Cooking Julia Child’s recipes showed that classic recipes can be simple, comforting and fun.Even selective eaters can enjoy meals made with care, butter and a little extra time.Child’s recipes remind us that cooking is love—and a way to bring family together.
As a new mom trying to work, parent and still maintain my sense of self, I joined a book club. One of our first reads was Julia Child’s My Life in France, and while I couldn’t uproot my life and move to Europe to pursue a love of cooking with a 1-year-old, I lived vicariously through Child’s stories of learning to cook and discovering a love of food. Later, I read Julie and Julia, a book about one writer’s attempt to cook her way through Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I was among the first in line to see the 2009 movie version of Julie Powell’s novel and can still remember the day I found my own vintage copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking at a thrift store, complete with handwritten, dated notes in the margin from a woman who cooked from it in the ’60s.
Child died before I even discovered my love of her recipes and cooking style, but I’m far from the only home cook she impacted. For years, her cookbooks and television appearances have guided aspiring foodies through tasks like roasting the perfect vegetables and making a really good quiche. Her methods were simple, her ability to educate was unparalleled, and her legacy lives on in humble food writers like me, who she taught to use cooking as a form of self-expression during the isolating stages of new motherhood. But I was curious, 17 years after discovering the iconic chef, how would Child’s recipes hold up when it came to feeding my family dinners for a week?
What Went into Cooking Julia Child Meals for a Week
I’ve made plenty of meals from Mastering the Art of French Cooking over the years and recently decided to spend a week channeling my inner Julie Powell, cooking only recipes from the book for dinner for my family of four. I’ve got the same challenges most parents face at dinnertime: balancing a grocery budget, finding the energy to cook after a long workday and dealing with moody teenagers who develop food aversions without notice. (Shoutout to my 15-year-old daughter, who only last night announced mashed potatoes were the only food she would eat on Thanksgiving this year.)
So I sat down with my copy of Child’s most iconic cookbook and looked first for dishes my kids already like: French onion soup, burgers and chicken all stood out. But because my husband and I love decadent, flavorful meals, I threw in extras like a rich mushroom cream sauce and unctuous beef bourguignon. All-in-all, my list consisted of two chicken dishes, a unique take on hamburgers, a soup night and beef bourguignon, which I planned to tell my kids was “just beef stew.” Although Child offers tons of side dish recipes in the cookbook, I chose to keep things simple, using sides like rice for the chicken or a green salad with the soup to minimize the effort level. Besides, I figured, Child’s main dishes would be so rich and delicious, they deserved a moment to shine.
The Recipes I Tested
Here’s the list of Julia Child’s recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking that made it into my five-night meal plan:
Soupe à l’Oignon (French Onion Soup)
Suprêmes de Volaille aux Champignons (Chicken Breasts with Mushrooms and Cream)
Boeuf Bourguignon (Beef Stew in Red Wine, with Bacon, Onions and Mushrooms)
Bitokes à la Russe (Hamburgers with Cream Sauce)
Suprêmes de Volaille à Brun (Chicken Breasts Sautéed in Butter)
As someone who’s cooked around the pages of Mastering the Art of French Cooking quite a bit, these five recipes felt like they represented the main courses in the book pretty well while still (I hoped) appealing to my picky teenagers. Yes, the cookbook addresses methods for cooking whole goose, calf liver, poached fish and more, but I figured I’d have better luck pleasing everyone at my table by keeping things pretty basic.
My Favorite Julia Child Recipe: Chicken Breasts with Mushrooms and Cream
Abbey Littlejohn
I’ve long drooled over Child’s French onion soup and beef bourguignon recipes, so I assumed one of those would be my favorite of the week. Surprisingly, it was a new-to-me recipe that turned out to be my favorite. There’s a whole section in Mastering the Art of French Cooking on chicken suprêmes, which are essentially the yummy, boneless, skinless piece of the chicken breast. Child wrote all about how to find those mess-free breasts by butchering your own whole chicken, but for ease, I went with boneless, skinless breasts from my grocery store.
Child had a master method for cooking chicken breasts that was used for all the sauces covered in the cookbook. I started by coating both sides of four chicken breasts with salt, pepper and a few drops of lemon juice. After heating 4 tablespoons of butter in a frying pan, I cooked the breasts for a few minutes on each side, then finished them in a 400°F oven until, as Child said, the meat was “springy to the touch.” Then, it was time to transfer the chicken to a plate to work on the real star of the meal, the cream sauce.
The secret to most of Child’s recipes is butter, butter and some more butter, and this dish was no exception. The sauce started with butter, minced green onion, sliced mushrooms and salt, which I cooked until the vegetables were tender but not browned. Then I added stock, whipping cream, vermouth, salt and pepper and lemon juice and stirred the whole thing until it turned into a rich, creamy, thickened sauce.
I’ve got one kid who’s into mushrooms and creamy sauces, and one who’s not, so I loved that this recipe allowed me to pull one plain chicken breast out to serve to my son. Even without the sauce he proclaimed, “Wow, this is really good chicken,” and he wasn’t wrong. Still, pouring the creamy, mushroom-filled, perfectly seasoned cream sauce atop the chicken and serving the whole thing over white rice was the ultimate in decadent comfort food.
The Best Weeknight Meal: French Onion Soup
Abbey Littlejohn
Child’s French onion soup has long been the recipe my husband and I have used when we’re craving the distinctly French dish at home. It uses a lot of onions: 5 cups of thinly sliced yellow onions, to be exact, but it’s worth the hard work (and potential tears) of doing that much onion-cutting.
It’s a soup that’s better the longer it simmers on the stove, so I started the process early in the day, simmering all those onions with salt and sugar for nearly an hour until they were a deep, golden brown and perfectly caramelized. For the soup’s broth, all that’s required is beef stock, white wine or vermouth, and salt and pepper. Child said to “count on 2½ hours at least from start to finish,” but I let my onion and broth mixture simmer for much longer, from early afternoon right up to dinnertime. Before serving, Child recommended adding a bit of cognac and topping each bowl with a crusty round of French bread and some Swiss or Parmesan cheese.
This soup puts any French onion soup I’ve had in any restaurant to shame and, served with a simple green salad and some extra bread, it’s a great weeknight meal, especially since you can let the soup hang out on low for hours, simmering away, and know it only adds more flavor to the broth.
The Dish My Family Was Divided On: Hamburgers with Cream Sauce
Abbey Littlejohn
My kids love a good burger, and I wondered, did Child have a French burger recipe to share? She did, in fact, along with a funny little quip. “Shock is the reaction of some Americans we have encountered who learn that real French people living in France eat hamburgers,” she wrote. “They do eat them … the French hamburger is an excellent and relatively economical main course for an informal party.”
For my informal party of four, I tried Child’s hamburgers with cream sauce. As with the chicken breasts, there’s a master recipe for ground beef hamburgers in the book, made of sautéed onions, butter, ground beef and simple spices. After shaping each burger into a patty, the burgers get patted with flour on both sides then fried in—you guessed it—more butter. The cream sauce that goes along with them is a simple mix of stock, cream, butter and herbs, cooked in the same pan as the burgers once they’re done.
I served the burgers atop mashed potatoes and topped the whole thing off with the creamy sauce. The verdict? My daughter and I loved the dish, finding it comforting and quite tasty. After all, what isn’t delicious covered in cream sauce? On the other hand, my husband and son weren’t fans of the texture of eating a sauced burger atop potatoes, and said they may have enjoyed the burger patties more served on buns.
Best Julia Child Meal for Entertaining: Boeuf Bourguignon
Abbey Littlejohn
There’s something so special about Child’s beef bourguignon recipe. It’s been one of my go-to meals for holiday dinners or sitting around our dinner table with friends for years both because it always turns out really good and because it’s comfort in a bowl. Through the years, I’ve served the French-style beef stew over roasted potatoes, rice, mashed potatoes and egg noodles. This time around, buttery egg noodles were our medium of choice, and the dish tasted amazing with the noodles soaking up every little bit of sauce and vegetables.
This dish must simmer for three to four hours to really be good, so it’s a great meal for a weekend dinner party or a Sunday family meal. The ingredients are truly ones you cannot go wrong with: thick bacon, tender beef stew meat, savory carrots, mushrooms, pearl onions and a rich brown sauce that only gets better with time.
Child called this dish “one of the most delicious beef dishes concocted by man,” and I’d have to agree. It’s one worth pulling out for any special meal in your life, especially if you want to impress your dinner guests with a dish that, all things considered, isn’t incredibly difficult to prepare.
The Easiest Julia Child Meal I Cooked: Chicken Breasts Sautéed in Butter
Abbey Littlejohn
The simplest of Child’s recipes, I found, was for chicken breasts with brown butter sauce. The chicken was cooked in much the same way as the breasts I cooked for the mushroom cream sauce, with the exception of needing to coat each breast with a light dusting of flour before frying them up in butter. For the sauce, I browned some clarified butter in a skillet, then added parsley and lemon juice before pouring the mixture over the chicken.
The dish wasn’t hard to make at all and was beautiful in its simplicity. Paired with some rice and roasted vegetables, it made a great family dinner and was one everyone at my table enjoyed. Still, compared to decadent beef bourguignon or slow-simmered French onion soup, it felt a bit too simple.
What I Learned from My Week with Julia Child
So what did I learn during my weeklong experiment with Mastering the Art of French Cooking? First and foremost, it did what I think Child would have wanted it to do: it made me want to put my teenagers on a plane and teach them all about how delicious even the most simple foods are in France. But cooking some of Child’s most iconic recipes at home also reminded me that it’s no more difficult to make a really incredible French dish than it is to whip up some of our weeknight staples like tacos or spaghetti and meatballs.
Yes, my teens are picky eaters, but I never want to stop putting delicious meals in front of them because, like Child, I believe food can transport you to another place and time and teach you so much about other cultures. My kids may have learned that things cooked in butter are really, really good this week, but they also learned that a bite of slow-cooked food made with ingredients that were lovingly picked out at the grocery store can truly be a way to convey love.
The Bottom Line
If you feel like Julia Child’s recipes are too intimidating, they’re not. Start with small but fancy-sounding dishes like Child’s French Apple Tart or upgrade one small thing on your dinner table with recipes like her Cranberry Chutney. And remember, French food uses a lot of butter, but sometimes that’s OK, as evidenced by every delicious bite I took during my week of cooking through Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
Julia Child lived a lifelong love affair with cooking, and her story is an important reminder to home cooks that we can make healthy, love-filled meals for our families with ingredients that aren’t difficult to find or incredibly expensive. And remember, the next best thing to visiting a country is learning to cook its cuisine at home.
Dining and Cooking