Julie and Julia by Julie Powell

Author:Julie Powell [POWELL, JULIE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780759514577
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

And so on the eve of the New Year, I made Veau Prince Orloff for eleven cousins and aunts and uncles, who I’m sure believed their crazy Yankee-fied niece had dropped completely off the deep end.

Veau Prince Orloff is an absurd recipe. What you do is this: You roast the veal with some vegetables and bacon. You save the juices. We did this the night before, and then left the roast sitting on the counter overnight—slightly overdone, I think, as I so often do with Julia’s meats, which is particularly a shame when the meat you’re roasting is $15.99 a pound. Then you can wake up a few times in the early hours of the morning in a cold sweat, convinced your parents’ golden retriever has gotten to the eighty-dollar veal roast. That stress should offset some of the catastrophic caloric intake you’re about to experience.

On the day you’re serving, you make a soubise, which is a bit of rice briefly boiled and then cooked slowly with some butter and a lot of sliced onions for forty-five minutes or so. The water that sweats out of the onions is sufficient to cook the rice, which is kind of neat, sort of like a chemistry experiment or something. Then you make duxelles, which are just minced mushrooms sautéed with shallots and butter.

Out of the veal juices and some milk you make a velouté sauce, which is a roux-based type of thing. You combine the velouté with the soubise, run the soubise through the sieve/Cuisinart, then stir in the duxelles and cook it all up, thinning it out with cream.

This, surprisingly, takes all morning. And produces a hell of a lot of dirty dishes, which my mother, being my mother, patiently washed. Which is as it should be, because guilt is what Christmas is for.

I sliced the veal as thinly as I could, then stacked it back together again, one slice at a time, smearing mushroom filling on each slice as I went. I stirred some cheese into the warm velouté, then poured it over the veal. The veal now looked like some kind of wet beige footstool. I sprinkled some more cheese on top, and some melted butter. My mother is a Texan and knows the value of cooking fats, but even she was horrified when she did a stick-of-butter count. The veal got thrown into the oven about half an hour before it was time to serve, just to warm through.

If you fed this veal to a racehorse, it would instantly drop dead of gastric torsion. Very good. Who cares if the roast is overdone, I think, when you’ve got that much shit on it? It goes a little oddly with San Antonio squash casserole with Velveeta and canned chiles, cornbread dressing, turkey, and pecan pie. But no matter.

We flew back to New York on January second. As I sat at the kitchen table that morning before our flight home, sipping a cup of coffee and maybe wallowing a bit

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