Description
Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen
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 crépes, 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.
‘The book is written by Julie Powell, about her 1 year self-imposed challenge to cook everything in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of Fine Cooking. The project was motivated by feeling stuck in her job (a low level drone in a government office) as well as rebellion towards the whole Alice Waters, locovore, trendy foodie things. I instantly connected with the author – she was a Buffy the Vampire fan (the blog was going on during the last season), found the act of preparing food very sensual, and was trying to figure out what to do next with her life. The book is very entertaining, mixing stories about Julie Child and stories of her own family in with the trials of cooking the recipes (including treks to find bone marrow, brains and other offal). Her husband Eric is portrayed as a saint, her friends are nuts. Its fun to read.
But what really struck me was not the challenge of cooking, but the blogging. In addition to cooking every recipe, she blogged about everything she cooked. I went on-line and looked at some of the blogs. She blogged almost every day, and not just “I checked Filets to Poisson en Souffle off the list, didn’t puff but tasted good”… no, she went into details about procuring the ingredients, the moods of her husband, her cats, occasional Buffy references, how the food was prepared, what worked, what tasted good, and what didn’t. And it was entertaining… she had a huge following (after a while, she set up a way people could donate money to help buy lamb and more butter to keep the project going – and they did). She never talks about the challenges of blogging in the book.. things I find really hard, like making it witty (but not contrived), not offending others (however, that New York thing probably helps here), how personal to get, making a good story but not going on and on, punctuation and grammar good enough to make it readable. It has a happy ending, she found her real calling as a writer.
– Goodreads reviewI debated getting this book based on the “hollywoodish” premise from the movie but it was nothing like what I thought it would be. First of all it was irreverent, a bit vulgar in parts and in spite of both of those it was delightful!! As I read through this book I laughed, cried and wished it was me on this heartfelt journey. I felt a bit like Julie because I too married my high school sweetheart and he would have done all the wonderful things for me that Eric did for Julie. Not to mention that I admire Julia Child and love what she has done for the love of cooking. I love cooking for my man, too!
Julie did not take on this challenge for anyone but herself. She didn’t know Julia but only admired her experiences as a women cooking in a “Man Chef World”. Julie did not even feel that Julia “liked” her for taking on the Julie/Julia Project. Julie carries on in spite of knowing this because she was a strong, determined woman and knew there could be a better “Julie” on the other side of her project journey. When Julie heard of Julia’s death she wrote one sentence on her blog that speaks to why she chose this journey:
“I have no claim over the woman at all, unless it’s the claim one who has nearly drowned has over the person who pulled her out of the ocean.”
– (Goodbooks review)Author: Julie Powell
Year: 2005
Condition: Soft cover. Fab lightly used condition.
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