Re-visiting Julia Child

I just saw the movie Julie and Julia on dvd this past week and it inspired me to cook a dinner from Mastering the Art of French Cooking which I did on Sunday . . . although not 100% from the book.

I made roast chicken with mushrooms, cream and cognac; gratineed broccoli and diced sauteed potatoes.

Some reasons why my meal was not 100%: I had no lemon (really unusual for me!) and I seldom go to the store for one thing. Mastering has no specific broccoli recipes because it was not a popular veggie at the time in France. The book suggested using the Brussel sprout recipes and I chose one, but reduced the number of cooking steps.

The chicken dish was rich and flavorful. I like chicken better than anything else and serve it often. This was a welcome change.

As for the potatoes, I have been dicing and sauteing potatoes in the restaurant chef's olive oil/butter mix for a long time. It is a quick way to create a full meal and is related to the more traditionally American homefries. Julia's version involved putting a lid on the fry pan for part of the cooking time, something I would never do. It changed the dish a bit, "dressing it up," but neither improving nor spoiling it. Potatoes in any form are marvelous things.

The broccoli. Ah, that veggie maligned by the 41st president. A newspaper (Boston Globe? NYTimes?) interviewed Julia at the time and she suggested sauteing broccoli with lots of garlic to make it palatable.

The Brussel sprout recipe demanded blanching, oven roasting, then gratineing. I feared that much cooking would produce a gray vegetable, so I skipped the second step. The broccoli was delicious, tender and coated with cheese. In the future, I might try another variant: a shorter blanching, followed by some roasting, then a little gratineeing.

I post this because several things have struck me about food recently.

I work part-time but over seven days a week and my commute is long. I find dishes that can be made in one session then kept for several days . . . soups, golupki, lasagna, stews . . . work well to provide a balanced diet quickly and cheaply.

However, some people suggest I chose restaurant take away. I dislike take-away except in extreme need. It is often messy and sometimes difficult to eat (in the car!) and carrying away food diminishes its quality. Closed in a container, the food chills and becomes gluey. Restaurants sometimes disappoint, so, why pay more for food that is less delicious?

Much is made today of how cooking is dying as an art but houses still come with elaborate kitchens . . . which may have marble counters and stainless appliance but are poorly planned. Saving steps is not, to my mind, a virtue but creating elbow room and convenient storage is.

Food has changed since Mastering was published.

Mastering rang the death knell of the "continental" restaurant that was chi-chi from the 50s into the 70s.

I was in a food co-op in the late 60s-early 70s where the folks were enamored of The Joy of Cooking (referred to in J & J, with Frances Sternhagen playing Irma Rombauer). My friends with social aspirations followed the NY Times Cookbook. A male friend told me then that Julia Child was a fraud and that if I wanted to really know French cooking, I had to read Alma Lach. Not long after that conversation, I moved to New England and six months later, in a tiny bookstore created from a white Cape-style house in a resort town, I discovered Elizabeth David. I read all of her then-published books from cover to cover and cooked her recipes with the enthusiasm that the movie portrays Julie cooking Julia's recipes.


I finally asked for Mastering for Christmas perhaps in 1977. While I discovered that Elizabeth David had already taught me some of the same techniques, I cooked from the book for several years . . . and my copy looks like I did! The dust jacket died long ago and the cover of volume 1 was taped together and lost its tape!

I was working part-time at Williams-Sonoma when Julia died. One of my co-workers, himself a chef, told me a long story about his meeting with Julia at an event at which he cooked. The entire chain put out signs with Chuck Williams' own salute to her and people came into the store (just a few miles from her former home in Cambridge, MA) to tell stories of their own close encounters of the Julia-kind (I had two myself) for months. People loved her.

She did not come out as well in the movie although Meryl Streep's amazing ear once again allowed her to triumph vocally, reproducing Julia's famous voice to perfection. But, I thought back to an interview I had seen with Gandhi director Richard Attenborough in which Richard had been cautioned "not to make a saint of Gandhi." The movie did not make a saint of Julia, to the credit of the writer/director Nora Ephron.

My Sunday experiment convinced me of a few things.

The first is that there is space in one's repertoire for many methods. While I will still grate raw broccoli as the foundation of the vegetable slaw (try it, you will be amazed!) and I probably will never peel broccoli but I will blanch it from time to time prior to sauteing. After all, many vegetables are tastier cooked in some of those time honored and time consuming French way. Try cooking Swiss chard en blanc and you will see what I mean.

The second is that Julia still deserves a place in our hearts . . . and in our kitchens.