Julie Powell has given a dusty old cookbook a new lease of life. Anna Mundow meets the secretary turned sassy writer
Four years ago, Julie Powell had to face facts. She was not an actress. She was not even a writer. "I'm a person who takes a subway from the outer boroughs to a lower Manhattan office every morning," Powell admitted, "who spends her days answering phones and doing copying." At 29, she was "too old for theatre, too young for children and too bitter for anything." There was also the cheery diagnosis of polycystic ovarian syndrome, "which just meant I was going to get hairy and fat and I'd have to take all kinds of drugs to conceive".
Things could have been worse; in fact they had been worse. Five years earlier, Powell had "donated" some of her eggs for $7,500 (€6,347) to pay off a credit card debt. Two years later, she agreed to do it again because "there was a little me running around Tampa or somewhere, and the little me's parents were happy enough with him or her that they wanted a matched set".
Living with her husband, three cats and a python in a grotty apartment in Queens and working at the Lower Manhattan Development Agency ("the place was lousy with Republicans"), Powell did what any normal girl confronting reality would do. She went home to Austin, Texas, to visit her mother, sat around in her dressing gown and read Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the classic cookbook by Julia Child, volume one of which was published in 1961 and has sold more than 800,000 copies.
"If The Joy of Sex was my first taste of sin," Powell recalls, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking was my second." She had found her mission. Back in New York, Powell started a weblog and announced her intention to cook every recipe in Child's gastronomic bible - in one year. Her recently published memoir, Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, is the irreverent account of that insane undertaking.
At first glance, Julie & Julia is an unlikely partnership. Here is Boston aristocrat Julia Child telling you, for example, how to bone a duck, turkey or chicken: "By the time you have completed half of this, the carcass frame, dangling legs, wings and skin will appear to be an unrecognisable mass of confusion and you will wonder how in the world any sense can be made of it all. But just continue cutting against the bone, and not slitting any skin, and all will come out as it should."
And here is expletive-prone Texan Julie Powell on the subject of roast lamb Marinade au Laurier: "This lamb marinated in red wine and bay leaves is quintessential French cookery: take some scary-ass piece of flesh and mess with it until it tastes good".
Both women, however, shared a healthy appetite. Child, who died on the eve of her 92nd birthday, was devoted to butter and loudly contemptuous of low-fat alternatives. Powell is equally zealous when it comes to vodka gimlets and bacon/jalapeno pizza. Child too worked briefly for a government agency - in her case the OSS, forerunner of the CIA, during the second World War - but there the resemblance ends. Julie Powell spent September 11th, 2002, not deciphering code but dispensing tissues to bereaved relatives who had assembled for the first anniversary of the World Trade Centre attack. "Maybe, being Republicans, the senior staff had some family-values sort of notion that women possess inherent delicacy and sensitivity," she reflects, "Or maybe they just knew that twenty-something Ivy League boys don't take kindly to being drafted for emotional shit-work."
Cooking, on the other hand, was women's work that Powell had always regarded as therapeutic. Until the third week of the Julie/Julia project, when she progressed to eggs. Oeufs a la Bourguignonne, to be precise, "which is about much more than just wasting a dozen eggs trying to poach them in the red wine that was the only booze we had. If the purplish-stained shreds of yolk clinging stickily to the walls had been blood spatters, a forensics specialist would have had a field day."
To be fair, in Powell's kitchen only three of the stove's burners worked, the floorboards were rotting and the lid of the rubbish bin served as an additional worktop. Yet here Julie Powell returned from work each evening, to turn another page in Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Most evenings, if things went well, the Powells ate dinner by midnight. "I confessed to Eric as we sat down to our Homard aux aromates that cutting lobsters in half was beginning to prove eerily satisfying. I could see him wondering where was the finicky, soft-hearted girl he had married, 'By the end of this you'll be comfortable filleting puppies'."
Powell winningly describes buying lobsters in Chinatown, subduing them on the subway and dismembering them in horror: "I peered down at the lobster to see how he was doing. The inner plastic bag was sucked tight around him and clouded up. It looked like something out of an 1980s made-for-TV movie, with some washed-up actress taking too many pills and trying to off herself with a Macy's bag." She observes that "trussed chickens always look like sex-crime victims" and that the veal in Veau Prince Orloff "looked like some kind of wet, beige footstool".
You cannot imagine Julia Child making such bizarre associations. Yet both women, in wildly different ways, preach the same message. Good food is good food. Anybody can learn how to make it. There is no mystery, only mastery. Ranting against food elitists who shop at "boutique farms" in the Hamptons, Powell insists that "Julia Child wants you - that's right you, the one living in the tract house in sprawling suburbia with a dead-end middle-management job and nothing but a Stop and Shop for miles around - to know how to make good pastry, and also how to make those canned green beans taste all right. She wants you to remember that you are human. And that blows heirloom tomatoes and first-press Umbrian olive oil out of the f***ing water."
Mastery, initially, came easily to Powell. By the end of the first week, she had made Filets de Poisson Bercy aux Champignons, Poulet Roti, Champignons a la Greque, Carottes a la Concierge and Creme Brulee ("well, Creme Brulee soup, more like"). Then came Oeufs a la Bourgignonne and, worse still, Oeufs en Gelee: "I woke up at 6am on Thanksgiving morning to finish putting the little bastards together. I rewarmed the aspic and placed a cold poached egg on top of each tarragon X in each chilled ramekin. The good thing about starting your Thanksgiving feast with Oeufs en Gelee is that everything afterward is going to taste pretty goddamned great by comparison."
Boeuf Bourgignon, by contrast, seemed straightforward. When a reporter from the Christian Science Monitor heard about Powell's project and asked her to cook dinner in her apartment for Judith Jones, the original editor of Julia Child's cookbook, an awestruck Powell decided to play it safe with Boeuf Bourgignon. She started cooking the stew at 9.30 the night before, planning to remove it from the oven at 1.30am. She set the alarm for 1.30am. She had a couple of vodkas. She woke up three hours late. "The nice thing about waking up at four on the morning of the most important dinner party of your life to a thoroughly destroyed French beef stew inside your oven is that you will definitely not be going to work." The second stew was perfectly cooked by 5.30pm when the reporter rang to say 90-year-old Ms Jones had cancelled.
A few months later, New York Times food critic Amanda Hesser came to dinner. By then Powell had been interviewed by CBS, CNN and various newspapers. But cooking for The New York Times - cooking kidneys for The New York Times - was a different matter. "When I'd told my mother that Amanda Hesser was coming over for dinner and that I was going to make her kidneys, she'd said, 'But kidneys taste like piss'. But these didn't at all. Though the potatoes were burned, the onions were nice. The Greysac was excellent. I've got to say, it's a nice feeling, impressing Amanda Hesser. Even if it is with your idiocy."
On the second last day of her year-long mission, Julie Powell cooked Pâté de Canard en Croûte - boned stuffed duck baked in a pastry case. "The day before, I'd made the pâté my duck-suit was to be stuffed with . . . just ground veal and pork mixed with chopped-up pork fat, onions that had been minced and sauteed in butter and Madeira that'd been cooked down in the same pan, some eggs, salt, pepper, allspice, thyme, and a clove of crushed garlic. Hardly worth mentioning at this late stage in the game." The duck was perfect. All that remained was the pilgrimage to Julia Child's kitchen, now an exhibit at the Smithsonian in Washington, where Julie Powell - ex-secretary, newly hatched writer and cook - left a votive pound of butter on her saint's altar.
Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, by Julie Powell is published in the US by Little, Brown, €15.80. It will be published by Viking in the UK in February.
Julie Powell's weblog address is http://juliepowell.blogspot.com