Julie & Julia

By Julie Powell

Julie Powell was at a time in her life when things didn't seem so good. She had moved to New York City from Texas with her husband Eric in order to become an actress. This had not worked out. Instead she found herself working as a secretary in various temp positions which lead to a full time job at a government agency. It was a job that neither inspired her or fulfilled her, that was frequently aggravating and that was going nowhere. Then she found out that she had a medical condition that might prevent her from becoming pregnant, if and when she & Eric decided they wanted to start a family. Also, she was 29, facing 30 and all that that means.
Feeling dissatisfied with life and talking about it to her husband, he suggested she go to cooking school and when she turned that down, suggested she try blogging. And somehow the two ideas came together. But instead of cooking school, she would attempt to make all the recipes in Julia Child's cook book, MASTERING THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING, Volume I of II, which contains 524 recipes, within the space of one year and record her progress online in a blog. And so the story begins...
Not being familiar with the Julia Child cookbook, I didn't know what exactly she was taking on. Now, this cookbook sure as hell ain't no BETTER HOMES AND GARDENS or BETTY CROCKER type cookbook. No, this is the cookbook from hell. In this book you learn to make gelatin from scratch, which involves cooking calves feet until they produce the requisite jelling properties. It involves making your own mayonnaise and making broths from scratch. It involves splitting bones to get the marrow out to use in recipes. It involves cutting up a live lobster. This cookbook doesn't even want you to use boughten ladyfingers in recipes calling for them because the quality isn't up to Julia Child's high standards.
So this was quite a daunting goal she set for herself, never mind the chore of blogging about it nearly every day. But it turns out that Julie is quite an entertaining writer who doesn't mind sharing all her trials and tribulations with the world, even those incidents that many would keep hidden until death, like the time maggots were living under her dish drainer in the kitchen. EWWW! It wasn't long before Julie had quite a loyal following and eventually she attracted national attention. And it all ended with Julie succeeding in making all the recipes in the space of one year, getting a book deal, quitting her tedious government job, and now her book has been made into a movie starring Meryl Streep. What a deal.

I really enjoyed this book. Julie, like I said, writes a very entertaining story and following along as she masters the cookbook was fun, surprising, and informative. I never realized how much of French cooking involves simply masses of butter, just gobs and gobs of it. Some of the recipes Julie made took days to complete, requiring several pages of instructions in the cookbook. It really was quite an accomplishment making all those recipes, never mind that she did it all in just one year! What a woman and what a great book she has written.