Dinner with Julia
Submitted by Karen
Like so many others, I’ve fallen - once again - under the spell of Julia Child after seeing Nora Ephron’s film “Julie & Julia” {twice so far}. While Meryl Streep said that the charmingly effervescent, larger-than-life Julia she portrayed in the film is idealized, played as Julie Powell might have imagined The French Chef beside her as she cooked through 500-plus recipes, all you have to do is watch Julia to know that she was possessed with a huge, joyful spirit. As she huffs and puffs and careens her large frame around the kitchen, warbling all the while in her distinctive whooping voice, how can you stop yourself from feeling warm and fuzzy all over? Julia has served as my muse in the past; when I watched her appear on WGBH during the 1970’s, on a small black and white television in my mother’s kitchen, and then later in my own apartment when I decided to teach myself to cook, I referred to Mastering the Art of French Cooking {MTAOFC} as I attempted my first pommes Anna and chocolate soufflé. My passion for cooking grew and has taken me along a path. Years have gone by since I whipped my first egg white, and my cookbook collection has grown by the hundreds. After starting out a dedicated amateur home cook, I went on to work in restaurant kitchens, threw dinner parties and then eventually started a personal chef business. I also started a family, and those days of spending a whole weekend making a special dinner are way over. Now I find that I’ve been drawn back to the big, wonderful book, volumes 1 and 2, that took Julia and her colleagues Simone Beck {the third contributor, Louisette Bertholle, had no part in volume 2} more than a decade to produce. After getting reacquainted with them over the past few months, I decided that there’s no time like the present for me to re-master the basic foundations of French cooking that are meticulously laid out in these volumes - sort of like taking myself back to school.
