Cooking with Julia Child
Aug. 16th, 2007 09:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maeve66I gave my mother Julie and Julia for Christmas, and she read it and loved it and has now lent it to me. I just barely started it. But I also just got my newest Netflix delivery, which includes "The French Chef with Julia Child", Disc 1. I think I may go back and forth between the two.
I remember watching Julia Child on WTTW, Channel 11, in Chicago, the PBS station. I was fascinated by her as a kid. I love cooking -- though I love it processually, if that's a word, which is to say that I love DOING it, slowly and with attention to the stages and the parts of each dish. I am not a fast cook. I don't enjoy cooking quickly to get dinner on the table, although that would be a much more useful skill. When I've thought about what got me to like cooking, I've usually attributed it to my mother and my Great-Aunt Fran. My mom cooks really well, although she is somewhere in between my enjoyment of long, slow cooking and my sister's very skilled embrace of practical, quick cookery. I remember my mom's daily dinners as being varied and colorful, with lots of side dishes: a main dish, say, broiled chicken livers, and seasoned rice to go with it, and a green salad, and broccoli, and cucumbers in vinegar, and a basket of sliced bread and butter, and, as often as not, some kind of simple dessert. Maybe I'm making that last bit up -- or maybe there were cookies or something. She didn't MAKE dessert very often. But the point is, there was always attention paid to the combination of food and food groups and literally, colors of food. And she did this pretty quickly. My Aunt Fran, on the other hand, was a good cook at Thanksgiving and carefully taught me a lot about cutting and dicing and dredging and other cooking techniques.*
But now I wonder. I watched an awful lot of Julia Child. And I feel a lot of kinship with her laid back bon vivant attitude towards cooking. She drops shit. She misses her flips. She's messy. She doesn't care. Also, she never measures anything, and I tend not to, either. Maybe my mom doesn't, either? But then, I am absolutely sure that my mom watched Julia Child, too.
Here are some quotes from "The Potato Show", which is the first episode on the first disc.
"... if you do it ahead of time, they [the potatoes] will exude a great DEAL of water, and will immediately turn brown... and that wouldn't look well. It would be psychologically bad for the cook. Potatoes... they're that QUEER in their chemical construction..."
"...you can put some CREAM in! [repeated at least four different times during the show; she drenched just about every potato dish in cream] We don't care about calories here... and anyway, one potato has only about 70 calories, which is about the same as an apple!"
"I once used poached eggs I had poached three days earlier and kept in the refrigerator just in some water, with no cover, and they tasted perfectly delicious. That's a bit odd, but very convenient."
The black and whiteness of these episodes is a little disconcerting. I remember her workmanlike BLUE shirt so well. But the set is the same one she used for ages (and is apparently -- or maybe a later version is -- in the Smithsonian, and quite right, too) is familiar. The stove is a fucking trip: it's all ultra modern circa 1964 or so, and thus features an electric stove whose controls are the same as the little weird buttons on old Osterizer blenders. And she's excited about her no-stick pan.
I love her for saying "that wouldn't look well". She's an adorable giantess with a fruity, campy voice.
* I also got to experiment along these lines fairly early because my sister and I -- me first, since I was older -- got responsibility for cooking dinner at least once a week when my mom worked late. I think the first meal which I "intellectually authored" (phrase thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
john_b_cannon), around age 12 or 13 was scalloped potatoes paprikash, with ham. I remember the glass baking dish -- it was really pretty, with concave ovals on the sides all around. The recipe must have been from The Joy of Cooking. That book was just as much a Bible in our house as Capital, or The History of the Russian Revolution was.
I remember watching Julia Child on WTTW, Channel 11, in Chicago, the PBS station. I was fascinated by her as a kid. I love cooking -- though I love it processually, if that's a word, which is to say that I love DOING it, slowly and with attention to the stages and the parts of each dish. I am not a fast cook. I don't enjoy cooking quickly to get dinner on the table, although that would be a much more useful skill. When I've thought about what got me to like cooking, I've usually attributed it to my mother and my Great-Aunt Fran. My mom cooks really well, although she is somewhere in between my enjoyment of long, slow cooking and my sister's very skilled embrace of practical, quick cookery. I remember my mom's daily dinners as being varied and colorful, with lots of side dishes: a main dish, say, broiled chicken livers, and seasoned rice to go with it, and a green salad, and broccoli, and cucumbers in vinegar, and a basket of sliced bread and butter, and, as often as not, some kind of simple dessert. Maybe I'm making that last bit up -- or maybe there were cookies or something. She didn't MAKE dessert very often. But the point is, there was always attention paid to the combination of food and food groups and literally, colors of food. And she did this pretty quickly. My Aunt Fran, on the other hand, was a good cook at Thanksgiving and carefully taught me a lot about cutting and dicing and dredging and other cooking techniques.*
But now I wonder. I watched an awful lot of Julia Child. And I feel a lot of kinship with her laid back bon vivant attitude towards cooking. She drops shit. She misses her flips. She's messy. She doesn't care. Also, she never measures anything, and I tend not to, either. Maybe my mom doesn't, either? But then, I am absolutely sure that my mom watched Julia Child, too.
Here are some quotes from "The Potato Show", which is the first episode on the first disc.
"... if you do it ahead of time, they [the potatoes] will exude a great DEAL of water, and will immediately turn brown... and that wouldn't look well. It would be psychologically bad for the cook. Potatoes... they're that QUEER in their chemical construction..."
"...you can put some CREAM in! [repeated at least four different times during the show; she drenched just about every potato dish in cream] We don't care about calories here... and anyway, one potato has only about 70 calories, which is about the same as an apple!"
"I once used poached eggs I had poached three days earlier and kept in the refrigerator just in some water, with no cover, and they tasted perfectly delicious. That's a bit odd, but very convenient."
The black and whiteness of these episodes is a little disconcerting. I remember her workmanlike BLUE shirt so well. But the set is the same one she used for ages (and is apparently -- or maybe a later version is -- in the Smithsonian, and quite right, too) is familiar. The stove is a fucking trip: it's all ultra modern circa 1964 or so, and thus features an electric stove whose controls are the same as the little weird buttons on old Osterizer blenders. And she's excited about her no-stick pan.
I love her for saying "that wouldn't look well". She's an adorable giantess with a fruity, campy voice.
* I also got to experiment along these lines fairly early because my sister and I -- me first, since I was older -- got responsibility for cooking dinner at least once a week when my mom worked late. I think the first meal which I "intellectually authored" (phrase thanks to
john_b_cannon), around age 12 or 13 was scalloped potatoes paprikash, with ham. I remember the glass baking dish -- it was really pretty, with concave ovals on the sides all around. The recipe must have been from The Joy of Cooking. That book was just as much a Bible in our house as Capital, or The History of the Russian Revolution was.![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-08-17 12:25 pm (UTC)I have a lot to say about Julie/Julia but will wait til you've finished the book.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-17 01:10 pm (UTC)But what I want is a complete run of these.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-17 05:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-17 07:15 pm (UTC)This was wonderful to read. We should really cook sometime. My kitchen's not big enough for two, though, and you have those pesky allergy-causing cats, don't you? Grrr.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-17 09:04 pm (UTC)I think we could cook in your kitchen, sans cats. Or at least I could keep you company and drink wine or something. That works, too.