Julie Powell is 30-years-old, living in a rundown apartment in Queens and working at a soul-sucking secretarial job that’s going nowhere. She needs something to break the monotony of her life, and she invents a deranged assignment. She will take her mother's dog-eared copy of Julia Child's 1961 classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and she will cook all 524 recipes. In the span of one year.At first she thinks it will be easy. But as she moves from the simple Potage Parmentier (potato soup) into the more complicated realm of aspics and crépes, she realizes there’s more to Mastering the Art of French Cooking than meets the eye. With Julia’s stern warble always in her ear, Julie haunts the local butcher, buying kidneys and sweetbreads. She sends her husband on late-night runs for yet more butter and rarely serves dinner before midnight. She discovers how to mold the perfect Orange Bavarian, the trick to extracting marrow from bone, and the intense pleasure of eating liver.And somewhere along the line she realizes she has turned her kitchen into a miracle of creation and cuisine. She has eclipsed her life’s ordinariness through spectacular humor, hysteria, and perseverance.
I had been wanting to read this book for a long time because it served as the inspiration for the movie of the same name. But after reading it, I have to agree with what people on the internet say: the movie is much better, and the author ends up being a character you grow to dislike.
Let me explain in more detail: the book is essentially a version of the website Julie had in the early 2000s. The author worked as a secretary in a government office that dealt with the horrible tragedy of 9/11. As part of her daily life—and as a way to relieve stress—she decided to cook every recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child. In short, the entire book is about her personal life mixed with her attempts to finish cooking all the recipes from Julia Child’s book.
I think the idea was good, but Julie’s narrative becomes boring at times, and her way of expressing herself is disappointing. She often mixes in political opinions, and there’s a constant air of negativity throughout her writing. Compared to Julia Child’s autobiography My Life in France (which I’m currently reading), the feeling is completely different: Julia expresses positivity, progress, a sense of hope, and her daily observations tend to be inspiring (or at the very least, amusing).
The issue with Julie is that readers typically seek her book as a comforting and inspiring read, but what we find is quite the opposite. While it’s impossible to deny that Julie was successful in publishing a book after her blog The Julie and Julia Project gained many readers and was later turned into a movie, I have to say that the personality she shows in the book is dull.
This is clearly reflected in the film, where, as viewers, we tend to prefer the scenes with Julia. We love seeing the joy with which she learns to cook, and how that eventually leads her to publish her cookbook.
Since I didn’t enjoy the book very much, I’m unsure whether to keep it in my collection or just leave it among my Julia Child books. This is something I’m currently debating internally.
Have you heard of Julia Child?
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