From Julia Child’s Kitchen

"It’s the description. It’s everything you need to know. Just give me one little sec. I’m going to pull out the book… But the real secret, which she didn’t know at the time, and that I got from Bernard Clayton’s book, is the temperature of the butter has to be 60-65 degrees, so that it’s malleable and doesn’t break through, but not so soft that it squishes either. This is the thing. I’m choosing the books that I refer to the most. So, to be honest, I haven’t looked at Julia’s book for a long time, but I consider it to be unsurpassable in the writing style and… here it is! It’s full of yellow post-its. Oh! It’s not puff pastry, it’s croissants. Probably the hardest thing to make without a sheeter and she has four and a quarter pages devoted to it. That’s a lot of pages. “If you have the right recipe you don’t need to know anything – you just need to follow it.” I have them in my book too, but no other book gave all the information about the rising, the rolling, the delaying tactics, forming them. It has really good step-by-step photos and it is just beautifully and clearly written. I know a lot of people love Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but that’s classic old-style French cooking. So, she has half a pound of flour and she uses part salad oil to soften the butter. I’ve found since then that you don’t need to do that if you have the butter at the exact right temperature. She actually says ‘chilled unsalted butter. The proportions of flour to butter are two to one… but as soon as you feel more expert use equal proportions of flour to butter to make the flakiest, tenderest, most deliciously mouth-watering, melting-on-tongue croissants imaginable.’ I must just tell you one aside that’s related. Years ago I was interviewed with other people and asked what was the one book I’d take with me to a desert island. One cook took her own book and I thought: ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ One never remembers one’s own recipes but you can always recreate them if you have the basics."