Since I saw the trailer for this great-looking movie with Meryl Streep, due to open August 7, 2009, I seem to have a fascination with Julia Child and her famous book Mastering The Art of French Cooking (You can read my review of Julia Child’s My Life in France here.)

The movie is based on that book – and on this one: Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen by Julie Powell. For Canadian readers

When Julie Powell was an adolescent, she stumbled upon a Joy-of-Sex-type book in her father’s bathroom cabinet. About that time in her life when she was sneak-reading about forbidden sensual delights, her mother dug out her copy of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking to make Boeuf Bourguignonne for her husband’s boss. Julie began to associate the mysterious sounding French recipes and the diagrams therein with sensual delights of another kind and to imbue the cookbook with an adult mystique.

Fast forward to to August of 2002 when Julie Powell, a government drone, undertook to cook all of the recipes in Julia Child’s MtAoFC in one year – and to blog about it. This book is the story of that year. Herein, Powell documents her successes and her failures in language that is usually sensual and sometimes raunchy. In fact, her language was hotly debated on the blog itself and some will find it distasteful (an unintended pun).

Personally, I thought Powell’s language usually evoked exactly the sensuality required to describe the food she cooked and the adventure she was on. For example: “The taste of marrow is rich, meaty, intense in a nearly too-much way… I could think of nothing at first but that it tasted like really good sex. But there was something more than that… What is really tastes like is life, well lived.”

However, I did not enjoy or condone and certainly would like to have done without, the frequent use of that four letter that begins with the sixth letter of the alphabet. Please don’t debate here Julie’s right to use that word. It’s her book and her language. But I include this as a warning to those whose enjoyment would be completely ruined by encountering this kind of language throughout the story.

Julie cooked for her long-suffering, loving and near-saintly husband Eric, for her brother Jordan who stayed several months in their apartment, and for a motley crew of friends.

As the year started, Julie & Eric moved house to Long Island City which is, evidently, not on Long Island at all and is difficult to get to on NYC’s public transportation. For this reason, friends often canceled dinner invitations, using various excuses. Oddly enough, as the year wore on, friends not only accepted invitations readily, they sometimes showed up without being invited, knowing that chances were they would have a marvelous meal. And if the meal was less than great (as the cut-up roast chicken served cold and jellied) they could depend on good take-out pizza.

And as the year wore on, the fame of the blog grew until Julie appeared on national television, was reported on in major newspapers, and entertained the food editor of the NY Times.

When Julie started the year she had never eaten an egg and couldn’t tell which of the innards of a chicken was the liver. By the end of the year, she had eaten brains, livers, sweetbreads, bone marrow, and even eggs (although not the cold poached eggs in jelly). She grew not only in cooking knowledge but in self-confidence and her nearly constant companion was a chortling Julia at her elbow, at the back of her mind. It was the Julia Child who appeared in the early 60s on The French Chef, who won everyone’s hearts as she journeyed through her career of American Grande Dame of cooking, the Julia we all remember too.

That Julia became Julie’s “polestar”. When she died, Julie wrote: “There’s so much I would not have done. Because it would not have been there for me to do. Without [Julia] here, I would be a different person–a smaller, a sadder, a more frightened person.” You can read her entire (very moving) blog entry for that day here.

When I ignored the profanity in the book, I enjoyed making this awesome journey with Julie. I’m inspired to buy Mastering the Art of French Cooking and try Bifteck sauteed en Beurre, French Tarts, and maybe even Pate de Canard en Croute. Who knows – I might find a whole other side of me – one who can master French cooking.

Thank you , Julie. Thank you, Julia.

[tags]Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julie & Julia, My Life in France, Julie Powell, Julia Child, French food, book review[tags]