Julia Child Rules by Karen Karbo

Author:Karen Karbo [KARBO, KAREN]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781493000661
Publisher: skirt!

MASTERING THE ART OF FINDING YOURSELF THROUGH AN IMPOSSIBLY LONG AND SEEMINGLY INSURMOUNTABLE PROJECT OF UNKNOWN VALUE

The general wisdom about following your bliss suggests that most likely you’ll be happy pursuing a field for which you have a natural aptitude, but Julia Child wasn’t a natural cook, nor for a long time was she even a good cook. It’s an imaginative exercise to see past the formidable expert she became, to imagine her in her cold Paris apartment, bent over her typewriter, struggling to write the recipes that would one day comprise Mastering, which for years she called her “scratches.”

One of the reasons she felt the need to devote an entire morning to writing a recipe for cooking lobster, as a way of documenting exactly what needed to be done, step by step, was so that she could follow that particular trail back into the woods the next time she wanted to make it. She needed to have a perfect, highly detailed recipe because she feared she lacked perfect culinary pitch. Had she been a more instinctive, “natural” cook, she might have felt less compelled to parse each recipe, to tackle each one as though getting it right were a matter of life and death. The recipes are so infamously long because Julia herself required such details.

Evidence of her obsession, and the ecstasy it produced, would fill an entire book, and did. Page after page of As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto is filled with lengthy passages attesting to Julia’s near-manic joy about food: eating it, cooking it, and everything associated with it: “We also ran into a beautiful Bordeaux 1929, that is just perfectly matured, and is everything one reads about that a wonderful Bordeaux should be but rarely tastes. It is really something to swoon over, the wonderful rich exciting bouquet, that excitement as it fills the mouth … I’m swooning over the typewriter just at the thought of them.”

In 1952, while Julia was still hoping, somehow, to make a career around cooking, she wrote a fan letter to a journalist and historian named Bernard DeVoto in response to a piece he’d written in Harper’s Magazine bemoaning the mediocre stainless-steel knives found in most American kitchens. So grateful was Julia that someone had brought this egregious problem to light, she sent along a “nice little French model” from her batterie de cuisine.

Avis DeVoto, Bernard’s wife, handled all of his correspondence. The thought of the gifted, sage, and canny Avis handling her husband’s fan mail a la Vera Nabokov who, I read once, also escorted her husband around when it rained, to save him having to clutter his mind with learning to open an umbrella, is another rant for another time.* In any case, Avis answered Julia’s letter, and the two became devoted pen pals, then best friends, confidantes, and colleagues. Julia would refer to her, alternately, as her “wet nurse” and her “mentor.”

Their letters are astonishing, a primer both on what it means to be a good friend and why people loved Julia the way they did.

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