Cooking with Julia

Even the great Julia Child had a cooking group – L'Ecoles des Trois Gourmandes, pictured here in 1953 in a photo taken by Paul Child. Left to right, they are Louisette Bertholle, Simone (Simca) Beck, and Julia, the co-authors of Mastering the Art of French Cooking Volume One (photo from Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child, by Noel Riley Fitch.)

For our first cooking session of 2006, the #1 Cooking Group – the original nine cooks – decided to watch a few episodes of The French Chef and cook along. I needed to create a menu and send out the grocery shopping list to each group member a couple of weeks ahead of our cooking date, so I've been reveling in old episodes of The French Chef, the cooking show that started it all – before The Food TV Network, before podcasts and recipe web sites, before Too Hot Tamales and Two Fat Ladies.

Choosing recipes was no easy task. We allow 2-1/2 hours to cook, which eliminates stews and yeast breads, and anything that needs to marinate for a while. No pork, veal or innards, just because I don't like them. We've already done bouillabaise, following a recipe by the artist Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, and real French onion soup, which gave us lots of practice with a mandoline; both would have been good candidates for this cooking session.

Of course I wanted to choose dishes typical of what Julia was cooking thirty-some years ago, featured in episodes of The French Chef that were both instructive and entertaining.

And the winning recipes, from the television shows and, in a somewhat different version, in The French Chef Cookbook, are.....

• Soufflé Démoulé, Mousseline (The Noncollapsible Unmolded Cheese Soufflé), from the 86th show, paired with
• Salade Nicoise and Pommes de Terre a L'Huile (French Potato Salad), from the 17th show.

Our cooking date is next weekend. Stay tuned for a full report. Bon Appetît!

Comments

[Marcia]

You stole my thunder! I was going to blog in your other site about Julia's Pommes de Terre a L'Huile.
New potatoes from my garden elevate this recipe from the sublime to the divine.
Now, back to my seed potato catalogues.....

[Rupert]

Wasn't there a scene in Desperately Seeking Susan with Rosanna Arquette following a Julia TV show?

[Lydia]

Marcia, which varieties of potatoes do you use for this recipe? I like it with Yukon Golds.

[Marcia]

Lydia, French Fingerlings or Russian Banana. If that sounds enticing, get that other blog up and running; I'll give further details.

[Lydia]

Ah, you do tempt me....I've seen both potato varieties in gourmet stores like Sid Wainer in New Bedford, and at our favorite farmers' market in Danielson (Connecticut), but you're so lucky to have them fresh from your garden. Red new potatoes would work in this recipe, too, and if you leave them unpeeled, you get the added plus of the beautiful red skins in your potato salad.