Not to Mess with the Sacred Boeuf…

I saw Julie & Julia a couple of weeks ago, and I’m still digesting it. It’s a mighty meal to digest, and before I go much further let me say that I loved it. I’ve been meaning to comment, and when Julia made the front page of the New York Times this past week I knew that time had come. Yes, I loved the movie, but I have a few bones to pick.

536 recipes, 365 days…did Julie really do it? Or did she kinda do it?

On a recent (and admittedly petty) trip to our nicer local grocery store, I priced some of the meats you’d need for the recipes in Mastering. A whole duck was about $35. Any steak, and Julie had to make at least three, would have been $15 to $19 per pound. Rack of lamb was $19.99 per pound, scallops $13.99. Okay, she wrote her blog in 2003, but it was New York. Let’s say she spent an average of $20 per recipe in ingredients — not hard to imagine with butter at $4 a pound and lobster tail closer to $30 — that’s $10,750 for the year. Sheesh.

But here’s really why my shopping trip was petty.

It was always my plan, from the time I first heard of Mastering the Art of French Cooking (I was about 17) to work my way through all the recipes. I knew at the end of that task I’d have…mastered the art of French cooking. Somehow I never undertook it, and I’d like to think I have real good reasons why.

To begin with, at seventeen I couldn’t afford the book, so I had to hang around and get a little older and then work in a cookware store after college where I could buy it with my discount. Whew, the book was daunting. No pictures, and so much specialized equipment. I had a couple of Master Chef pans (thanks to that discount) and some slightly damaged Le Creuset (discounted and marked down). So much butter and cream. So many expensive ingredients. And my cookware store salary didn’t allow for duck or foie gras or even steak.

By the time I had a little more money, Julia came out with her amazing bible, The Way To Cook. In her introduction, Julia acknowledged that things had changed since 1960 when she wrote Mastering, and this new book was about “the essentials of good cooking today.” Since then – 1989 — I’ve been intending to cook all the way through it. Really.

Julia Child was a beautifully realized work in progress. She put herself through the rigors of French cooking – classical cooking that was, by and large, the domain of restaurant chefs — and shared them in the minutest detail with hundreds of readers and cooks. These were the secrets of the French ecole de cuisine, which she demystified for the non-professional American home cook. But Julia moved with the times and the times demanded less fat, less fuss, and greater eclecticism. She knew that cooking at home would always be a very different animal than cooking in a restaurant.

I think Julie & Julia has been a touchstone for something important. I believe we are craving the skills to make really good food, to love that food and its preparation and ingredients, like Julia did. To experience her joy.

We’ve had Martha Stewart for twenty years, who, incidentally, cooked her way through Mastering, but Martha’s was a triumph of style over substance. Beautiful, tasteful plates, cool photography, not a drop or a sprinkle out of place. And now Julie Powell’s blog comes along as a triumph of concept over substance.

Is a gimmick really a satisfying accomplishment?

In the trailer there is a scene that I don’t believe was in the movie. Standing together with her “friends” on the street, Julie is informed by one of them, “Showtime bought my blog for a mini-series.” The trailer cuts to Julie telling her husband, “I could write a blog. I have thoughts.” This approaches what is fundamentally bothersome about Julie. Was her first goal to be famous? If so, she succeeded.

Julie breaks down in tears (again!) near the end of the movie when she gets a call about whether Julia Child has read her blog. We can’t hear the other side of the phone call, but she hangs up and says, with utter astonishment, “Julia hates me.” She has (another!) tearful tantrum/freak out which results in (another!) long support session from her patient husband. Does Julia “hate” her? No, says Russ Parsons in his excellent August 12 column (“Julie, Julia and me: I tell all”) from the Los Angeles Times.

Julia is merely (hold on to your seats) unimpressed by Julie and her blog. Young folks have had “good job!” thrown their way so many times that if they don’t hear it echoing in the background for every undertaking, all life sucks. If you read some of Julie’s posts, you may see why Julia would be less than dazzled. They’re like reading the Basketball Diaries while chugging a sixer of Red Bull and watching a Quentin Tarantino film on your iPod. Julie struggles with the recipes, shortcuts, hates many of the ingredients (“ew”), uses the f-word constantly (Julia decidedly NOT of the f-word generation), and complains endlessly. It’s not the most joyous approach to food and she’s not the most appealing persona.

I’m still scratching my head over how she did it. I tried calculating, dividing days, weeks, counting recipes. Complex recipes, some taking hours, to pull off after working full time, shopping for the ingredients, blogging, moving from Brooklyn to Queens, pulling up the old linoleum floor, and so on. And the shear exhaustion of typing “fuck” so many, many times. Maybe she had that text shortcut thing. But wait, here is the concept trumping the details. Or am I just being – well — jealous?

According to Russ Parsons, who printed out the Julie/Julia Project posts for her to read, Julia said, “Well, she just doesn’t seem very serious, does she?” She went on to add that she had tested and re-tested the recipes over eight years and many people had cooked through them quite successfully. Julia surmises that she (Julie) must not be much of a cook if she had problems. I don’t think that’s an unfair conclusion, since Julie is racing the clock rather than mastering the skill.

Julie Powell’s stunt did bring her fame and fortune, and maybe Julia Child would be thrilled to see her own book on the best-seller list and the front page of the New York Times. The library and the local bookstores have been scoured clean. Cordon Bleu in Paris has a link to the movie and anyone who’s ever been in Julia’s air space is blogging about it (yours truly). But the best outcome is that we’re all thinking about food and its careful preparation, because in the end we admire Julia, not Julie. This would make Julia very happy. And we have Julie Powell to thank for it.

There is a book entitled Pride and Prejudice and Zombies on the market, maybe even on the best-seller list. I know Super Size Me was a hit movie, and that there will always be hot-dog eating contests. But that doesn’t tell us anything about hot-dogs. It makes me yearn for the plodding and thorough research of the Coen brothers, the careful writing of Jane Austen, and Julia’s sincere dedication to the art of cooking.

Kelly McCune © 2009

Tagged as: Commentary, Review