Julia Child: Home Cooking with Master Chefs

GOURMET COOKING AT HOME

A Review of Julia Child: Home Cooking with Master Chefs

by Judy Pozar

If you like to cook and want to go beyond the ordinary dishes you make over and over, try whetting your appetite for fine home cooking with this new CD-ROM.

Julia Child: Home Cooking with Master Chefs brings together sixteen of America’s greatest chefs. Twenty-five interactive video lessons feature these culinary artists preparing a sampling of the dishes that made them famous. Also included are photo biographies, more than 100 recipes, 250 cooking tips, and guided tours of Child’s kitchen.

A typical cooking lesson is a mix of video and still photographs narrated by the chef. One fascinating example is Patrick Clark preparing his Horseradish-Crusted Grouper with Mashed Potatoes. He demonstrates not only how to cook the fish to perfection, but also how to make it a work of art by presenting it with chive oil, crispy leeks, and a chive garnish.

Through the lessons and photo biographies, narrated by Child, users will appreciate the distinctive style of each master chef. Additional text provides a more thorough look at each chef’s history, influences, and personal food preferences. For example, “comfort food” means soups and stews to many of these fine cooks, but for Jeremiah Tower it means champagne, pistachio nuts and homemade potato chips.

The recipes are quite complete. You can hear the names of ingredients and dishes that may be in French, Italian or other languages. You can scale most recipes to serve a desired number of people, and print out custom, comprehensive shopping lists – unique features that are not available with ordinary cookbooks. Instructions are very detailed, and each recipe includes nutritional information and even a complete list of cookware and utensils needed to prepare and serve the dish. You can add your own notes to any recipe, and it is a simple matter to print an entire recipe, or just the ingredients, directions, cookware list, or your personal notes. It is also possible to copy a recipe to the Windows clipboard and paste it to a word processing document. However, copying recipes causes all fractions in the ingredient list to be converted incorrectly. For example, if you copy a recipe that calls for ‘1/8 teaspoon salt’ to the Clipboard and then paste it to Microsoft Word it will be converted to ‘7 teaspoon salt.’ To get around this problem, while you are in the word processor, you must select the numbers that should be displayed as fractions and then change the font to MS Reference 2. This is obviously tedious and error-prone.

Overall, however, Julia Child: Home Cooking with Master Chefs is an easy-to-use, enjoyable, and useful product. Anyone with an interest in fine home cooking will be inspired to try some of the outstanding recipes demonstrated by the experts.

Multimedia Cafe Scorecard

Product:	Julia Child: Home Cooking with Master Chefs
Company:	Microsoft Corporation One Microsoft Way Redmond, WA 98052-6399 (800) 426-9400

Cost:

$34.95

Multimedia PC or compatible with a 386SX of higher microprocessor;
Windows 3.1 or Windows 95; 4 MB RAM; 6 MB hard-disk space;
double-speed CD-ROM drive; audio board;
VGA or higher-resolution monitor with minimum 256-color support;
mouse or other pointing device; headphones or speakers.