ABSTRACT
In the 1960s, long before there was Julie & Julia, an aspiring writer named Nora Ephron cooked her way through the holy trinity of cookbooks: Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Michael Field’s Cooking School, and Craig Claiborne’s New York Times Cook Book. Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking became the inspiration for Julie Powell’s mission to cook every one of its 524 recipes, and write a blog about it. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines three of Hussain’s cookbooks for children, in which Hussain figures as the main character in the stories the author tells. It takes the quotation in her title from a character in Monique Truong’s novel The Book of Salt: Binh, the Vietnamese cook of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.
