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Rachel C.'s review

Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen
by Julie Powell

Rachel C.'s review
rating:
bookshelves: foody-stuff, real-stuff

Not enough about the food - Powell really only describes making about 25 of the 500+ recipes she refers to in the title. Granted, she didn't start out as a very good cook but she seemed to have a lot of difficulty with the simplest of tasks. As I recall, not one person in my culinary school class had problems making mayonnaise by hand, even the first time around. Powell doesn't master mayonnaise until almost the very end, but somehow managed to debone a duck easily on her first try. I'm not sure how that works.

Powell notes that she wrote a blog during the year of cooking (the book came after) and it really shows. Lots of minutiae about her everyday life, her marriage, her crappy New York apartment, etc. She comes across as a Bridget Jones-type, by turns adorably inept and inexplicably insane.

My two favorite passages are below:

"If I had thought the beef marrow might be a hell of a lot of work for not much difference, I needn’t have worried. The taste of the mar...more Not enough about the food - Powell really only describes making about 25 of the 500+ recipes she refers to in the title. Granted, she didn't start out as a very good cook but she seemed to have a lot of difficulty with the simplest of tasks. As I recall, not one person in my culinary school class had problems making mayonnaise by hand, even the first time around. Powell doesn't master mayonnaise until almost the very end, but somehow managed to debone a duck easily on her first try. I'm not sure how that works.

Powell notes that she wrote a blog during the year of cooking (the book came after) and it really shows. Lots of minutiae about her everyday life, her marriage, her crappy New York apartment, etc. She comes across as a Bridget Jones-type, by turns adorably inept and inexplicably insane.

My two favorite passages are below:

"If I had thought the beef marrow might be a hell of a lot of work for not much difference, I needn’t have worried. The taste of the marrow is rich, meaty, intense in a nearly-too-much way. In my increasingly depraved state, I could think of nothing at first but that it tasted like really good sex. But there was something more than that, even. What it really tastes like is life, well lived. Of course the cow I got marrow from had a fairly crappy life – lots of crowds and overmedication and bland food that might or might not have been a relative. But deep in his or her bones, there was a capacity for feral joy. I could taste it."

"I baked David Strathairn absurdly complicated pecan-cornmeal cookies… I can’t imagine anyone – a few of the more repressive Islamic societies aside - who would consider baking an act of adultery. Still, for Eric, knowing what he knew of my proclivities, watching me roll out thin layers of cornmeal dough, sprinkle them with chopped pecans, cinnamon, and melted butter, then lay another layer of dough on top, and repeat over and over with infinite patience, must have been a little bit like noticing I’d gotten a bikini wax and a tight red dress the day before leaving for some business convention in Dallas. He didn’t do anything but roll his eyes and grumble with careful good humor, but he knew what I was doing."...less

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