Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Food and drink: Longing for the good life

Julie, Julia and us, in the kitchen, microwaving KD — and reading

I don't know if Columbia Pictures planned this, but the release date for the movie Julie & Julia this past weekend falls remarkably and, one hopes, auspiciously close to the anniversary dates of both Julia Child's birth, Aug. 15, 1912, and her death, Aug. 13, 2004.

'Tis as though 'twere ordained. Given that the inimitable Ms. Child, played by Meryl Streep, was such a singular force of nature, it may well be the case, if only such things were possible.

More likely, Paramount thought this light-hearted flick would make for good summertime box office returns, and it does.

But another unforeseen and far larger result has been a tidal wave of renewed interest in the one, the only, the ebullient Julia Child. Her books are back on best-seller lists - again - some 50 years later, and Le Creuset cookware is marching off the shelves of culinary stores around the planet.

By comparison, this Child-ish renaissance leaves Julie Powell, recreated in the film by Amy Adams, somewhat standing in the pastry flour dust, so to speak, despite the fact that this witty New York blogger, who cooked her way through the 1961 classic Mastering the Art of French Cookery , which Child co-authored along with two other female gastronomes, made her way to her own epiphany (cooking is good), her own bestseller ( Julie & Julia ), movie royalties, plus another book on the way. My, my.

Although I must say, it is engaging and très très post-post-modern to be able to visit Ms. Powell's blog and check out her responses to the movie, to the critics, to the fame, to her own narrative arc, and to the responses to her responses. Then you get to read the comments, 159 posted Monday, another 438 posted opening day, responding to her responses, to the movie, to the critics, to the fame, to her own narrative arc and sometimes how their own narrative arcs compare, or don't, and to the responses to her responses, naturellement .

Oh, you also can bear witness to the classic reveal - what Julie cooked for dinner the other night.

Aargh! Give me the real Julia, please - tall as a basketball player on steroids with a voice like, well, like a man, say, John Cleese, all campy and pretending to be a woman.

Then teleport me back to pre-Blogger 1963, when most people, at least the common folk, saw her in action for the first time in grainy black-and-white television on The French Chef, run for many years by the venerable public broadcaster, WGBH in Boston. The show delivered Julia to hoards of hungry North Americans, longing for something more, much like our contemporary blogging friend, Julie.

The name, The French Chef, was beyond irony, given it was Ms. Child, neither French nor a chef, who created the show. Au contraire , this "French chef" was born and raised in California. And despite her immersion in so many things eternally French-ish and culinary - Escoffier, Larousse Gastronomique , and Chef Bugnard's classes at the Ècole du Cordon Bleu, which, by the way, were somewhat accidental, since she thought she was signing up for a six-week intensive course rather than the year-long Année Scolaire that got her remarkable career going - she was never a chef.

Cook, Julia, liked to call herself. One all about the joys of cooking and the pleasures of the table, about applying classic French techniques to "good plain old cooking."

And showman or, should I say, show woman, one with a great sense of humour and a greater sense of timing. She wasn't in the slightest bit flummoxed if the supposedly crisp baguette she held up to the cameras unco-operatively sagged in the middle. Lacking in character, she decried it, flinging it over her shoulder.

Dropped omelettes? Salt instead of sugar in the demonstration sabayon? Four hundred audience members waiting to taste the paella and only a two-burner hot plate to cook it on? Fourteen-hundred in one book-signing lineup and no dinner in sight?

Who cares? C'est la vie! Let's eat at midnight, soak it all in cream and butter and wash it down with good booze.

Life jolly well went on with Julia, Julia of the sensible shoes with straps and the waxed chin - the only two tips she ever gave to her long-time assistant, Nancy Verde Barr, on how to age gracefully.

The New York Times recently ran an article by food/culture guru, Michael Pollan, that's both of and above this tsunami of all things Child-like. For instance, he gently rubs our olfactory nerves in the fact that while we ooh and aah over Julia, Julie, the movie, the Food Network, the foodie stars and the latest food novelty, the average American and, likely, Canadian spends only 27 minutes a day on food preparation!

So maybe all those $200 Le Creuset pots are gathering greasy kitchen dust as we toss the KD into the microwave and read all these great books and articles and blogs about the people really cooking up a storm?

But back to that NYT article. The best part is the accompanying black and white photo. Vintage Julia.

There she stands at the demonstration counter, a friendly giantess, in profile, focused on the cameras out of the picture frame, stage left, and there at her feet, huddled behind the counter are no fewer than five - count 'em - men and women, production assistants all, crouching out of camera range, one of them gingerly holding up what looks like a baked pie shell in the general vicinity of Ms. Child's gesticulating hands so that she might carry on, uninterrupted, with her life-transforming, meticulously organized and researched cooking show.

I'm sure she never missed a beat.

That photo says it all. If you want to ken a bit of the real Julia, take a look behind the scenes.

To whit, try a copy of My Life in France , her last book, published posthumously in 2006. It's a recollection of her post-war years in France where it all started. Almost as good as the story are the quirky black and white photos that flirt with surrealism by her dear husband, Paul, with whom it all started.

Likewise, Backstage with Julia , by the aforementioned Nancy Verde Barr is well worth a nibble. The title says it all.

Barr worked with Julia for nearly two decade on TV shows, books and articles, but more than that - they were good friends, which is maybe what we all really long for. To be invited to Julia's table, welcomed, treated like a long lost friend by one amazing, delightful, unflappable woman who never bore a child but who nourished about half a world hungry for so much.

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who's never made one Julia recipe.