her dry wit and practical approach to "fancy" French cooking. Eighteen classic programs, in black and white and color, feature the ever-practical Julia Child educating viewers in everything from starters and side dishes like braised spinach, shirred eggs, and hollandaise sauce, to main courses like seafood crêpes and braised goose, to breads and desserts like croissants and the exotic gâteau in a cage. Julia Child leads viewers step-by-step through each recipe, imploring budding chefs to use their fingers and hands, let go of their fear of failure, avoid a sense of panic and maintain a sense of humor so that neither the cook nor the soufflé collapses. Helpful tips include advice about preparing dishes ahead of time, how to save a recipe gone awry, and an ever-present sense of humor that includes a waving goose and more than a few chuckles from Julia Child at her own inevitable bloopers. While current recommendations about food safety may necessitate altering some suggestions like defrosting a goose in the sink for 4 hours and modern dietary guidelines might frown upon the use of pork back fat in a terrine or pâté, the majority of these recipes can easily be prepared without alteration today. If you love French food and want to learn how to prepare it yourself, join Julia Child for 18 lessons that are sure to have you cooking up exotic dishes in no time. --Tami Horiuchi
Product Reviews
 (5 stars) - Great French Chef from America!
This is a humble collection of America's chef of all times, Julia Child. It contains 3 dvds with a random (there must have been a key but for a fresh viewer, it looks like random) selection of 18 episodes of her TV cooking show presented on TV in the 60s and 70s.
Though the espisodes were recorded and televized over 40 years ago, and most of them are just black-and-white, you would certainly not have a feeling that they are outdated. Well, the art of cooking is universal and timeless and if we speak of French cuisine, of which we should in this context, it is a classic view that Julia presents.
Julia Child shows you how to prepare vegetables, a roast goose, French savory crepes and even how to bake a piglet. You will see the very classic approach to cuisine, maybe with a little bit too much butter and too little olive oil, but maybe it is just the north-France approach where they cook with butter not olive oil :) Anyway, it is a new face of American cuisine inspired the French way by Julia Child.
A must-have for a fan of good cooking.
(5 stars) - Totally Enjoyable
In an era when "inspired" American cooks were using unthickened Campbell's mushroom soup as a sauce, Julia Child was teaching viewers how to make the crayfish butter to bind the sauce for écrevisses à la Nantua.
This wonderful series, only slightly dated by the occasional reference to the difficulty of finding certain ingredients, like shallots, which have now become commonplace, still provides an excellent demonstration of techniques and recipes. And Julia's casual style and enthusiasm are irresistible.
My only complaint with this and the companion volume is that some fool decided to arrange the episodes by type of dish rather than chronologically. Hence, one misses the nostalgia of seeing the development and gradual improvement of all aspects of the show. In spite of that flaw, this a set to treasure.
(5 stars) - The French Chef 1 & 2
I have been waiting for years for these DVDs to appear. Julia Child was an amazing woman who inspired me as a young bride to cook. She was, in addition to being a superb chef, a wonderful teacher. Her techniques and the recipes stand the test of time. My daughter, an excellent cook in her own right, has heard me talk about Julia Child and now she has her own copies of both DVDs. My daughter had watched Julia Child as a guest on television shows but now that she has actually seen the "Master Chef" in action she appreciates why I have been in love with Julia Child for so long. Julia Child goes back to the basics of cooking, showing the techniques that you have to master to become a really good cook.
(5 stars) - Not Just Nostalgia -- Useful
This is a culinary time capsule. I was one year old when The French Chef debuted on TV, and yet tonight I made the creamed spinach featured in the series, and not only was it simple, economical, and DELICIOUS (truly, like something I might have had in a restaurant), but it also used just a tiny bit of butter and a tiny amount of cream, and the rest was stuff you'd have on hand (plus the spinach).
This is an EXCELLENT way to be cooking (perfectly Atkins even). I topped it off with two poached eggs, just as Julia suggested, and that was dinner.
So many recipes today require lots of ingredients and you end up using only a portion of what you have to buy (usually only to find the recipe wasn't well written, could have been improved, and wasn't all that worthwhile). This is truly real-world and economical cooking, and even better than that, what you learn cooking one thing (in which you've learned a simple little technique and dish to add to your repertoire) transfers to cooking other things, and before you know it you're a good cook and INSPIRED cook, not having to stick slavishly to someone else's recipe, but just cooking based on experience.
There's excellent kitchen wisdom in this series to go along with the nostalgia, and I'm looking forward to trying more -- tomorrow for lunch, in fact.
It was also fun to hear Julia say things like that you could pick up a French omelette pan for $2.50 or so when the particular episode was made, and to correct herself to say "brown" a dish after saying "gratinee" and thinking (at the time) no Americans would know what she was talking about -- same thing with common cooking terms we know today like "bouquet garni" that Julia's audience was being introduced to for the first time but that today most any cook is going to know. Additionally, Julia makes suggested wine pairings that I'm certain still hold up today.
This series was particularly good for the episodes on vegetables and eggs, as, again, you will have a small repertoire of things to try that are easy, excellent, and use ingredients you're likely to have on hand or can easily and economically pick up.
Enjoy.
(5 stars) - Another enjoyable visit with Julia!
Like the first, this too is yet another great opportunity to experience Julia at her best! Bombard WGBH and tell them to release #3, #4, #5, etc.!!! Also ask them to release episodes of the "Julia Child" of plants--Thalassa Cruso, star of "Making Things Grow" filmed on the same set as Julia!
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