The Way to Cook. (Julia Child)

In her most creative and instructive cookbook, Julia Child distills a lifetime of cooking into 800 recipes emphasizing lightness, freshness, and simplicity. Chapters are structured around master recipes, followed by innumerable variations that are easily made once the basics are understood. For example, make Julia’s simple but impeccably prepared sauté of chicken, and before long you're easily whipping up Chicken with Mushrooms and Cream, Chicken Provençale, Chicken Pipérade, or Chicken Marengo. Or master her perfect broiled butterflied chicken, and you’ll soon be including Deviled Rabbit or Split Cornish Game Hens Broiled with Cheese on your menu.

Here home cooks will find a treasure trove of poultry and fish recipes, as well as a vast array of fresh vegetables prepared in new ways, along with bread doughs and delicious indulgences, such as Caramel Apple Mountain or a Queen of Sheba Chocolate Almond Cake with Chocolate Leaves. And if you want to know how a finished dish should look or how to angle your knife or to fashion a pretty rosette on a cake, there are more than 600 color photographs to entice and instruct you along the way. A brilliant, inspiring, one-of-a-kind, book from the incomparable Julia Child, The Way to Cook is a testament to the satisfactions of good home cooking.