Critics praised the book's comprehensiveness, but some felt that it was far too ambitious for the average home cook.
On its release in 1970, Volume 2 was also well received. Critics praised the book's comprehensiveness, but some felt that it was far too ambitious for the average home cook. Gael Greene, reviewing the book for _Life "Life (magazine)"), wrote that Volume 2 was "a classic continued," and made the contents of Volume 1 look like "mud-pie stuff," while Raymond Sokolov wrote that "it is without rival, the finest gourmet cookbook for the non-chef in the history of American stomachs."[24][25] The _New York Times' review was mixed, with critic Nika Hazelton praising the book for being "elegant and accurate," but criticized it for being too interested in minutia and theory to be useful for the home cook. Learning French cooking from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, she wrote, would be akin to "learning to drive a car by having the workings of the internal combustion engine described in full detail."[25] Similarly, Nancy Ross of The Washington Post and Times-Herald argued that many of the recipes in Volume 2 would be far too time-consuming, difficult, and expensive for the American home cook, pointing out that the recipe for French bread provided in the book was nineteen pages long, took seven hours to complete, and required the use of "a brick and a sheet of asbestos cement."[19]