The Joys and Woes of Trying to be Julia
August 23, 2006 - The Santa Fe New Mexican
Foodies beware: There might be a whisk on the cover of Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen—and the promise of a cool idea inside—but the proof of this pudding isn’t exactly in the tasting.
Author Julia Powell gave herself a project well beyond the culinary equivalent of baseball’s hitting for the cycle. Her goal? To cook every recipe in Julia Child’s 1961 classic, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, within one year.
Many home chefs have thought of cooking their way through Child’s culinary bible as a way to learn more about cooking. Powell, to her immense credit, actually did it. She prepares every single recipe, from a simple potage parmentier—leek or onion and potato soup—to a complex pate de canard en croute—boned stuffed duck baked in a pastry crust, complete with little pastry flowers the rest of us would almost certainly skip.
Thing is, the book—the result of Powell’s immensely popular blog—is more about the problems and adventures in her life than those in her kitchen. Reading about the author’s eggs—she was 30 at the time and her biological clock was ticking—and not how best to make an omelet Julia-style seems out of place at first.
Powell tells us about her husband, her friends, her mom, her boring job and her sex life—until we realize the book is more about Julia saving Julie than about Julie cooking Julia. Readers looking for insight on how to cook like Julia will have trouble making the transition.
There are reasons to persevere, though, mostly because Powell is pretty darn funny. There’s something chuckle-worthy every few pages. When she writes about food, you can easily imagine Powell tossing chickens around the kitchen or hefting knives and hammers over her head with a big smile, in classic Julia Child form.
It’s Powell’s swear-like-a-sailor-while-drinking-lots-of-gimlets nonchalance that is her strong suit when she writes about food. It’s curiously comforting to know Powell, like Child, makes plenty of mistakes in the kitchen. A good percentage of her meals are flops, and it’s easy to understand why there aren’t any photographs in the book. Ladyfingers and crpes become long-term problems. Malakoff, mayonnaise, marrow and even rice become the banes of her existence.
Riz a l’Indienne (steamed rice) has got to be the single most willfully obtuse recipe in all of MtAoFC—Powell’s dreadful acronym for Child’s classic cookbook.
“Wrangling a recalcitrant butter sauce can be a tricky business, certainly, but it doesn’t fill you with the angry sense of futility that consumes you in making Riz a l’Indienne,” Powell writes. “I guarantee you, you cannot make it without at least once screaming at the open book, as if to Julia’s face, ‘My God, woman—it’s rice, for #@‘s sake!!!’”
Feeling sorry for his wife, Powell’s sympathetic husband, Eric, immediately gives the rice a new and rather unprintable nickname.
Powell even has the guts to repeatedly break one of the cardinal rules of entertaining by preparing recipes she had never cooked before for guests, right down to making veal kidneys for Amanda Hesser of The New York Times.
“Hating Amanda Hesser is something of a cottage industry in certain, admittedly small and perhaps excessively navel-gazing circles, and it would be an easy enough bandwagon to jump onto. But when she’s going to be writing an article about you in the Newspaper of Record,” Powell writes, “there’s really no sense in starting off on the wrong foot. Besides—I was going to be cooking kidneys for the poor woman—the least I could do was give her the benefit of the doubt.”
If Powell can screw up the recipes yet still pull it off most of the time, as she did with the kidneys—Hesser even had two slices of Powell’s clafouti dessert—so can we. If, at the end of all this, her friends still love her, her mom can begin to understand what her project’s all about and her husband hasn’t deserted her for Nigella Lawson, she must be in a pretty good spot. (It also doesn’t hurt that Powell won a 2006 James Beard award for food journalism for her article, “The Trouble with Blood: A Modern Chef Takes on the Challenge of Ancient Cooking,” published in Archaeology magazine in November 2004.)
Reading Julie and Julia also creates a wonderful nostalgia for Child and a desire to watch old videos of The French Chef. Better yet, we can acknowledge Child’s birthday—she was born Aug. 15, 1912—by dusting off our own copies of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and taking a stab at that rice for ourselves. (If you don’t have a copy of the original book, don’t despair. It was rereleased a few years ago in honor of the 40th anniversary of its publication.)
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“The large amount of water used for boiling the rice gets rid of its floury coating, and the washing of the rice after this preliminary blanching is an added precaution,” Child and her co- authors write in the 1966 edition of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. “The final steaming finished its cooking, leaving the grains dry, fluffy, and separate.”
There are many ways to cook rice, the authors note, and cooks must choose the technique that best suits their temperament. Apparently, this approach was not a match with Powell’s personality.
RIZ A L’INDIENNE
(Makes 41/2 cups cooked rice)
11/2 cups unwashed raw rice
A large kettle containing 7 to 8 quarts rapidly boiling water
11/2 teaspoons salt per quart water
A large colander (with small holes)
3 thicknesses of dampened cheesecloth (or a clean towel or napkin, well washed and rinsed so there is no odor of soap or bleach)
Gradually sprinkle the rice into the boiling salted water, adding it slowly enough so the water does not drop below the boil. Stir it up once to be sure none of the grains are sticking to the bottom of the kettle.
Boil uncovered and moderately fast for 10 to 12 minutes. (Note that it may take longer at Santa Fe’s altitude.) Start testing after 10 minutes by biting successive grains of rice. When a grain is just tender enough to have no hardness at the center but is not yet fully cooked, drain the rice in the colander.
Fluff it up under hot running water for a minute or two to wash off any traces of flour.
Wrap the blanched rice in the damp cheesecloth, towel or napkin.
Either place the bundle in a colander, cover, and set it over boiling water to steam for an additional 20 to 30 minutes, or until the rice is tender—or place the bundle in a heated casserole, cover, and set in a 325-degree oven for 20 to 30 minutes, or until the rice is tender.
If the rice is not to be served immediately, fluff it with a fork, rewrap it, and set it aside off the heat. Steam the bundle again for 5 minutes or so to reheat it, and serve by turning the hot rice into a hot vegetable dish, fluffing it with a fork, adding salt and white pepper to taste, and topping with
2 to 4 tablespoons of butter.
(In this form, the rice is known as Riz a l’Anglaise. Child offers four different ways to butter and serve the rice.)