in music you can't sing bel canto before you can sing do, re, me, fa, sol, la, ti. In cooking you can't cook good food before you've mastered some basics. Cooking starts with technique. You don't acquire it from looking at pretty pictures in cookbooks; you only get it through practice.

Telling people that a little hardship might be involved is always a proof of bravery in this country. Two people who deserve Purple Hearts are Julia Child and Jacques Pepin. Calling them "cookbook authors" does not come close to describing their accomplishments. Julia Child first engaged the world of gastronomy from the perspective of a housewife. Jacques Pepin, inversely, approached the task of teaching America to cook from the perspective of a professional chef who'd worked at the highest levels of gastronomy. For both of them technique is paramount.

Julia Child is happy to give up over two pages in "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" to show how a chicken is trussed. Jacques Pepin intersperses his nuggets of information throughout his books. In a recipe for Poule au Pot, for example, he gives the reason why you start to poach the chicken in cold water: so the impurities will rise to the surface as it begins to boil and you can then skim them off. To them, a recipe is clearly not only instructions for a dish, it's a real life situation for culinary principles.

We all know instinctually the difference between a well-charred steak and one that isn't, or a crispy baked potato and one that's soggy. Similarly, color, texture and consistency are qualities that can not be measured in ounces or oven temperatures. This is what good cooks can gauge and regulate even if they can not explain how. Ask a French chef how he did a certain dish and often the answer will simply be, "Au pif." This means, "I followed my nose," which means instinct.

French chefs carry their knowledge lightly. You'll never hear them describe a dish as "accomplished," "unique" or "marvelous." That's for journalists. Instead they talk like judges at a comedy club. Words like "marrant" and "sympa" come up: funny and congenial.

A "sympa" dish is something heartwarming and well-accomplished, like a big dish of pommes boulangere, still steaming from the oven, dripping with the juices of slowly baked potatoes and onions and more resonant to most Frenchmen than all the chateaus of the Loire.

A "marrant" dish could be a modern dish with an allusion to classical cuisine. A noisette of lamb, for example, breaded with chopped truffles and parseley may merit this description because it's a sort of culinary eyewink to the days when meat was simply breaded in breadcrumbs, as in Escalopes à la Viennoise.

Negative comments made by French chefs are often brutally cryptic. "Un tas de merde" is one that is often used. This is a dish that is so bad that it can only be adequately described as "a pile of shit." A lack of seasoning will not invoke this description, nor will undercooked, overcooked or even plain bad. For a dish to be a "tas de merde" it has to bother a chef's instincts. His whole understanding of what food should be must be offended by what he sees in front of him. It is the sort of dish that is falling all over itself with ingredients, concepts and, worst of all, techniques.

If great writing is seamless and great music is effortless, the irony of cooking is that for all the importance it places on technique, great cooking today must be techniqueless. People don't want fish mousse in the shape of the Arc de Triomphe. They want to see the magician's act but not his hand.

Once, in Paris, I worked with a pastry chef for six months. Before I was to leave I asked him for his recipes. He smiled, as if this request was the proudest moment of his life and he reeled them off while I scribbled them down as quickly as I could. Months later, in the U.S. I tried to do them and none of the recipes came out right. Thinking that it was my own pastry making skills that were lacking, I asked a friend who was French and a professional patissier to help me and none of them came out right for him either.

"Where did you get those recipes anyway?" he asked when we were finished and the fruits of our wasted work was all around us, crumbling on racks and dripping in cremes that had not taken.

"A guy who let me work in his patisserie in Paris for six months."

My friend's face lit up. He'd understood. "You really think the guy was going to give you his lifetime's experience because you'd worked for him for six months?"

"Well ... yes."

"You'll never get these right," he said snapping the notebook closed. "He's changed just enough weights and measures to make sure of that."

I smiled. I could still see that Frenchman leaning against his marble rolling counter and letting me know recipe after recipe. It took him a full half hour to say, "Do, re, me, fa, sol, la, ti."