Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child
Published 1961 · 250,000 words · about 17 hours at an average pace · Education & Reference, Nonfiction, Travel & Food
How hard is Mastering the Art of French Cooking to read?
Mastering the Art of French Cooking scores 17 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 35 out of 100
- French culinary terminology throughout. Technical but well-explained.
- Sentence structure: 28 out of 100
- Abstraction: 20 out of 100
- Entirely practical. Technique, ingredients, method.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Extremely dense with culinary instruction, technique, and detail.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- Direct instruction. No narrative structure.
- Symbolic density: 100 out of 100
- French cooking functions symbolically as a path to the good life.
- Ironic distance: 100 out of 100
- Warm, encouraging, direct.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- Each recipe resolves with a completed dish.
- Structural complexity: 20 out of 100
- Organized by technique and ingredient. Clear reference structure.
How Mastering the Art of French Cooking is regarded
Mastering the Art of French Cooking holds a literary regard score of 65 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.