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Eating Their Words: The Saucy Chef
The author of the intimate cooking memoir “ Julie & Julia” says she has no regrets about revealing so much of herself.
Knight Ridder/Tribune
Julie Powell, 32, prepares Baked Cucumbers, a recipe from Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,’’ at home in Queens, N.Y. Powell cooked every recipe in the book.
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Published: November 23, 2005
It is fall 2002. Julie Powell is sneaking up on 30, treading water as a temp secretary, living in a postage stamp-sized New York City apartment with her husband and trying to convince herself that she's really an actress who's between jobs.
To stir things up, she palms her mother's copy of Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." At the behest of her husband, Eric, she spends a year cooking all 524 recipes contained within and writes a Weblog describing her adventures.
Fast-forward.
It is fall 2005. Julie Powell is now, at age 32, the darling of both food lovers and literary critics who can't help but fawn over her gritty, personal and sometimes bawdy memoir, " Julie & Julia: 365 days, 524 recipes, 1 tiny apartment kitchen" (Little, Brown, $23.95). After the book is released in September, she crisscrosses the country meeting fans and talking about the doyenne of cuisine, who died in 2004 while Powell was writing her blog. She no longer is a temporary secretary. She no longer pretends to be an unemployed actress.
The book is as intimate as her Julie- Julia Project blog, filled with her problems conceiving both a child and a life for herself. Brimming with girl talk and sass, it is a full-contact appreciation for Child, the wife of a former diplomat, who — at a crucial time in her life — carved a new identity through food.
Just like Julie Powell.
We caught up to her during a dizzying leg of the book tour on the West Coast, as she juggled a cell phone while driving to an appearance outside San Francisco.
Q. It's time to confess: This isn't a cooking book. It's really a sex book with food in it, isn't it?
A. Yes. It's a sex book and a marriage book and a life book. Food is like that.
Q. Cooking is a very sexual experience for some.
A. Absolutely. The one thing I love about how Julia Child writes about it is that even though the book is very formal and she's not out there flaunting her wares like Nigella Lawson, whom I love, [Julia] understands it's about how you touch food and smell food. It's very sensual, and I think that there's this exuberant eroticism about it.
Q. It's a very tactile experience.
A. I feel that way.
Q. What's been the strangest response to the book you've heard yet? Any "whack jobs" approach you?
A. There have been some. ... I don't want to call them whack jobs. Daytime readings tend to attract these very intense people, but also very bright and interesting and cool people.
Q. Kind of like having a blog.
A. It's not so much different. Because I had the blog before the book, people felt like they knew me. In a certain way, they did. They knew how much I was hung over and how much my jobs sucked. Because I'm not very much for thinking ahead in general, I had established this level of intimacy that once you're there, you can't really back off from it.
Q. How much did writing first for a blog contribute to the frankness of the book?
A. I've had people e-mail, "You're going through such-and-such problem," and I'm thinking, "I didn't say anything about that." People pick up on things, and they're careful readers. All of a sudden you realize you've stuck your brain out there to be read. I tend to be this person who doesn't believe in the inherent kindness of people, but the book tour and blog are proving me wrong.
Q. You're officially the queen of blogging, now that you're the first to actually make some money as a result of writing one.
A. Is that true? I'm certainly part of the first wave. What a fluke. The experience of blogging really freed me up. After being this self-loathing, frustrated writer, the blog burst that insular bubble I was in and got me writing. I'm very grateful for the community aspect of blogging. It helped me find my voice, and that's all good, but it remains a question how much it can be part of the next project. It's less organic now. I don't want it to be seen as a gimmicky thing.
After adapting all that material, eventually you have to lock yourself in a back room with a laptop and write the material. You can't write by committee.
Q. Any regrets on opening up so deeply to readers about all aspects of your life?
A. No, I don't. Obviously I've exposed very intimate things about myself. But on the other hand, too, it's also a construct. It's me, but it's not. The Julie of the blog and Julie of the book is not the Me Julie.
Q. Any guess on what Julia might have thought of the book?
A. There's a part in the book where she was sort of a pill about the project. Everyone I've talked to who has known her ... the consensus is that if she had been a little bit younger, she would have appreciated it as the tribute it was. The almost universal consensus also was that she was very generous about helping younger people along and encouraging people to try new things.
Q. In the 1961 foreword to "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," Julia wrote, "This is a book for the servantless American cook who can be unconcerned on occasion with budgets, waistlines, time schedules, children's needs, the parent-chauffeur-den mother syndrome or anything else which might interfere with the enjoyment of producing something wonderful to eat." Sure sounds like you.
A. It's an old-fashioned book, but I love the foreword. It's almost bloggy. It's really a beautiful piece of literature.
Q. She really was quite adventurous for her time.
A. She was a feminist icon, in a way. She kept knocking at those walls by being bullheaded and adventurous with enormous energy and a lack of concern about what those obstacles were.
She was totally committed to this reinvention of herself. Everything she did was new, and for a woman back then, one of those options was not, "I'm going to write a definitive French cookbook."
Q. You talk a little in the book about how her death affected you. Does that still remain a powerful moment?
A. Absolutely. I think that what she did for me personally — she's an incredible inspiration.
The other day I met a guy in Portland [Ore.] who was younger than I am, maybe not even 30. He was well-dressed, and he raised his hand during a Q&A session to ask about a recipe in her book. He was teaching himself. We all still get a chance to hear this wonderful, exuberant voice that's encouraging on a subliminal level.
Q. At the moment, we seem to be in the midst somewhat of a cookbook renaissance.
A. To me, cookbooks fall into two schools. One is the group that is voyeuristic, unrealistic and full of lush photos that show that you're supposed to look at it. It's not about eating it. The other cookbook school tries to get people to think, "This is easy and simple, simple, simple. You are a person of strength and mettle and you can do it." That's why [Julia's] book spoke to people at the beginning. For me, it did have this sort of life-changing devotion, this commitment. It said to me, "You're going to learn new things and broaden your horizons."
Q. I saw a photo that showed your James Beard Award [for food writing in a magazine] hanging on a cupboard in your kitchen. Is it still there?
A. I kind of put it there and forgot it.
Q. Any significance to its placement?
A. No, it's just where it wound up. The first one [awarded for a New York Times story she wrote] would be hanging up there, too, but we have a Rottweiler. He's 110 pounds, just an enormous rug of a dog. He looks like Chewbacca. He's got a slow metabolism.
Q. What's been the reaction to your book by foodies?
A. Right now, I'm a really easy person to hate. It's totally fair and I would hate me too, I think. Who the hell am I? I'm just this chick with a foul mouth. But people like me for that reason too. If it could happen to me, it could happen to them as well.
"She [Julia Child] was a feminist icon, in a way. She kept knocking at those walls by being bullheaded and adventurous with enormous energy and a lack of concern about what those obstacles were."
Jeff Houck can be reached at (813) 259-7324.
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