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9780801897733 Add to Cart Academic Inspection Copy

Setting the Table for Julia Child:

Gourmet Dining in America, 19341961
  • ISBN-13: 9780801897733
  • Publisher: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
    Imprint: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
  • By David Strauss
  • Price: AUD $109.00
  • Stock: 0 in stock
  • Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
  • Local release date: 16/04/2011
  • Format: Hardback 352 pages Weight: 0g
  • Categories: Cookery / food & drink etc [WB]
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Before Julia Child's warbling voice and towering figure burst into America's homes, a gourmet food movement was already sweeping the nation. Setting the Table for Julia Child considers how the tastes and techniques cultivated at dining clubs and in the pages of Gourmet magazine helped prepare many affluent Americans for Child's lessons in French cooking.

David Strauss argues that Americans' appetite for haute cuisine had been growing ever since the repeal of Prohibition. Dazzled by visions of the good life presented in luxury lifestyle magazines and by the practices of the upper class, who adopted European taste and fashion, upper-middle-class Americans increasingly populated the gourmet movement. In the process, they came to appreciate the cuisine created by France's greatest chef, Auguste Escoffier.

Strauss's impressive archival research illuminates themes—gender, class, consumerism, and national identity—that influenced the course of gourmet dining in America. He also points out how the work of painters and fine printers—reproduced here—called attention to the aesthetic of dining, a vision that heightened one's anticipation of a gratifying experience.

In the midst of this burgeoning gourmet food movement Child found her niche. The movement may have introduced affluent Americans to the pleasure of French cuisine years before Julia Child, but it was Julia's lessons that expanded the audience for gourmet dining and turned lovers of French cuisine into cooks.

Acknowledgments Note to the ReaderIntroduction1. Food Fights in Twentieth-Century America: The Good Life versus the Healthy Life2. Building a Foundation for Gourmet Dining in America3. Origins, Rituals, and Menus of Gourmet Dining Societies, 1934– 19614. Selectivity and Publicity in the Gourmet Dining Movement5. Beating the Nazis with Truffles and Tripe: The Early Yearsof Gourmet: The Magazine of Good Living6. Gourmet's Gastronomic Tours: Samuel Chamberlain and His Bouquets7. From Readers to Cooks? The Influence of Gourmet/Gourmet Recipes8. Julia and Simca: A Franco- American Culinary AllianceConclusionNotesEssay on SourcesIndex

""Thoroughly researched [and] cogent.""

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