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.