So I'd seen it before, but after the NYT article, I've been taking a deeper look at Julie/Julia. A great read. Go there. After you finish reading this, that is.
I called my boyfriend and read him the first entry of the Julie/Julia blog (Aug 25 - last year) and the entry from August 1 of this year. Stories of real people and their real experiences with cookbooks might have a soft spot in his heart. Why? Because he's learned how to cook from cookbooks. Julia's? No.
Sometime in graduate school, or was it post grad, my boyfriend found himself tiring of can openers, pizza and ground beef, and called his mother up for basic recipes. He tired of childhood favorites like macaroni and cheese, and branched out further. Being a good student and a methodical person, he collected cookbooks. Fannie Farmer, Better Homes and Gardens, Cooking for Dummies. He had some cooking successes.
But his cookery guides lacked a certain something. Why? Okay, a certain recipe calls for these ingredients in those portions, and says to heat in a saucepan while stirring for five minutes. Why? Why, why, why?
Somewhere in my adult life, I encountered people --usually scientists-- who ask the same kinds of questions that three-year-olds drive their parents crazy with. And there are some good answers to those questions. That is, other than, "Don't bother me, I'm busy." Why does the world work that way? Why do colors in a rainbow occur in just that order? And why didn't I wonder why boiling karo syrup turned brown in my 7th grade home-ec Peanut Brittle recipe? I dunno. It just does and when it does, that's when you pour it onto the greased cookie sheet. It was enough that I could reproduce the results at home.
But my boyfriend belongs to the Order of the Rigors of Scientific Thinking. He's had it drilled into him in the hallowed halls of CalTech and Stanford. He followed the recipes in the cookbooks, but they told him only what to do, not Why.
Browsing in a bookstore's cooking section, he encountered The Best Recipe. Finally! A cookbook written by a New England kitchen lab applying all the rigors of a scientific investigation. In any other context, they'd be laughed at as a prime example of anal-retentive: They provide a chart of how many minutes it takes a stick of butter --just outta the fridge-- to soften to the proper creaming temperature. (Oh, and they did the same thing for a frozen stick of butter, too).
The cookbook generously provides all kinds of background information on the whys and wherefores, explaining every path they took and why they settled on the one provided in the recipe. So when the recipe calls for roasting the butterflied bird at 500 degrees, my boyfriend took comfort in their having cooked 14 birds at different temperatures just to get that proper temperature and cooking time. Talk about isolating your variables! (And that doesn't include all the trials devoted to brining or flavoring, either). This was a cookbook for those who want to understand why as well as how.
I met my boyfriend well into his Cook's Illustrated phase. I've picked up some good pointers myself. I'll poke around with him in his cookbooks and ask him the wisdom of seared salmon according to "those guys back east" (though I mostly like the Cook's Illustrated, their take on taco preparation was *not* to be trusted by this Californian, and they've been "those guys back east" ever since). But I don't even have the patience that he does to spend the amount of weeknight time that he does trying out some new recipe or preparing a favorite one.
So here is Julie, spending a whole year, cooking every recipe from Julia Child's cookbook. Whether the book is by Julia, or "those guys back east," anyone who undertakes to cook over 500 recipes in a years' time is crazy in a divine kind of way-- a mad inspiration, a fantastic genius. 500+ recipes in a year's time have transformation powers. I find myself admiring the hell out of this Julie and her cooking quest.
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