It's Sunday. I didn't work today so I cooked breakfast: cinnamon rolls (not from scratch, sorry), and bacon. On the end of my kitchen counter is a TV with a DVD player, and on Sunday mornings, I treat myself and cook with Julia Child. Christmas before last, my husband gave me the two DVD sets that are available with episodes from her series, The French Chef. I love these DVDs because I enjoy watching Julia make recipes I would never try (terrines) and some I would try, like today's crepes. I also hate the DVDs because they are divided up by type of recipe--Starters, Main Courses, Desserts--and not arranged chronologically. You can go from watching a black and white early episode, to a later episode in color, and then back to balck and white. There were originally 134 episodes of this show, the first 13 of which were lost. So I only have 36 out of the remaining 121 on these two DVD sets. I would quickly fork out bundles of money for a complete, chronological set of The French Chef, but for now I make due with what there is. I love the fact that Julia is messy, drops things, and doesn't always worry about the final presentation of a dish.
Because I work in a bookstore, it's easy for me to see how media exposure drives book sales. As soon as the movie Julie & Julia came out, sales of Julia Child's books increased dramatically. We couldn't keep copies of Mastering the Art of French Cooking in stock because everyone wanted. Julie Powell made cooking from it seem so attractive. I sold it to one woman who bought it simply so she could learn to make a bechemal sauce. There are cheaper and quicker ways to get your hands on the recipe and technique of making bechemal sauce, but I certainly understand the attraction of having Julia teach you how. When I was a child back in the 1960s, I learn to cook from my mother--and from watching Julia Child.
I own both hardcover volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking (I paid $2.50 for each at a sidewalk sale outside a cooking store a long time ago), but I confess I never use them to cook with. They certainly are the foundation of the way Julia Child built her approach to cooking, but I prefer the more Americanized versions of her recipes: Julia in later life.
When my daughter Emily, was a toddler, she loved watching cooking shows. She was fascinating with what the hands were stirring and making. She loved to watch Julia and Jacques Pepin when their show, Cooking at Home, was on the air: "Mommy! The people who talk funny are on!" She thought Julia Child was from France too. Two of our favorite recipes for Sunday dinner come from that book: Roast Chicken (Jacques's version) and Scalloped Potatoes (Julia's Pommes des Terre Dauphinoise). I have never made scalloped potatoes as good as my mother-in-law's, but Julia's recipe fixed the mistakes I was making, and produced a recipe my husband found to be different than his mother's but "Very good!" The book is laid out with Julia and Jacques's recipes for the same basic dish side-by-side, and I often end up somewhere in the middle. But I have never made a bad recipe from this book.
The other book I use is Baking with Julia, based on a TV series Julia did baking with famous chefs such as Lora Brody, Martha Stewart, Marion Cunningham, and Nancy Silverton. Some of the recipes in this collection are completely over the top such as Martha Stewart's for a three-tiered almond wedding cake with meringue and apricot glaze between the layers, frosted with rum buttercream, and decorated with marzipan fruit. Other recipes are fabulous such as the Danish Braid (I made it with the apricot filling), or the White Loaves. This latter recipe produces two magnificent loaves of bread that toast beautifully. That probably has something to do with the half a stick of softened butter that is beaten in as the last step of making the dough. The recipe says that the "mountainous loaves" are four and half inches high. The two I made this week topped out at six inches!
And when I want an older, basic recipe, I tend to go back to The French Chef Cookbook, that has the recipes, chronologically, from the original series. My mother and I watched Julia make Beef Bourguignon with its Onion and Mushroom Garniture (Episode 96), and we bought the ingredients and made it soon afterwards. For years it was my requested birthday dinner. These recipes teach basic techniques and are aimed more towards how America cooked (at least in the 1960s) than the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
So if you are inspired to cook with Julia, take a look at all the different books she has on the shelf in the bookstore, and don't automatically head for the bright blue cover of her original gem. Take time to find the one that's right for you. And if you want a good look at how cooking television used to be before being FoodNetworkicized, I highly recommend the DVD sets.
