Setting the Table for Julia Child: Gourmet Dining in America, 1934-1961 Review

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(More customer reviews)Setting the Table for Julia Child: Gourmet Dining in America, 1934-1961 considers the gourmet food movement that swept the nation before Julia Child influenced many a home cook. The revolution actually began not on TV but in dining clubs and in the pages of Gourmet magazine, which became predecessors for Julia Child's lessons in French cooking. Themes of class, national identity and more influenced the birth and rise of gourmet cooking in America, and author David Strauss uses plenty of research to trace early influences on the aesthetics of dining in this top pick for any culinary collection.


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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 ofGourmet magazine helped prepare many affluent Americans for Child's lessons in French cooking. David Strauss argues that Americans' appetite forhaute 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.

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