When we had our first home and my husband and I began cooking together, we acquired a copy of Julia Child’s ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking’ from a book club. Being ignorantly ambitious, we decided to first try Boeuf Bourguignon.We must have done a lot wrong because in the end, a can of Dinty Moore with a splash of cheap red would have been superior to our sad product; but we learned our lesson, and realized that we needed to know a lot more about cooking before attempting something like that. We never tried that particular dish again, until...