The Way To Cook

The Way To Cook (1989, Knopf) is a cookbook and series of instructional videos written by television personality and cooking teacher Julia Child; Child saw it as her magnum opus and considered it a culmination of her career as a cooking teacher up to that point. The book was published by Knopf, the firm that published almost all of Child's work from the beginning to the end of her career; the video series was produced with and marketed by the WGBH Educational Foundation in Boston but shot at Child's West Coast home in Santa Barbara, California.

The Way To Cook differs from Mastering the Art of French Cooking in numerous ways; the first was that while Mastering was a collaboration that co-authors Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle had gotten underway before Child's involvement, The Way To Cook was a solo work, written entirely by Child during the late 1980s. The second significant difference was that The Way To Cook did not focus entirely on French cuisine, adding substantial amounts of traditional American cooking (particularly that of New England, where Child's mother had come from and where Child spent much of her life) to the French cuisine that had made her reputation, thus reflecting the diversification of Child's television repertoire since the premiere of the 1978 series Julia Child & Company.

Pedagogically, the book also formalized an approach that Child et al. had been using since the very beginning, providing a more explicit focus on "master recipes", that is, recipes that illustrated broad principles in cooking, with other recipes provided as variants on that theme. The book also made greater use of technological changes such as the food processor, of which Child was a major proponent (the 1983 revision of Mastering was driven heavily by the introduction of the food processor to the market), and improved cookware designs.

The book proved to be extremely popular upon introduction, with four printings in the first month after its introduction;Masthead of a copy from the fourth printing, dated November 1989 it remains in print nearly two decades later in both hardcover and softcover editions.