LITTLE ROCK — Almost 48 years after it was first published, Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child is finally topping The New York Times best-seller list, bringing with it all the butter, salt and goose fat that home chefs had largely abandoned in the age of Lipitor.
The book, given a huge lift from the recently released movie Julie & Julia, sold 22,000 copies in the most recent week tracked, according to Nielsen BookScan, which follows book sales. That is more copies than were sold in any full year since the book's appearance, according to Alfred A. Knopf, which published it.
The book is making its debut at No. 1 on The New York Times best-seller list today in the advice and how-to category.
"In a month, I've sold almost seven times what I sell, typically, in a year of Mastering, and it's going to get even higher," said Lee Stern, the cookbook buyer for Barnes & Noble. "It's amazing."
Amazing not just because the book is almost half a century old, costs $40 and contains 752 pages of labor-intensive and timeconsuming recipes - the art of French cooking is indeed hard to master - but also for what those recipes contain.
In a decade when cookbooks promise 20-minute dinners that are light on calories, Child's recipes feature instructions like "thin out with more spoonfuls of cream" (Veau Prince Orloff, or veal with onions and mushrooms, pages 355-357) or "saute the bacon in the butter for several minutes" (Navets a la Champenoise, or turnip casserole, pages 488-489). And for a generation raised to believe thatJell-O should have marshmallows in it, there is plenty of aspic - the kind made with meat.
Readers who only recently opened the book, and have beenblogging and tweeting about it, have found some anachronistic surprises.
"I'm looking at these ingredients going, 'Oh, sweet Lord, we'll die,'" said Melissah Bruce-Weiner, 45, a resident of Lakeland, Fla., who bought the book on her way home from seeing the movie. Horrified by the prospect of cooking with pork fat, she tried a variation of boeuf bourguignon - "beef fauxguignon," as she called it. "I know why all of the greatest generation has died of heart attacks," she said.
Mindy Lockard, 34, of Eugene, Ore., made Poulet Saute aux Herbes de Provence, which calls for a stick of butter, for a recent dinner party.
"I found the recipes, actually, much easier than I thought they were going to be, but the amount of butter was a bit overwhelming," Lockard said. "There's a picture of me cooking, and I have this glow, and it's from too much hot butter. I expected to break out the next day."
Child, who died in 2004 at the age of 91, liked to say, "'Oh, butter never hurts you,'" her editor, Judith Jones, recalled. "In this country, we sort of have a love-hate relationship with food - we love it,but we're also afraid of this whole fear-of-fat mania."
Mireille Guiliano, the author of French Women Don't Get Fat, said there are reasons why American and French bodies respond differently to the same fatty ingredients.
For starters, the French eat more fruits and vegetables, and they walk more, she said. And then there is portion size. "The French simply eat much less," she said.
Some of that is alluded to in the movie Julie & Julia, which combines scenes from Child's discovery of cooking while in France with the true story of a modern blogger who decides to cook her way through Mastering the Art.
Mastering the Art - co-written by Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, and the first of two volumes - is not the only book that has gotten a lift from the movie. The book Julie & Julia, which was written by the blogger Julie Powell and was the basis for the movie, has been reprinted 13 times this year in movie tiein versions by publisher Little, Brown.
The movie editions of My Life in France, the 2006 book that chronicles Child's years there and provided biographical material for the movie, have been reprinted nine times by Knopf.
Knopf has also reprinted Julia's Kitchen Wisdom six times this year, and it tops today's Book Review list of advice and how-to paperbacks. According to Book-Scan, which tracks roughly 75 percent of the book market, it is the second-best-selling cookbook in the country, behind Mastering.
As for Mastering the Art, even discount stores that have never stocked the book, like Sam's Club, are putting in orders.
"We won't be caught up for a while," said Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for Knopf.
Style, Pages 52 on 08/30/2009