Tuesday, July 08, 2003

I’ve said this before, but I was thinking about it again last night, as I watched the episode of Julia Child with Rick Bayless and the epazote, which was airing on PBS for like the third time in a month.  I find it a mysterious, almost a frightening, oddity that before the inception of the Project I had never once watched Julia Child on television.  Julia Child was, to me, Dan Ackroyd in an apron gushing blood, and I mostly remember that because John Goodman’s character watches that skit on the movie “Always.”  Not that I didn’t know who Julia was, of course I did.  Doesn’t everyone?  For one thing, of course, I always had the books – tucked in my mother’s cookbook rack in the pantry ever since I can remember, the two volumes with the matching covers, red chevrons for volume one, blue for volume two.  They sat in the rack just by the Time-Life collection of Cuisines Around the World – two volumes for each cuisine, those had, a slim, spiral-bound book with all the actual recipes, and then a larger, full-color book with the history and lots of pictures of imposing Viennese cakes and things.  These books were all so wonderfully serious, serene but imposing, these great troves of arcania.  But my mother only ever cooked out of Master The Art Of French Cooking, and even then, she only used Volume I.  But I never watched Julia at work.  Working with the book, one comes to know Julia as a teacher – a brilliant one, with a spark of humor, a passion for her subject, and an unfailing intuition for how to create a feeling of comfort in the midst of chaotic striving.  But in her shows, and particularly her later ones, “Cooking With Master Chefs,” et al, Julia proves an exemplary, and inspirational, student.  She is endlessly curious – every time she sticks her big, curled paws into a pot of boiling water, or right under the flying knife of a chef forty years her junior, to pick up some bit of something to taste, the tiny bit of my soul that still harbors a belief in a higher power squeezes its eyes shut and crosses its fingers and prays as hard as it can that when I am her age, I’ll be just like Julia.  She asks endless questions – in the episode PBS is so obsessed with that they show it about once a week, it’s the anti-flatulence properties of epazote that holds her attention, to a rather unseemly degree – and always seems glad to learn from the people she brings on to the show, often wet-eared young whippersnappers who treat her like she’s some dotty old biddy until I want to grab them by the shoulders and shake them – “Show some respect, kid, this is Julia, and you wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for her!!!”  But she never seems to feel slighted or disrespected – really, in the end, how could she?  She is Julia – always changing, but always, utterly, herself.  As a student, on these shows, she’s teaching us all how to learn. She has a wonderful aside in these endlessly repeated episode about lard – when she gets off the epazote for a minute.  “We should talk about this,” she warbles, as Rick dumps a nice big scoop of lard into a frying pan, “Because everyone’s so afraid of lard.”  They discuss the pros and cons of the stuff – less cholesterol than butter, but more saturated fats, the authenticity lard lends to Latin American dishes, etc…, and Julia says, “The point is, if you don’t want to make something right, don’t make it.  Choose something else.  Like making tamales with olive oil, it’s TERRIBLE!”  And her voice swoops briefly up into the stratosphere, and you feel this passion in her, and yes, she’s probably had a glass or two of wine, which God love her she deserves, but to me the wonderful thing is the hint that there’s yet another Julia, another face.  I’ve learned from the teacher and I’ve learned again from the student, but when she talks of lard, Julia hints that there is another, wilder, Julia beneath it all, a rebellious, passionate, dare I say dangerous individual.  Was it this Julia who joined this OSS and created shark repellent?  Or maybe just this Julia who walked into a cooking school in France – no longer a spring chicken herself, but with an unquenchable fire in her that she herself didn’t quite understand.  That’s the Julia I’m striving toward, the Julia that I hope someday to be like. I love the days when I don’t cook and I have the time to wax all poetic and shit.  Tonight, though, no waxing.  Tonight the soaking and blanching of sweetbreads, the baking and chilling of Ile Flottante.  I’m meant to go to yet another office party for yet another’s colleague’s imminent departure, but I’ve got the best excuse ever.  “Oh, sure, I’ll traipse to the West Village to have an over-priced drink… Can I just leave my calves’ thymus gland here on the bar with your purse?”   8:02:17 AM    comment []