Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen
Julie Powell
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 031610969X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
With the humor of Bridget Jones and the vitality of Augusten Burroughs, Julie Powell recounts how she conquered every recipe in Julia Child+s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and saved her soul. Julie Powell is 30-years-old, living in a rundown apartment in Queens and working at a soul-sucking secretarial job that+s going nowhere. She needs something to break the monotony of her life, and she invents a deranged assignment. She will take her mother+s dog-eared copy of Julia Child+s 1961 classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and she will cook all 524 recipes. In the span of one year. At first she thinks it will be easy. But as she moves from the simple Potage Parmentier (potato soup) into the more complicated realm of aspics and crpes, she realizes there+s more to Mastering the Art of French Cooking than meets the eye. With Julia+s stern warble always in her ear, Julie haunts the local butcher, buying kidneys and sweetbreads. She sends her husband on late-night runs for yet more butter and rarely serves dinner before midnight. She discovers how to mold the perfect Orange Bavarian, the trick to extracting marrow from bone, and the intense pleasure of eating liver.And somewhere along the line she realizes she has turned her kitchen into a miracle of creation and cuisine. She has eclipsed her life+s ordinariness through spectacular humor, hysteria, and perseverance.
and his coffers a little light on gold, but it actually worked. Still, for all that mumbo-jumbo-type work, I want at the very least something that doesn’t smell like processed livestock. It pissed me off so much I had to go buy some vintage clothes on eBay to get over it. Then there were the eggs to poach. I am still pretty far from an egg-poaching expert, and these eggs weren’t going to be napped in cheese sauce—they were going to be out there in front of God and everybody, clothed only in a
flew back to New York that May, I had Mom’s copy of the book stashed in my bag. The thing you learn with Potage Parmentier is that “simple” is not exactly the same as “easy.” It had never occurred to me that there was a difference until Eric and I sat down on our couch the night of my appointment at the gynecologist’s, three months after stealing my mother’s forty-year-old cookbook, and took our first slurps of Julia Child’s potato soup. Certainly I had made easier dinners. Unwrapping a
then of something equally primary and inescapable, that explains why everything from instant messaging to fabulous sex to aspic can in the end be defined as an illustration of the futility of existence. And it really, really sucks. By the time Eric came home at six, Gwen and I were both a little drunk and a little morose. Eric, who had not yet shed his Blanche-headache, wasn’t able to do much to lighten the mood. The Poulet en Gelée à l’Estragon was able to do even less. We did try to eat it.
into a pneumatic tube—an airless shuttling, inexorable. No matter how often Eric said, “It’ll be nice to see the cats, won’t it?” I could not be cheered. Homard à l’Américaine awaited. I didn’t know why I was doing this, I really didn’t. I didn’t want to kill lobsters. Hell, I didn’t want to cook at all. The bleaders would be disappointed, sure, but they’d get over it. I was used to disappointing people. Besides, how had I become so absurdly arrogant as to think that anything I wrote about Julia
around us were beginning to take notice of this conversation; they peered at me curiously. My goodness—I was a celebrity! It felt great. Unfortunately, I didn’t have anything else to say. I just nodded some more and grinned vacuously, and the next time we got ushered to another slip, I unobtrusively shifted to another part of the crowd. I’d be a really terrible famous person. But so that was nice. Creepy, but nice. And the ferry ride itself was, once it finally happened, most pleasant. I sat