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First Published:
Sep 2005, 320 pages
Paperback:
Sep 2006, 336 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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With the humor of Bridget Jones and the vitality of Augusten Burroughs, Julie Powell recounts how she conquered every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and saved her soul!
With the humor of Bridget Jones and the vitality of Augusten Burroughs, Julie
Powell recounts how she conquered every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the
Art of French Cooking and saved her soul.
Julie Powell is 30-years-old, living in a rundown apartment in Queens and
working at a soul-sucking secretarial job that’s going nowhere. She needs
something to break the monotony of her life, and she invents a deranged
assignment. She will take her mother's dog-eared copy of Julia Child's 1961
classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and she will cook all 524 recipes.
In the span of one year.
At first she thinks it will be easy. But as she moves from the simple Potage
Parmentier (potato soup) into the more complicated realm of aspics and crépes,
she realizes there’s more to Mastering the Art of French Cooking than meets the
eye. With Julia’s stern warble always in her ear, Julie haunts the local
butcher, buying kidneys and sweetbreads. She sends her husband on late-night
runs for yet more butter and rarely serves dinner before midnight. She discovers
how to mold the perfect Orange Bavarian, the trick to extracting marrow from
bone, and the intense pleasure of eating liver.
And somewhere along the line she realizes she has turned her kitchen into a
miracle of creation and cuisine. She has eclipsed her life’s ordinariness
through spectacular humor, hysteria, and perseverance.
DAY 1 , RECIPE 1
The Road to Hell Is
Paved with Leeks and Potatoes
As far as I know, the only evidence supporting the theory that Julia Child
first made Potage Parmentier during a bad bout of ennui is her own recipe for
it. She writes that Potage Parmentier- which is just a Frenchie way of saying
potato soup - "smells good, tastes good, and is simplicity itself to
make." It is the first recipe in the first book she ever wrote. She
concedes that you can add carrots or broccoli or green beans if you want, but
that seems beside the point, if what you're looking for is simplicity itself.
Simplicity itself. It sounds like poetry, doesn't it? It sounds like just
what the doctor ordered.
It wasn't what my doctor ordered, though. My doctor - my gynecologist, to be
specific - ordered a baby.
"There are the hormonal issues in your case, with the PCOS, you know
about that already. And you are pushing thirty, after all. Look at it this way -
...
If you're a keen home cook or a fan of memoirs, real or fictionalized, such as Bridget Jones, this is one for you; and with the holiday season coming up dangerously soon, you might also want to keep a note of Julie & Julia as a potential gift item for a domesticated relative - perhaps paired with Julia Child's autobiography My Life In France (with the caveat that Julia Child, who died while Julie was working her way through The Art of French Cookery, wasn't a fan of Julie or her project!)..continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Ann Beattie
Julie and Julia has all the ingredients of a tasty novel: it's
original, funny, and slyly provocative. I also learned a lot, and I will channel
Paul Child when I renovate my kitchen. Elizabeth Gilbert, author of The Last American Man
A feast, a voyage and a marvel. Julie Powell writes about cooking the
way it always needed to be written about - in big, buttery, honest and lusty,
gravy-dripping-down-your-chin gulps of rhapsody. Mario Batali, cookbook author and 2005 James Beard Awards' Outstanding Chef of The Year.
Julie Powell's homage to Julia is inspiring, poignant and engaging. A
magnificent introduction into the lives of two very interesting women.Julie Powell says... 'My answer to "what's your favorite read" changes every time I'm asked it, but I can say that as far as cookbook authors, Paul Prudhomme*, Andries de Groot and, yes, Nigella Lawson are folks I enormously admire. Elizabeth Gilbert is a fantastic writer as well as a great person, and I look forward to her next book with bated breath. I am in awe of Alice Munro. As a kid I was a bit of a sci-fi and fantasy geek, and read Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's trilogy on a bi-yearly basis, and was a ...
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