Julie & Julia and Cookbook Blogs
Julia's Kitchen Wisdom is Like Blog Version of Child's Classic Book
Aug 7, 2009
The movie Julie & Julia is playing at movie-houses across the country and its premise is this: An office worker named Julie Powell, uninspired by her life, decides to cook her way through Julia Child’s sentinel cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking and to write a blog about her adventure. Ultimately, Powell writes a book about the Julie/Julia Project, as she calls her experiment, and the book Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously quickly became a success. When film writer and director Nora Ephron decided to make a film of Powell’s book, she merged it with Julia Child’s memoir, My Life in France, co-written with Alex Prud’homme, and there you have it – the movie Julie & Julia.
Julia Child never blogged, but those who have read her memoir, her cookbooks and books about Julia written by her friends would know that the tall, red-headed firebrand would probably have loved blogging if it had come about earlier in her life.
In 2000, however -- four years before her death -- Julia Child wrote a slim little book called Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom: Essential Techniques and Recipes from a Lifetime of Cooking. The information it contains is pure Julia – simple, basic cooking techniques with her trademark in-depth instructions.
Soups and Sauces
Throughout Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom, Julia’s enthusiasm for cooking is evident. Who else would refer to soups as “Primal Soups” – making them sound steamy and sexy rather than what they really are – master recipes for basic stocks and soups? And when Julia writes about sauces, they’re not just sauces. They’re “mother sauces” – a term that seems basic and comforting yet commanding at the same time.
In Kitchen Wisdom, Julia describes how to cook everything to perfection, from soups and salads to meats, eggs, crepes and tarts. However, it’s her quotes, scattered like little gems throughout the book (and only the length of a Tweet post) that seem like Julia Child is blogging to her readers – encouraging them to find their kitchens and get cooking, for heaven’s sake.
Cooking Without Recipes
Picture Julia, sitting in her Cambridge kitchen/studio and blogging to her fans: “Once you have mastered a technique, you hardly need look at a recipe again.” Of course, Julia wrote nearly 20 cookbooks during her lifetime -- proving that, for most home cooks, cooking mastery is an elusive art. Still, she never gave up on her fans.
“When you serve fine, fresh green vegetables, you want them to show off their color,” writes Julia in Kitchen Wisdom – a piece of advice that surely would have been on her blog. Julia was an original subscriber to the trend of eating local, fresh and natural food, but finding a great local source is only half the battle. Preparing the vegetables properly once they’re brought back home is the second half. Before her “French Chef” television program, home cooks were serving vegetables that bordered on limp, gray and lifeless. She taught American cooks how to lock in the color of cooked vegetables by boiling them rapidly then plunging the vegetables into ice-cold water. “Genius,” might have been one of the comments posted on her blog.
How to Become a French Chef
But more than anything else, Child inspired American women to go into their kitchens and prepare food that would taste as good as it looked. She encouraged them to experiment with cooking, to have fun with it, and to practice their skills until they too would be able to display the kind of culinary prowess that’s a hallmark of French kitchens.
“Of course you can buy a ready-made pie shell, but it’s a shame not to have the know-how yourself,” Julia writes in Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom, and would have surely posted on her blog. Julie Powell spent an entire year acquiring that kind of know-how, and no doubt she’s a better cook for it, but she might have saved herself some time, tears and trouble if she had worked her way through Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom instead of the more intimidating Mastering the Art of French Cooking. After all, the same techniques are there – just in a more condensed form. Anyone else considering a project similar to the one Julie Powell created might do well to work his or her way through Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom first, or even instead of Mastering. Think of Kitchen Wisdom as Julia Child’s blog version of her classic and now-famous book.
 |
