Mastering the Art of French Cooking
Mastering the Art of French Cooking is a two-volume French cookbook written by Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, both of France, and Julia Child of the United States. The book was written for the American market and published by Knopf in 1961 (Volume 1) and 1970 (Volume 2). The success of Volume 1 resulted in Julia Child being given her own television show, "The French Chef", one of the first cooking programs on American television. Historian David Strauss argues that the publication of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking", "did more than any other event in the last half century to reshape the gourmet dining scene."
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.