French cuisine is a good thing, a thing which must be recovered. You can tell a good thing when our culture must pay it a nod; consider the recent film Julie & Julia.
But French cooking does not begin and end with Julia Child; Julia Child’s role was to popularize French cooking in America. That was a necessary and important role, to be sure. But before Julia, and more important in the architecture of this thing called French cooking, stand two other books — the Larousse Gastronomique and the Escoffier.
The Larousse is not so much a cookbook as it is an encyclopedia of cooking, with stories biographical entries to complement its many recipes. It is a reference guide to French cooking, though it also touches briefly on other styles of cooking.
The Escoffier is a cookbook, but it is geared for professionals. It may tell you how to make a certain sauce, but it does not necessarily give you the exact proportions of things or delve too deeply into technique. It is a cookbook written in a kind of chef’s shorthand. It is also a cumulative work — if you are preparing a dish that includes, for instance, a Bechamel sauce, it will give you the number of the recipe for a Bechamel sauce from several hundred pages previous. So you need to read into the Escoffier and experiment with it. It assumes you know the basics.
My point here is not to criticize Julie and Julia, or to be a curmudgeon. Julie and Julia will doubtless send many people on an expedition to recover, in their own lives, French cooking. This is a good thing, a valuable thing. But the journey does not end with Julia Child. That is merely how prepared the culture is prepared to walk in the direction of the good at this time. Beyond Julia lie the thousands of recipes in the Larousse and the Escoffier. Julia Child’s work is old and good. The Larousse and the Escoffier are older and better still.
The Recovery of Good Things 