My Struggle with Julia Child

photo credit: WebExhibits

Julia Child is back in the news, five years after her death and at least a decade after I handed my gently worn copies of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volumes I and II, to a man at my office. Given to describing in excruciating detail what he had cooked the night before – often using vegetables from his garden – he struck me as a worthy recipient. The truth is that despite purchasing both books at the Harvard Coop in 1972, I never actually cooked any of Julia’s recipes.

Nora Ephron’s new film, Julie and Julia, which intersperses details about the lives of Julia Child, the woman who brought French cooking to the masses with a critically acclaimed PBS series, and Julie Powell, a blogger who aspires to cook all 524 recipes in Julia’s autobiography, opens tomorrow. I saw the trailer with Meryl Streep’s Julia and Amy Adams’ Julie, and I liked it. If my husband, Dennis, is amenable, we might even try for the showing near my office at 5:30 p.m.

Ah to be a 22 year old newly wed living just outside of Harvard Square in 1972, within blocks of Julia Child’s home, and literally around the corner from Julia’s butcher, Joe Savenor. Married to a psychiatrist named Jerry, I and I alone put myself under intense pressure to demonstrate that I could hold my own, making elaborate dinners for other psychiatrists and their spouses, the youngest of whom was 10 years my senior.

This was an era when being able to cook Julia’s recipes was the ultimate status symbol. The wife of one psychiatrist in our circle cooked deliciously elaborate dinners, claiming to have attended classes at Le Cordon Bleu. The kitchen of their suburban home had a big butcher block island and lots of whisks and copper pots, pans and mixing bowls hanging from hooks.

Strictly a wannabe, I went through the motions. In our tiny apartment I had a collection of Rosti plastic mixing bowls in bold, primary colors, imported from Denmark – keenly aware that copper was the gold standard for making one’s egg whites get to just the right degree of stiffness for folding into a soufflé mixture. Although I’d gotten a hand mixer as a wedding gift, I bought a wire whisk just to be au courant.

For years I found my salvation in James Beard’s American Cooking, a book Dad had given me a few days before that first marriage. Like Julia’s recipes, those in the James Beard book all called for multiple sticks of artery-clogging butter and heavy cream. But the recipes seemed a lot less pretentious than Julia’s and had fewer steps to follow.

I dutifully sliced potatoes paper thin with my Henkles chief’s knife, drizzling each layer with lots of butter, for a crispy potatoes Anna that made me feel if not proud, at least adequate. A prime rib roast or veal scallops pounded paper thin, purchased from Savenor’s of course, would send the message that I cared to serve the very best – regardless of my limited culinary skills. Completing the picture was a salad with Roquefort dressing I’d make in a Waring blender, a lemon soufflé cake with cream whipped to just the Chantilly stage, and enough crackers and Brie to serve an army.

If James Beard proved my salvation at a time when I felt The Joy of Cooking would be seen as déclassé, I still felt the need to pretend at least a nodding acquaintance with Julia. So it was that I purchased tickets for Jerry and me to see a cooking demonstration featuring Julia, James Beard, and Pierre Franey of New York Times recipe fame. All I remember of the demo was that it took place on the Harvard campus as a benefit for the Schlesinger historic cookbook collection at Radcliffe, and that James Beard, armed with a Sharpy, autographed the chief’s apron I bought at the event.

As The Boston Globe recently noted, who cooks like Julia any more? Who cooks like James Beard any more? These days I’m a lot more likely to prepare than cook.

My James Beard cookbook, literally falling apart -- with lots of handwritten recipes calling for items like canned soup tucked between the covers -- hasn’t been used in at least a decade. It has found its final resting place in the drawer of one of the end tables in my living room – along with my cookbook from the B’nai Brith of Passaic, New Jersey.