Recently
I've been reading Bob Spitz's excellent biography, Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child. It's a massive book
(576 pages), exhaustively researched and full of detail, but it's not to be
hurried. I'm somewhere in the middle at
the moment.
No, this
post is not about cooking, although I adore Julia Child. I own three copies of her groundbreaking Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and
it has shaped my culinary life. I
attended a lunch-hour demonstration she gave in San Francisco many years ago,
and I still have the handouts. I was
never privileged to run into her on the streets of Cambridge when I lived
there, but I did visit her local grocery store, and I kept a picture of her
kitchen taped to my refrigerator in my Cambridge apartment. Smith College, which she (and my daughter)
attended, holds an annual Julia Child Day.
Many of us
who have grown up with Julia Child, either through her cookbooks or from the
PBS televisions shows, don't realize the impact that one cookbook had on the
way Americans cooked—or how much work went into the making of it. And as I read Spitz's book, I came to view
the cookbook as a "book" rather than a tool.
Think back
to the distant 1960s, when quick food was the norm and TV dinners were in their
heyday. Fast = good. Women didn't want to be chained to the stove. As a result, a lot of women sort of forgot
how to cook, and worse, they lost the pleasure of cooking.
I first
visited France in 1971, and while my mother was a good plain cook, who (to her
credit) used fresh fruits and vegetables and didn't overcook everything, I
realized with my first meal in Paris (coq
au vin in a small restaurant on the Left Bank) that there was a lot that
I'd been missing. I never looked back.
When I moved into my first apartment (with a tiny kitchen), the first
thing I bought was Mastering the Art of
French Cooking, even before I bought a bed.
But to
return to the literary side, Julia Child demystified French cooking. She laid out step by step instructions, and
explained in simple terms why each step was necessary. Her recipes worked, and turned out exactly as
described, with portions sized for people with normal appetites. On occasion she would say things like, this
may curdle during this step, but don't worry—it will smooth out later. And it did.
What Spitz
makes abundantly clear is the prodigious amount of research and testing that
went on in Julia's kitchen (or many kitchens, in different countries, over
several years). She could write
authoritatively about how to do something because she had done it over and over
herself until she knew it worked.
And then
she could explain it, clearly and simply.
What's more, Spitz points out that there is a story behind the whole
book. Julia loved French cooking, and
she wanted other people to love it, rather than being scared by it. So her book is a love story, and she gives little
anecdotes and comments all along the way, to make us feel closer to the food,
and she succeeds admirably. The cookbook
is worth reading even if you never pick up a sauté pan, and if you want to know
how it achieved its elegant simplicity, read Spitz's book.
(BTW, Bob
Spitz is mystery writer Nancy Martin's brother-in-law)
3 comments:
Julia's one big regret was that her friends would never invite her to dinner; they were too intimidated.
Got Dearie for Christmas and loved it. With the popularity of memoir, which I also value, there have been fewer true biographies published, and it's great to know the art is still alive and well. (And in fact, my protag is reading Dearie in my upcoming release.)
Excellent book.
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