The Day Julia Child and I Became One

“Don’t crowd the mushrooms! Otherwise they won’t brown!”

I could here Julie Powell in a scene from the movie Julie and Julia, teaching herself out of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French cooking, as I looked down at the mass of mushrooms on the cutting board, envisioning the sin I was about to commit. I carefully cooked them in small batches, and they browned in no time.

The book is faded and loved, the pages thick with wear but sturdy and informative. My library copy was perched somewhere mess-free like a hymnal on a music stand. It had already taken a heart-stopping fall coming out of the grocery store where I had carefully been scouring for ingredients, saved by the bottom rungs of the cart from falling into a puddle. My worn sticky notes marked the pages of attempt: the oh so famous Boeuf Bourguignon, always declared in a deep boisterous voice (which I did my best to imitate), Artichokes with Hollandaise Sauce, Rice Pilaf, Rockfort Cheese Quiche, and of course, Chocolate Souflee. I far from mastered French Cooking, but wanted to capture Julia, and the essence of her work in my “perfect meal”.

The perfect meal to me includes insight, dedication, care and connection with ingredients and labor, it means seeing every dish from start to finish, communicating a labor of love. I regret not having more time to dedicate to the warmth and wit of her teachings, carefully outlined in each recipe of every kitchen tool and every cooking method.

Procuring ingredients was nothing short of a Grocery Store tour through Kalamazoo: The Park St. Market, Meijer, People’e Food Co-op, Sawall Health Food, and D&W. It turns out artichokes are hard to come by in the middle of winter, and Roquefort Cheese can only be found at D&W. It was overwhelming to traverse through Kalamazoo and realize the scarcity of some of my ingredients during a heavy school week.

Although I tried to channel every aspect of Julia- her charm, her ways and her methods, certain parts of the meal resorted to conventionality as opposed to her manual, old-fashioned impressiveness. I couldn’t help but use the microwave, and desperately lacked ramekin cups for the Chocolate Souflee, so I managed to find a collection of matching school-cafeteria mugs in our eclectic collection of school-provided kitchen supplies. I was nervous about the risk of using the misshapen, tall porcelain for something so testy. But, I conquered a souflee, beautifully, successfully, and without ramekins!

The Hollandaise was for sure the most intense: not an unoccupied second to breathe in the whole recipe, and so many opportunities to blow the whole thing. I was riding on the inspiration of my two sisters, who had successfully made the sauce before. Hollandaise sauce requires consistent, muscled labor: constant whipping for 20 minutes or more. The bulk of it is butter, with egg yolk and flavored with lemon. The idea is to heat the egg yolks, but not cook them, constantly aerating them with a vigorous whisking motion. If you are to stop or slow down, the eggs would scramble or curdle, ruining the sauce. I alternated whisking with one of my housemates, channeling Julia Child’s man biceps and ability to keep up in a male cooking class. I persevered, though, and learned that Hollendaise Sauce is another food myth: “impossible” in perception, but like poached eggs, and seeding pomegranates, if you follow the directions it turns out just fine. This world famous sauce was the reason for four of the four and a half sticks of butter used in the entire meal.

It was not as picture perfect as I had imagined it: I was wearing pearls, but underneath my lumberjack flannel with bunchy corduroys, and the most useful tool in the kitchen ended up being our onion goggles, as onions were used in almost every dish! The cooking was intensive, and time consuming, taking nearly five hours of straight mixing, prepping, baking and warming of finished dishes. The countertops were covered in dirty bowls abandoned in the midst of a time-sensitive step in a recipe. As we were mixing the last of the souflee, my housemates descended upon the kitchen, diligently picking up the slack on dishes that had accumulated. Once the souflee was in the oven, and the artichokes were on the table I was stunned by the resonating stillness of the meal, after constant chaos, it was finally time to eat.

There was much laughter around the table of eight girls, but mostly starvation, with a late dinnertime. The most important ingredient to a fantastic meal is an appetite. The artichokes were a tease for growling stomachs, so little meat with each bite. It was the first time many of my housemates had even seen an artichoke. I gave a classy demo about how to scrape the bottom of the top layer of the leaf off with your teeth. Next came the Bouef, Rice, and Quiche. The rice and quiche were for the vegetarian. The quiche was punchy and strong with flavor, and light like warm cheesecake. Not being a fan of “stinky” cheese myself, I was reluctant about the flavor but loved the idea of the authenticity, and was pleasantly surprised. The Pilaf was nothing more than rice cooked in onions, and of course, butter. It was the perfect counterpart to the melting, flavorful beef and vegetables that had soaked up red wine and herbs for the past four hours. It was more of a stew than I had imagined, and to be honest I wasn’t that impressed with the idea of Beef Stew for dinner, but the flavors communicated the art and skill behind the recipe: the ability to infuse so many flavors into the perfection of good quality meat. The souflee followed, the most impressive of everything, with homemade whipped cream on top. Not only were they saturated with delicious chocolate, but they did not collapse!

There are strange expectations that come with preparing such a labor and love infused meal, the moment of enjoyment was disappointingly anticlimactic. It was surprisingly hard to configure the timing of warming each dish, so many of the courses were lukewarm, a quality which undermines all of the care, and precision with which they were made. I’m not saying it wasn’t good, but it’s hard to justify 5 hours of work for one hour of enjoyment.