Julie and Julia: cooking the book

As a British blogger first and foodie second, until recently I knew who Julie Powell was (a New York blogger who found a good project, got a book deal and now a Hollywood adaptation of her story) but nothing really about the inspiration for her project, the much more conventionally famous Julia Child. Having since been assaulted by trailers for Julie & Julia the movie, and reading up on the doyenne of American cookery, I realise this is putting the cart before the horse. Or the butter before the bread.

The idea is an interesting one: taking inspiration from an influential cook and cooking your way through the book that propelled them to fame. In this case, working through ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking’ meant Julie Powell had to reproduce 524 recipes in 365 days.Julia Child came to cookery late. Moving to Paris in the late 1940s with her husband, who worked for the US state department, she called her first experience with classical French cuisine “An opening up of the soul and spirit for me … I was hooked, and for life, as it turned out.”

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She graduated from Le Cordon Bleu cooking school, and, eventually, published the enormous tome designed to teach the ‘servantless’ average American to cook like a gourmet chef. But I had no idea what a towering presence the woman was in American culinary culture – or American culture in general – until I had a poke around the Museum of American History’s website.

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Her kitchen, which was used for everyday catering, testing recipes and for filming her TV shows, has been carefully rebuilt and is preserved for the nation. There is, online, a description of some of the items preserved in the kitchen, exotic things like The Whisk. According to the museum:

“Julia introduced a French tool, the whisk, to a public that had heretofore only known various versions of “egg beaters.” The whisk, like other tools Julia used on TV, swept American consumers by storm, and they began to demand them at their kitchen and hardware stores.”

Quite apart from the obvious questions (can one sweep something by storm? Am I being too picky?) this sums up the influence Child had. For me, I’m still sitting here stunned, trying to imagine American life without whisks.

She wasn’t the first television chef but she very quickly became the most popular, crying “Hurray!” in her distinctive, hooting voice (imagine someone sticking bellows up a big duck) as she turned out yet another difficult and faffy French dish with telegenic ease and informality. When things went wrong she’d offer reassurance with the thought that “if you’re alone in the kitchen, what does it matter – who’s there to see you?”

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In a way it’s hard to believe that one woman alone could have had such an influence over the cooking of such a big country, and of course it wasn’t one woman alone. It was Child, it was Simone (Simca) Beck and Louisette Bertholle, who were originally writing a book on French cooking for Americans and asked Child to collaborate, and it was Judith Jones, their publisher. But it was the 6’2″ eccentric and passionate Child that won people over.

Child is often referred to as “the Woman Who Taught America To Cook”, which begs the question of whether there is a British equivalent. I can’t really decide on a person that could claim that kind of overwhelming influence in the UK. I don’t think Delia Smith or Fanny Cradock come close (and as nice as he is, the first person to say Jamie Oliver gets an heirloom tomato thrown at them, and those things are HEAVY). How about the dame of wartime cookery, Margaret Patten? Mrs Beeton? Elizabeth David? Personally, I think Keith Floyd, in style and in technique might be the closest equivalent.

The movie (which, by the way, left me wishing for a lot more about Julia Child, her collaborators and the creation of her legendary status, and a lot less of the modern day story of a young woman whining “OMG, no one reads my blaaaaarg!” which is frankly not charming when anyone does it, even when you’re as lovely as Amy Adams) did make me wish for a similar project. But all I’ve got is a pile of weight-watchers recipe cards from the 1970s that I picked up at a car boot sale purely to mine them for the comedy pictures of ‘Hawaiian hamburger pie’ and ‘Hot dog flan’ that, in many ways, represent the kind of cooking that Julia Child helped to overthrow. So maybe I won’t cook my way through those.

It does make me want to pick up a proper cookbook and cook all the way through it, though. If you were going to do it, which book would you choose?

Source: https://gardencourte.com
Categories: Recipe