The French Chef

How to buy, store, trim, boil, steam, serve, and et it - and some fancy fare with hearts and bottoms.

Fruit tartes -- how to make the dough, pastry cream and assemble them, plus a recipe for a showy dessert.

Starting in the store and ending on your plate - buying turkeys fresh or frozen, stuffing, trussing, timing, gravy making, carving, and serving. Julia shows you all you need to know to make the bird festive.

Better than anything you can buy. Learn a basic yeast dough and the special rolling techniques that will serve you well in other French pastries. Then form and bake it into the yeasty buttery crescent rolls that made France famous.

Variations on two soup themes - leek and potato soup, Vichyssoise and watercress on the one hand, and mushroom soup on the other - and how to provide counterpoint with what’s left from yesterday’s table.

If you can make a meat loaf, you can make a French pate -- it’s just ground meat flavored with herbs and wine and baked in a mold.

Four good reasons for learning how to make a Genoise are the cake itself, petits fours, cupcakes and jelly rolls. Plus madeleines!

Julia shows you how to roll a buche, make bark out of frosting, mushrooms from meringues, and moss out of spun sugar.

Try your hand at amuse-gueule -- anchovy appetizers, Talmouses, Croque Madame and Croque Monsieur.

The French approach to braised beef - learn to pick the right cut of meat, to lard and marinate it in the continental way, and to serve it up in a splendid wine sauce.

Another step in mastering the egg. Showing you exactly how to concoct this marvel of cookery. How to get it together and how to let it wait for the oven until you are ready to bake and serve it - swollen with pride, and justly so.

You need no special oven or equipment to bake this excellent white sandwich bread - fine textured and close grained, it is also perfect for fancy sandwiches, canapes, and melba toast.

Don’t panic at the thought of making Hollandaise or Bearnaise -- Julia shows you how!

Fillets of sole poached in wine, garnished with mushrooms for one, with tomatoes for the other, served in white wine sauce.

Julia prepares the delicate, rich Orange Bavarian Cream.

A marvelous recipe for stuffed cabbage, or how to make a little look like a whole lot and a whole cabbage.

In which you see how to make a plain French omelette in less than 30 seconds, and a many-layered omelette with many fillings. Then Julia shows you how to throw an omelette party serving 3 to 300 people.

A touch of aspic is a touch of magic.

None as brown, as crisp, or as fresh as those made at home.