Tag Archives: Mastering the Art of French Cooking

Dear Julia, Happy Birthday! #100, or, Why I Loved You

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Dear Julia,

Happy 100th birthday!

Today lots of famous food writers will write or post reams of flattering words about you. I know, I’ve already seen them, the New York Times leading the charge with three features about you, one by your friend Jacques Pépin.

Like Jacques, many others will point out, once again, that you almost singlehandedly transformed the sorry excuse for food in the 1960s United States into the bounty and abundance that we see today in nearly every grocery store on every corner. (Except for the food deserts of our inner cities, but that’s worth another meditation, another day.)

And indeed the pundits are mostly right, especially the part about you changing the focus from the lousy food of the early 1960s. I shudder to think of the casseroles, sweet Jello “salads,” and TV dinners, miracles of miracles, that children ate. No wonder the first food revolution took place in the 1960s! The local foods movement of today is nothing new, not at all.

Anyway, I wanted to tell you that a long time ago I decided I was never going to cook French food. It seemed so fussy and HARD. To tell you the honest truth, I felt faint whenever I looked at your Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The recipes went on for PAGES! Instead, I dabbled in all sorts of other cuisines, a bit of Chinese, some Mexican, and LOTS of Italian. But somehow, somewhere, it dawned on me that French cooking forms the backbone and much of the meat of Western cooking. Soon I owned both volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Just to show you what a sluggard I was, my copy of volume one came out in January 1981, the 32nd printing! Unlike Julie Powell, I never cooked my way through either one, it being impossible to buy things like mushrooms, eels, and endives when I lived in Honduras and other developing countries.

But I certainly stained a lot of pages! Along the way, I fell in love with France, too.

I’m glad that I finally met you, even for a brief moment. Aside from your books and all the TV shows and everything else, the most important thing you ever did was to teach us how to enjoy food and eating and cooking.

And you know what? You really were showing us how to enjoy life, by sucking every ounce of flavor from every moment.

Thank you, Julia! Truly, you were “Our Lady of the Ladle.”*

Photo credit: C. Bertelsen

*TIME magazine coined this phrase in 1966.

© 2012 C. Bertelsen

Cooking Classic French Food, the Easy Way

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If French cuisine, or at least the cooking of it, intimidates you, you’re not alone.

A perception of too many fussy techniques and hard-to-obtain ingredients stops people who might otherwise wield a wooden spoon with Julia Child’s enthusiasm. The great popularity of Italian food testifies to people’s desire to take simple ingredients and transform them into delicious food.

Unfortunately, most cooks don’t see French cooking in that light.

In French Classics Made Easy, Richard Grausman shatters those preconceived notions about French cuisine, just like a dessert lover cracking the sugar crust on a crème brulée.

Mr. Grausman studied first with James Beard and later earned a Grand Diplôme from Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris, as did Julia Child. Unlike Julia, he made friends with the director, “[the] strict, yet gentle and humorous Madame Elisabeth Brassart,” portrayed as an ogre in Nora Ephron’s stunning film, Julie & Julia. Brassart appointed Grausman as the school’s only U.S. representative ever.

From 1969 to 1985, Mr. Grausman traveled throughout the United States and Canada, teaching techniques of classical French cooking to “home cooks, chefs, and culinary students.” To help underserved high school students find jobs, he founded Careers through Culinary Arts Program (C-CAP).

In 1988, Mr. Grausman published At Home with the French Classics, joining other great teaching cookbooks like Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961), Henri Paul Pellaprat’s The Great Book of French Cuisine (1935/1936), Jacque Pepin’s La Technique: An Illustrated Guide to the Fundamental Techniques of Cooking(1987), Anne Willan’s La Varenne Pratique (1989), and the series of books published by Le Cordon Bleu.

Basically an updated version of At Home with the French Classics, French Classics Made Easy focuses on recipes and techniques easily accessible for home cooks. Most of the 250 recipes require ingredients found in any grocery store. Broken down into sections—First Courses, Main Courses, Vegetables & Other Accompaniments, Pastries & Desserts—the recipes in French Classics Made Easy include many all-time favorites, like the ones that grand-mere proudly produced for Sunday feasts.

A good French bistro turns out dishes like these every day. With recipes for such appetizing fare as Cream of Asparagus Soup, Omelet with Herbs, Ham and Mushroom Crepes with Mornay Sauce, Poached Chicken with Creamy Tarragon Sauce, and sauces—the book sings a veritable litany of the French bourgeois table.

Photo credit; Steve Johnson

Although Mr. Grausman’s Beef Burgundy recipe covers as many pages as does Julia Child’s, and as many calories, Mr. Grausman attempts to lighten and streamline recipes where possible. Reducing butter, cream, and egg yolks without affecting the flavor of the final dishes is no mean feat. Mr. Grausman achieves that with many recipes, mostly by cutting down on the amount of butter and cream, a seemingly insurmountable challenge in the dessert and pastry sections, which comprise almost one-fourth of the entire book. His recipe for Pots de Crème calls for five egg yolks and no cream, in contrast to the classic recipes loaded with a quart of heavy cream to twelve egg yolks!

French cuisine can be rigidly tradition-bound. But as Mr. Grausman says, “Most of the techniques used in preparing French classics are handed down from one generation of French chefs to the next by a strict apprentice system. . . . This system of learning may be one of the reasons that French cooking has remained distinctive through the ages and that many of the original techniques are still in use today.”

Where possible, as in the recipe for Sautéed Potatoes, for example, Mr. Grausman directs the cook to steam the vegetables in butter in a covered pan over low heat, eliminating the first step of parboiling the potatoes in another pan. In doing this, he actually utilizes a classic technique called “sweating,” generally applied to vegetables, although he doesn’t explain that relationship. Another surprising slip lies in the absence of an explanation for “mise-en-place,” or “everything in place,” the crucial French practice of preparing all ingredients ahead for recipes so as to increase accuracy and speed in cooking.

But in spite of these small omissions, French Classics Made Easy sparkles with the enticing tidbits of information readers expect from Workman Publishing. Small, boxed sidebars provide illustrated insights into cooking techniques. Recipe headnotes often elaborate on the fascinating background of certain recipes.

At the end of many recipes, Mr. Grausman offers numerous variations, as in the case of the master recipe for Green Beans. There the reader learns that freshness rather than size accounts for variations in cooking times, as well as six alternative methods for preparing and serving green beans.

This highly usable book ends with two appendices, one dealing with the mysteries of the metric system and the other with adjustments for high-altitude cooking.

Richard Grausman proves three things in French Classics Made Easy:

First of all, French cooking can be enjoyable and as easy as any other type of cooking.

Secondly, eating French food doesn’t have to lead to doctor visits, scolding lectures on high cholesterol, and out-of-sight blood pressure levels.

And the third thing? Mr. Grausman’s food tastes delicious, too.

So pull out that wooden spoon and get started.

Photo credit: C. Bertelsen

© 2012 C. Bertelsen

French cooks jambon persille

Parsleyed Ham and Kitchen Breezes: The Letters of M. F. K. Fisher and Julia Child

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Today is the 20th anniversary of M.F.K. Fisher’s death, so in tribute and at the request of her friend Leo Racicot, I am reposting this, something I wrote last year after attending Barbara Wheaton’s “Reading Historic Cookbooks” seminar at Harvard.

Sometimes words, both spoken and written, take on terrible power.

Use the wrong word and, at the sound, someone’s heart may crash to the bottom of their chest. Whisper another word and the soul flies straight up to heaven, if there is one. Or at least the listener might feel something akin to the euphoria of a saint in ecstasy.

Actually, the same can be said of cooks. A heavy hand with the pepper might lead the eater straight to that musty bottle of Tums at the bottom of the bathroom drawer, while a light hand with the whipping cream almost always ensures closed eyes and breathy smiles and other marvelous sensations.

M. F. K. Fisher

While a lot of people might not appreciate the work of M. F. K. Fisher, there’s something powerful and ecstatic about the way she grabbed onto the smallest experience and breathed life into it with words.

I’d forgotten about M. F.’s power with words, until I walked up the worn granite stairs to the second floor of the Schlesinger Library at Harvard, where I attended Barbara Ketcham Wheaton’s 2011 seminar on “Reading Historic Cookbooks.” Knowing about recipes is not enough – you need to know about the lives of the writers, their cultural and historical milieu, their motivation for producing their work, all obvious questions. The pieces make up the whole.

Only part of the steps of circular staircase showed, the rest covered with a black anti-slip material, cut into strange wave-like patterns, possibly hiding worn areas, not unlike the floor of Notre Dame in Paris, where you feel rather than see the impact of thousands of feet on the cold stone floor. Smooth, slippery, shiny, and silent.

In the reading room – a quiet, cool space, with late afternoon sunlight blazing through tall windows reaching to the ceiling – I waited patiently as the librarian rolled her two-shelve cart toward me. Two light green boxes rocked back and forth on the top of the beige metal, clacking quietly as the wheels bumped across the pale grey carpet. As she walked away, I stuck my thumbs under the flap of the first box and popped open the box. Filled with the characteristic rectangular files found in any archives, the boxes contained riches far more valuable than rubies, at least to me.

An anonymous archivist’s precise pencilings led me to the files I wanted to read – letters written by Julia Child and M. F. K. Fisher to each other.

Julia Child’s La Pitchoune

Like a fan from any time in history, in awe of a writer of magnificence, Julia Child wrote to M. F. K. Fisher on May 27, 1966, inviting M. F.  to visit her and her husband Paul in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At that time, M. F.  was working on the rather ill-received Time-Life edition of The Cooking of Provincial France with Michael Field. In fact, she and Field stayed and worked at Julia’s French house, La Pitchoune. (1) M. F.  replied to Julia on June 6, 1966 that she would be delighted to meet Julia in Boston on August 3, 1966. Julia, who by that time was probably more famous than M. F. , replied that she would meet M. F.  She also told M. F.  that she needed to consider “Haute versus Bourgeoise? That is something to hassel [sic] with Michael [Field] about.” M. F.  thought the title too close to Elizabeth David’s book (French Provincial Cooking) and preferred “Cooking of the French Provinces.” In that first letter,  M. F.  described Julia as a “quiet kitchen breeze clearing the kitchen murk.”

And so, on August 3, Julia waited at Logan Airport for Air France flight #19 from Paris.

Julia Child

Almost twenty years later, on September 7, 1982, M. F. wrote of that day, not just any day, but the day that two of the most influential writers on French cuisine in twentieth-century America met face-to-face for the first time:

And there you were, standing at the bleak airport gate like a familiar warm beacon … old tennis shoes, a soft cotton shirtmaker … tall boarding school teenager from Pasadena. We’d met before, not in this life but somehow. I went happily along with you, and felt home again.

…

That night in Cambridge, in a big cool house that was like the ones I’d always known in Southern California, an editor from Time-Life dined with us, and was puzzled at how little the summer’s work seemed to matter to anything but his project. We ate a jambon persillé you were experimenting with.

…

It is all part of my life … the real part, the best.

Way before that day, though, M. F. said to Julia, in a letter dated August 21, 1966:

These things do not happen often [friendship], and when they do they can be rather scary.

However fleeting, our encounters lead to many things, she implies. Food and meals form the threads, but it is us in our humanness that weaves it all together. 

Jambon Persillé (Parsleyed Ham in Aspic)

From Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol.2, by Julia Child and Simone Beck, p. 310:

As described in the introduction to this seciton, jambon persille is a Burgundian creation. Inevitably when dealing with well-known regional specialties, there are dozens of variations and minor version, and always hundreds of very definite opinions on how to conduct teach step. Among the considerable number of serious and trustworthy formulas we have studied, this is the one we prefer.

A note on store-bought ham: If you are not using home-cured ham, buy 6.5 to 7 pounds of bone-in, ready-to-bake, mild-cured smoked ham or picnic shoulder. Omit step 1, proceeding directly to the simmering in Step 2; skin and bone the ham after cooking.

For 2.5 to 3 quarts of ham, serving 12 to 16.

1) Soaking the ham: 12 to 24 hours.

4 to 6 pounds of boned, home-salted fresh ham or shoulder-arm, and the salted ham rind

Soak the ham and the rind in a large basin of cold water, changing water 2 to 3 times. Overnight is enough for ham cured about 15 days, soak for 18 to 24 hours if ham has cured longer. (Soaking removes the preserving salt, not the flavor.)

2) Simmering the ham.

1 bottle best quality, young, strong, dry white wine (Cotes du Rhone or Pinot Blanc), OR 3 cups dry white French vermouth
3 cups bouillion made from ham bones or a mix of beef and chicken
Neccessary water
1 tsp thyme )
2 Tb tarragon, all tied in cheesecloth
4 allspice berries 
2 imported bay leaves 
2 large cloves garlic 
1 large onion, roughly chopped
1 medium carrot, roughly chopped
1 celery stalk

Place soaked ham and rind in kettle, add wine, boullon and enough water to cover by an inch. Add rest of ingredients listed, bring to a simmer and skim for several minutes until scum ceases to rise. Cover partially and maintain at the simmer until ham is tender when pierced with a sharp knife (about 2 hours for boned, home-cured ham). Let ham cool in liquid for an hour or two.

While still warm, remove rind from kettle (or ham, if still on a bone-in ham), scrape off and discard as much fat as possible and puree rind through coarse disk of food mill or fine blade of meat grinder; reserve in a 1 quart bowl. Tear ham apart with your fingers, discarding fat and gristle. Cut ham into pieces about 1/2 inch thick and 1.5-2 inches square, and place in a separate 2 quart bowl along with any meat scraps. Moisten with a tablespoon or so of cooking stock, and set aside. Thoroughly degrease cooking stock, boil down rapidly to concentrate flavor if necessary, and correct seasoning.

3) The aspic (about four cups)

5 cups thoroughly degreased ham cooking stock in a saucepan
2 to 3 egg whites (1/2 cup)
1/2 to 1 cup minced green tops from leeks or scallions (optional)
2 packages (2 Tb) powdered unflavored gelatin

Clarify the cooking stock with the egg whites, add optional greenery, strain, and then dissolve the gelatin in it.

4) The parsley and aspic flavoring

Bowl of pureed rind
1 cup chopped fresh parsley
1 clove garlic, mashed
1 Tb dried tarragon or 3 tbsp fresh minced

1 Tb wine vinegar
Salt and pepper to taste
1 cup of the aspic, cool but not set

Mix all ingredients except the aspic in the bowl and just before assembling the ham in Step 5, stir in the cup of aspic. (You will have 2 to 2.5 cups when all is blended.)

5) Assembling and serving

The following assembly method is informal: the meat is packed into a bowl and slices are cut and served directly from it. If you want a dressier presentation, line the bowl with aspic before filling it, and unmold onto a platter for serving.

Chill the bowl or crock you plan to use (2.5 to 3 qt.) and spread a layer of parsley aspic in the bottom. Then pack with layers of ham and parsley-aspic. When filled, cover with a rack or plate that will fit into the bowl, top it with some kind of weight, and chill for an hour or so until set. (If you do not weight the ham, it will be difficult to cut into slices later). Remove the rack and so forth, scramble the top a bit with a fork to disguise the plate or rack marks, and pour on some or all of the cool aspic (leftover from step 3). Cover and chill until serving time.

______________________

After M. F. K. Fisher’s death in 1992, Julia arranged for a public radio program in which she featured a 1984 tape of M. F. K. reading “I was Really Very Hungry,” a narrative of an experience she had in France, eating a sumptuous meal with the help of an intense waitress and a frustrated Burgundian chef.

(1)  Alex Prudhomme:

La Pitchoune means “the Little One.” Paul and Julia built their modest little house in the town of Plascassier, near Cannes, surrounded by stucco walls, olive trees, and flowering lavender. 

For more letters, see M.F.K. Fisher: A Life in Letters : Correspondence 1929-1991. (1997)

© 2011 C. Bertelsen

Russian kitchen

Culinary Memoirs: What’s the Point?

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Photo credit: Anton Novoselov

They usually start by describing a kitchen from that vast desert common to all of us: memory. Filled with nostalgia, and sometimes not a little anger, culinary memoirs tend to hover around the memoirist’s stomach, in what I would call extreme navel-gazing.

What is culinary memoir? And why are there so many of them springing up like mushrooms on a wet spring morning (over 250 published since Ruth Reichl’s 1999 Tender at the Bone)? And – more to the point – why do they leave me with the mouthfeel (mindfeel?) of a sour orange?

Whatever the reason for the upsurge of this literary genre, culinary memoirs offer historians a unique peek at the inner life of the food-obsessed. I can’t help but think that this phenomenon emerged because 1) people are better educated overall, 2) hunger and famine do not plague as many people as in the past, and 3) use of the Internet encourages the type of narcissism that spawns Tweets and photos of every bite people take.

Just think what treasure there’d be if the great chefs of the past had written about their daily cooking life as Anthony Bourdain did in Kitchen Confidential? And consider the rejoicing if some graduate student unearthed Marie Antoinette’s handwritten cookbook in the dusty, brittle papers housed in the Archives Nationales in Paris!

Essentially a form of autobiography, the first culinary memoir came from the pen of a Roman Catholic saint, St. Augustine, who wrote about stealing pears in his Confessions:

“There was a pear tree close to our own vineyard, heavily laden with fruit, which was not tempting either for its colour or for its flavour. Late one night–having prolonged our games in the streets until then, as our bad habit was–a group of young scoundrels, and I among them, went to shake and rob this tree. We carried off a huge load of pears, not to eat ourselves, but to dump out to the hogs, after barely tasting some of them ourselves.”

St. Augustine’s guilt translates into my guilt, your guilt, everyone’s guilt over some thoughtless teenage act, things that all young people do and later regret. Even though he lived centuries ago, his story still wields power, it still prods the reader’s memory, and his words still bring forth an ashamed “Oh, yes!”

So what’s the difference between memoir and autobiography?

Well, in a way, the question splits hairs.

Technically, memoirs cover a portion of a person’s life, filled like a jelly doughnut with surprising revelations, usually a thematic approach, as in the case of the increasingly ubiquitous culinary memoirs cluttering bookstore shelves. As for autobiography, pundits define it as biography written by the person under scrutiny, in this case the author. Autobiography generally tends to cover a complete life from birth until whenever it is that the person picked up the pen or began banging on the keyboard. It can’t ever be complete and end with death, for how would the author write about that?

In Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (2001), Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson list fifty-two genres of autobiography, ranging from Apology to Travel Narrative and Witnessing. One of their genres is Memoir.

Many M. F. K. Fisher fans consider her monumental The Art of Eating to be the first of the increasingly large number numbers of culinary memoirs glutting bookstore shelves today. They forget Della Lutes’s groundbreaking The Country Kitchen (1936, reprinted 1992), which came out a year before Ms. Fisher’s Serve it Forth (1937). And of course there’s Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste (1825 ) and Elizabeth Robins Pennell’s The Feasts of Autolycus (1896 ).

Since memoir considers questions of identity, perhaps  the recent surfeit of them signifies the yearning for a sense of place and belonging. The food craze offers a sense of identity for many people. The kitchen or the stove or the farm or the restaurant become sites of narration and self inquiry. It’s almost as if the stereotypical coming-of-age story (bildungsroman) now must take place in a restaurant or at least in front of a stove or while staring at a cow’s udder.

Unlike some of the luminous stories of young people coming of age (think The Glass Castle, by Jeanette Walls), today’s food memoirs often reveal nothing larger than, “Gee, I really grew up when Chef yelled at me”  or “Cooking became my religion” or “I made it through a year cooking my way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” (My own Confession here: I must admit that Julie & Julia REALLY disappointed me – it could have been so great, with a newbie cook’s reflections on cooking, some material about Julia Child, etc. , but instead it was frankly one long boring “poor-me” whine.)

Most of these culinary memoirs come from the United States, written for the most part by people with middle-class backgrounds.

But some emerge from cultures long considered “The Other.” Madhur Jaffrey and Colette Rossant, to give but a few examples, write of their childhoods in Climbing the Mango Trees and  Memories of a Lost Egypt: A Memoir withe Recipes, respectively.

It’s a fine line to straddle, between being personal and yet universal at the same time. I beg editors and publishers to look for stories that veer more toward the universal. Many recent culinary memoirs offer little to chew on once the reader turns that last page.

Yet, yet, these memoirs do at times offer a lot to historians of the daily.

You know, I’d love to know the story behind the kitchen in the photo at the beginning of this post … . And I can almost imagine the beginning:  Aunt Adela looked out the window, its panes grimy with pork grease,  and sighed. “See that tree over there?,” she asked, her gaunt finger pointing at the lopsided fir. “That’s where that stupid Russian general shot your Uncle Dorin.”

Photo credit: Anshul Nigham

© 2012 C. Bertelsen

Remembering Julia Child, “Our Lady of the Ladle”*

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Julia Child 5

(Julia Child died on August 13, 2004. Her birthday was August 15; she would have been 92 years old. The following article originally appeared in The Roanoke Times on Sunday, Aug. 22, 2004, page 3 of the Horizon section.)

“Julia Child dies at 91.”

Stunned at the breaking news, I read the flickering words on my computer screen one more time, tears slowly welling up in my eyes.

Why should I be crying for Julia Child?

I only met her once, spending a half an hour with her alone in an art gallery in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 1997. She presented a keynote address at that year’s national conference of the American Society of Indexers. Basically, although at the time I indexed books professionally,  I was there as a fan, because cooking is like breathing to me. When the president of the Society asked me to squire Julia around before the keynote address, I almost refused for fear of messing up. What on earth would we talk about?

As it turned out, I shouldn’t have worried. We had a lot to talk about, and Julia put me, a complete stranger, at ease right away.

After the elaborate banquet prepared for the conference attendees, Julia insisted on calling out the entire kitchen staff for a standing ovation and a hug for the young nervous chef. Who wouldn’t be sweating with fright at the idea of cooking for the great Julia Child?

Later, after Julia’s wry keynote address, I opened copies of her books for her book signing that followed. You see, she would only sign the books on a certain page and in a certain place. Having read and cooked from most of her cookbooks, I wasn’t surprised at this unwavering attention to detail. Over 250 indexers and others  lined up with copies of her books. Julia signed every one of those books, smiling, laughing, asking people about themselves. Her glowing face, so full of energy from interacting with the scores of people in the room, is something I have never forgotten. That was Julia, a real person, giving, caring, and meticulous. The Julia we read about as her long-term and close friends and colleagues continue to pay tribute to her.

But I am not mourning her death just because I just happened to meet her once, a picture of us together on a wall in my kitchen as proof. Rather, my sorrow comes from knowing that, with Julia’s death, America lost a strong voice of hope and optimism. Her wise comments in her book, The Way to Cook, sum up her feelings about food and human community:

Dining with one’s friends and beloved family is certainly one of life’s primal and most innocent delights, one that is both soul-satisfying and eternal.

For Julia, true hospitality meant welcoming the stranger. Julia’s way is a way to remember our shared humanity with all human beings in these very troubled times. Eating, cooking, and sharing food together are all things that we all need very much these days when even families, much less strangers, do not eat meals together very often.

In memory of Julia, invite a new acquaintance to a meal this week. Cook the food yourself. And remember that once people have eaten together, there are no longer strangers.

Goodbye, Julia. Thank you.


Books About Julia Child:

Appetite for Life, by Noah Riley Fitch (1999)

Backstage with Julia: My Years with Julia Child, by Nancy Verde Barr (2008)

Julia Child: A Life, by Laura Shapiro (2007)

Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, by Julie Powell (2005, paperback 2009)

My Life in France, by Julia Child and Alex Prud’homme (2006)

Books by Julia Child:

Mastering the Art of French Cooking (with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle). New York: Knopf, 1961; The 40th Anniversary Edition of Mastering. Knopf, 2001.

The French Chef Cookbook. New York: Knopf, 1968; The 30th Anniversary Edition of the French Chef. New York: Ballentine Books, 1998.

Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. II (with Simone Beck). New York: Knopf, 1970, 1983.

From Julia Child’s Kitchen. New York: Knopf, 1975.

Julia Child & Company (in collaboration with E. S. Yntema). New York: Knopf, 1978.

Julia Child & More Company (in collaboration with E. S. Yntema). New York: Knopf, 1979.

The Way to Cook. New York: Knopf, 1989.

Julia Child’s Menu Cookbook. New York: Wings (Random House), 1991.

Cooking with Master Chefs. New York: Knopf, 1993.

In Julia Child’s Kitchen with Master Chefs (with Nancy Barr). New York: Knopf, 1995.

Julia and Jacques: Cooking at Home (with David Nussbaum). New York: Knopf, 1999.

Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom (with David Nussbaum). New York: Knopf, 2000.

*Time magazine, 1966.

© 2004, 2010 C. Bertelsen

Julie & Julia —

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A kitchen, a bottle of wine, and a duck recipe. Easy, right?

With the movie, “Julie & Julia,” now out,  media commentators and critics find new fodder for chewing. One of the better perusals comes from The Boston Globe, written by Devra First and Wesley Morris. A video helps brings home the impact of cooking from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. After deboning a duck, can one be empowered?

Probably.

And for another tidbit of all things Juliana, here’s Julia Child on one of my favorite topics — early cookbooks, from a tape done at the Library of Congress by Michael Lawrence Films: