Mastering the Art of French Cooking
Volume 1 of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" received overwhelmingly positive reviews when it was first released in 1961. In the "New York Times", Craig Claiborne wrote that the recipes in the book "are glorious, whether they are for a simple egg in aspic or for a fish souffle," and that it "is not a book for those with a superficial interest in food...but for those who take a fundamental delight in the pleasures of cuisine." Michael Field, writing for the "New York Review of Books", praised Beck, Bertholle, and Child for "not limiting themselves to la haute cuisine," and stated that "for once, the architectural structure of the French cuisine is firmly and precisely outlined in American terms." Field's sole criticism of the book was that the authors suggested dry vermouth as a substitute for white wine, as he felt the domestic vermouth available to American home cooks, the book's target audience, was "bland and characterless." Despite being a relatively expensive cookbook, retailing for $10 in 1965, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" Volume 1 did well commercially, selling over 100,000 copies in less than five years. According to Julia Child biographer Noel Riley Fitch, the publication of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" instantaneously changed the entire American cookbook industry, leading more cookbook publishers to place emphasis on clarity and precision, and away from the "chatty and sometimes sketchy" style that had typified American cookbooks.
Barbara Ketcham Wheaton
Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, born in Philadelphia in 1931, is a writer, a noted food historian, and since 1990 the honorary curator of the culinary collection at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, one of the largest U. S. collections of books and manuscripts relating to cooking and the social history of food. In 1976 she produced a modern edition of Agnes B. Marshall's Victorian classic "The Book of Ices", originally published in London in 1885. She is the author of the well-reviewed "Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789", and of the biography of Marie-Antoine Carême, French exponent of "grande cuisine", in Alan Davidson's "Oxford Companion to Food" (1999). At her request (she did not want to wash dishes and wanted a durable but disposable dish) the MIT Media Lab's Counter Intelligence Group created its Dishmaker, a machine that made dishes on demand out of food-safe materials and recycled them afterwards. She developed "The Cook's Oracle", a searchable database that establishes relationships among recipes in cookbooks from different historical periods. Wheaton hopes to find someone who will continue her database, now on Microsoft Access, and make it available.