I was attracted to this book both because it was on the three-for-two table at Borders and because of its subtitle: my year of cooking dangerously.
One evening in 2002, living in a small New York apartment with her husband, working for a government agency post-9/11, her career in limbo and her hormones in flux because of PCOS, Julie Powell found herself wandering home with the ingredients for leek and potato soup. Or, as Julia Child describes it, in her masterwork Mastering the Art of French Cooking, potage parmentier.
The book tracks the resulting Julie/Julia project – cooking her way through all 524 MtAoFC recipes in a year. Powell started and maintained an evidently popular blog throughout the process, and the book incorporates her reflections then and now, blog extracts, glimpses of her non-project life, and (conjectural) fragments of the lives of Julia and Paul Child.
The fragments, based on archival information, made me interested in a woman with whom I had no more than fleeting knowledge – she sounds like a fascinating person. No less so, though, than Powell – how many people would not only embark on but complete such a novel task, much less manage to turn the experience into a widely-read blog, media appearances, and a book?
The recipes are dated (references to the obscene amount of butter used are threaded through the text), confronting (the lobster executions were particularly unnerving just to read about), and classic. I felt no desire to make any of them, but I share Powell’s triumph at having polished off the set. What makes the book, though, is Powell’s personality – she’s adventurous, honest, tenacious and funny. Well worth the price of admission. – Alex
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