Mastering the art of French cooking

What Hacker News says

1. diego_moitaMar 2026
   I am worried.

   I do agree that the bigger picture of learning non-fiction is richer. We now have other ways to learn non-fiction: Wikipedia, Veritasium, Gemini, etc.

   But only books can provide you something we may call a "coherent worldview". They are the ones that stitch together different pictures into a coherent whole.

   I can think of a lot of books that gave me that: E.Gombrich's "Story of Art", Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death", ... honestly, even Julia Childs' "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" or Yuval Harari's "Sapiens" (his other books are crap, b.t.w.).

   True, we still have universities' textbooks. But they're very narrow in scope.

   The thing about non-fiction books is that nothing else can provide the same combination of depth and scope.

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2. globular-toastSep 2024
   Big difference being Child went to France to train as a cook and spent a long time there (she learnt French). There were techniques and recipes that simply weren't available to the English speaking world at the time. It's different nowadays, especially with English being so much more dominant. It's easy for us to find someone French doing a video in English. As of about 10 years ago there was still a bit more to learn if you learnt French, but the amount of stuff left is shrinking.

   For anyone who wants to learn to cook my advice is not to learn recipes but instead learn ingredients, tools and techniques. Good books like Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking dedicate many pages to this before they get into recipes (this book incidentally sets out the ingredients better than any other cooking book or website I've ever seen). Where YouTube shines is the techniques. Books do an admirable job of describing kneading, but nothing beats seeing someone do it. That's how we really learn this stuff, and must of us don't have a parent to learn from these days. So watch YouTube videos, but pay extra special attention to what they are doing, more so than what they are saying (you could have just read that part).

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3. jonstewartSep 2024
   I encourage you to read a couple dozen cookbooks and then read Mastering the Art of French Cooking and then come back here and issue a mea culpa.
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4. throwawaaarrghMay 2023
   Lol, we're so pampered today.

   Watch Tasting History with Max Miller (https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCsaGKqPZnGp_7N80hcHySGQ). Every old recipe used to leave out salt, not explain any technique, times, temps, types of ingredients, and barely had proportions. People who cooked recipes were usually professionals who just knew how to cook things. It was around the end of the 19th century that cookbooks for home cooks came out, and they too didn't explain much.

   If you are really interested in cooking, either take a class, or buy a book that teaches you how to cook. La Technique and Mastering the Art of French Cooking are excellent instruction manuals. If you learn better from video, Jacques Pepín did a 3 hour video of cooking mostly everything in La Technique.

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5. beedeebeedeeMay 2023
   I also use the Joy of Cooking and love it (as well as Mastering the Art of French Cooking).

   > On the other hand, I refuse to make recipes found on the internet. They work extremely rarely if you’re like me and don’t have a sense of “what the authors really mean when they say X.”

   What I do is look at about half a dozen recipes online when I am trying something new. I compare them and make my own recipe based on that. Through practice I can usually glance at them and see pretty quickly what they are doing differently and similarly.

   Most dishes come out really well because I can get a feel for the dish before it's made and I have the freedom to make changes based on what the different recipes say (and my intuition). I'd encourage everybody to take this approach and not follow just one recipe.

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6. throwaway787544Jun 2022
   La Technique, Jacques Pepin

   Mastering The Art Of French Cooking, Julia Child

   These books are a combination of background information, recipe, and step by step instruction. So these are more a reference of how to write an implementation guide or Runbook, rather than how to describe an API or present architectural documents.

   I also really liked Mastering Algorithms With Perl, and any of the For Dummies books on technical subjects.

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