Cooking up January

Julia Child apparently could not get it together enough to send out her Christmas cards in December, so she and hubby made a practice of sending out Valentines instead. Boy, can I relate. Forget the cards, ain’t going to happen. However, I do feel the need to catch up, since I’ve had precious little time to post here since January, due to actual big paying writing gig, trip to New York, class, and grandpa canning himself while I was away and breaking his collar bone. But you don’t want to hear about this, right? Let’s talk about what’s to eat.
As I mentioned in the last post, we are going to select one cookbook a month and actually cook from it. I absolutely have to pay homage to Julia, so the first one (January) was Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1. I’ve mentioned before how Julia Child taught me to cook. Back when I was in college, I actually had a printed copy of the television show recipes in paperback, which I still have of course. But for most of college and grad school I was way too broke to afford the actual bible, which was not then available in paperback in the U.S. To my extreme delight, I discovered that it was available in England in a Penguin edition and snatched up a copy when I spied it in a bookstore in Salisbury. This became my bedtime reading for the rest of the trip.

By the time I got home, I’d learned a lot about technique and treatment of ingredients, but I can’t actually say I cooked much from the book. Somewhere I read an article that it took more than two days to make the Beef Wellington preparation. About this time I had also discovered the cookbooks of Elizabeth David, and her somewhat sketchy directions and loose approach seemed much easier to me. I understand now (especially after January) that Julia Child’s recipes are not so much difficult as they LONG and precise, but who has time as a grad student, or for the rest of life, for that matter? So MAFC became the go-to if I didn’t understand a technique or wanted the definitive recipe for Gateau Pithiviers or some such, but I generally used someone else’s recipe.

I used it enough that the Penguin edition began to yellow (rapidly) and lose pages (slowly but consistently). Finally, 20 years later, I looked at my baby daughter and wondered what legacy I would leave her. Seriously, she was in danger of not inheriting a copy of MAFC. Cannot be. This was just about the time that there was a buzz about re-issuing MAFC, and when I saw the pre-publication price, I started combing used bookstores, nabbing both volumes for about $5 each (made me happier than a good stock pick).

From the condition of the books, it became obvious that using MAFC is like saving money or losing weight—everybody talks about it but nobody actually does it. So, when Nikipedia and I began this cookbook-of-the-month project, the very first one obviously had to be MAFC, volume 1.

My conclusion after about a dozen recipes? If you have any interest in eating, you must have this book. Notice I did not say “cooking”. You don’t need to know anything about cooking. Believe me, Julia will tell you everything you need to know—don’t think about it, don’t try to improve, don’t skip any ingredients—just do exactly what she says and you’ll have a taste orgasm. I mean, the Casserole-roasted Chicken with Tarragon smelled so good and tasted so transcendent I wanted to take a bath in it, smear it on my face, take the pot into a corner and snarl away my beloved child, eating it all myself.

I’ve been making omelets for more than 30 years, but never tried them Julia’s way. Who knew two crummy eggs in a pan could cause your eyes to fly open? And the Gratin of Creamed Salmon! We barely got that one to the table and when we did, it already had two forks sticking out of it.

Maybe there’s a bad recipe in there somewhere, but we didn’t unearth it. A lot of people have joked that you can make anything taste good with enough butter, but canned salmon? These recipes are just superb, and represent a kind of cooking that can rarely be beat, here in the U.S. or even in much of Europe, any more.

There were a few things I didn’t like about the book, however. The recipes are set up with ingredients running down the left column, and how and when you use them running parallel in the right column. Myself, I like recipes to list all the ingredients at the beginning, in order of use. Just easier for me. The instructions are LONG, however simple their actual execution, and this may be either intimidating, comforting, or over-kill depending on your level of cooking expertise. I’ve been cooking for at least 40 years now (I started in infancy), but I have to confess I learned a few things. I hate the index for several reasons—the typography is just horrible—can’t distinguish heads and sub heads. The recipes are not listed by exact title: if you want the Chicken casserole I mentioned above, you have to look it up under Casseroles, where you’ll find “Chicken Fricasees”, or under “Chicken” or under “Poulet”. For me, a pain.

This is not a budget cookbook. But, even with the butter, floods of vermouth and cognac, and all the très cher seafood, it’s not terribly expensive or caloric either. Why? portions are small to reasonable. In fact, Julia mentions that the portions are even larger than she wished, but her editors convinced her to change her expectations from the multi-course French way to the fewer, larger American expectations. If you can control your gluttony and stick to the portions sizes, it’s not so bad.

What about the time factor? As long as you read the entire recipe beforehand, and that’s an important caveat, the recipes weren’t bad at all. I wouldn’t attack a major entrée at 6:45pm on a week night, but many of the recipes are minutes to prepare—takes longer to read them.

January with Julia was great. We didn’t put on an excessive amount of weight. The Nikipedia groaned when I announced February would have a cookbook of its own. Onward and upward.

Shop at home

First, shop at home. This is one of my mantras for 2010. Actually, I’ve been telling myself this for much longer, but I’m hoping it will actually sink in this year. Have you ever been really hot to buy something, and then, by the time you get it home, you don’t have the time to read the instructions, or the book goes on the shelf for later, or it’s just too good to use? Well, at least one of those describes my software shelf, probably one third of my book collection, and my entire stash of fabric and yarn, to say nothing of the grand piano. So this year, I’m going to try to use some of this stuff to create beautiful things and beautiful experiences (and finally understand how some of this software works, beyond just the basics.)
Is this really about art? Well, gee, it’s my blog, so I guess I can write about what I want to. But isn’t at least one of the purposes of art to beautify life? To lend creativity to the mundane? To spin dross into gold?

Where to begin? Just choosing what to get to is an overwhelming project in itself. However, I happened to be wringing my hands while in the kitchen, and realized that I was facing my wall of cookbooks. I have upwards of 220 cookbooks; depending on how you count pamphlets and specialized guides, even more. And how many of these do I ever use on a regular basis? Maybe 5. Okay, you clutter control freaks are now saying, get rid of the rest. But I must tell you, if there were a fire, after getting my kid out of the house, and making sure the pets were safe (with the possible, er, exception of one cat) I’d grab the cookbooks and run out naked. For certain, these are the possession my child will need to sort through when I croak. She doesn’t get rid of anything either, but I digress…

Possibly still inspired by envy at Julie & Julia, which everyone knows I should have written, better (and been cashing the checks on by now), I decided to select one cookbook per month for the next year, and cook a recipe from it at least twice per week. I’ve run out of shelf space, so I’m hoping this “shop at home” will stem the tide, although truthfully I bought 2 more cookbooks over last weekend.

I can dine in for years with this. Of course, the Nikipedia, dedicated foodie that she is, was ecstatic. And she uttered those fatal words, “Mom, I can HELP you,” more than doubling the potential workload of this project.

Next post will be about our January experiments. Let me know if you have any nominations for a cookbook you’d like to see tested—chances are, I probably have it!