By MICHAEL POLLAN
Published: July 29, 2009

I was only 8 when “The French Chef” first appeared on American
television in 1963, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that this
Julia Child had improved the quality of life around our house. My mother
began cooking dishes she’d watched Julia cook on TV: boeuf bourguignon
(the subject of the show’s first episode), French onion soup gratinée,
duck à l’orange, coq au vin, mousse au chocolat. Some of the more
ambitious dishes, like the duck or the mousse, were pointed toward
weekend company, but my mother would usually test these out on me and my
sisters earlier in the week, and a few of the others — including the
boeuf bourguignon, which I especially loved — actually made it into
heavy weeknight rotation. So whenever people talk about how Julia Child
upgraded the culture of food in America, I nod appreciatively. I owe
her. Not that I didn’t also owe Swanson, because we also ate TV dinners,
and those were pretty good, too.

Every so often I would watch “The French Chef” with my mother in the
den. On WNET in New York, it came on late in the afternoon, after
school, and because we had only one television back then, if Mom wanted
to watch her program, you watched it, too. The show felt less like TV
than like hanging around the kitchen, which is to say, not terribly
exciting to a kid (except when Child dropped something on the floor,
which my mother promised would happen if we stuck around long enough)
but comforting in its familiarity: the clanking of pots and pans, the
squeal of an oven door in need of WD-40, all the kitchen-chemistry-set
spectacles of transformation. The show was taped live and broadcast
uncut and unedited, so it had a vérité feel completely unlike anything
you might see today on the Food Network, with its A.D.H.D. editing and
hyperkinetic soundtracks of rock music and clashing knives. While Julia
waited for the butter foam to subside in the sauté pan, you waited, too,
precisely as long, listening to Julia’s improvised patter over the hiss
of her pan, as she filled the desultory minutes with kitchen tips and
lore. It all felt more like life than TV, though Julia’s voice was like
nothing I ever heard before or would hear again until Monty Python came
to America: vaguely European, breathy and singsongy, and weirdly
suggestive of a man doing a falsetto impression of a woman. The BBC
supposedly took “The French Chef” off the air because viewers wrote in
complaining that Julia Child seemed either drunk or demented.

Meryl Streep, who brings Julia Child vividly back to the screen in Nora
Ephron’s charming new comedy, “Julie & Julia,” has the voice down, and
with the help of some clever set design and cinematography, she manages
to evoke too Child’s big-girl ungainliness — the woman was 6 foot 2 and
had arms like a longshoreman. Streep also captures the deep sensual
delight that Julia Child took in food — not just the eating of it (her
virgin bite of sole meunière at La Couronne in Rouen recalls Meg Ryan’s
deli orgasm in “When Harry Met Sally”) but the fondling and affectionate
slapping of ingredients in their raw state and the magic of their
kitchen transformations.

But “Julie & Julia” is more than an exercise in nostalgia. As the title
suggests, the film has a second, more contemporary heroine. The Julie
character (played by Amy Adams) is based on Julie Powell, a 29-year-old
aspiring writer living in Queens who, casting about for a blog conceit
in 2002, hit on a cool one: she would cook her way through all 524
recipes in Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” in 365 days and
blog about her adventures. The movie shuttles back and forth between
Julie’s year of compulsive cooking and blogging in Queens in 2002 and
Julia’s decade in Paris and Provence a half-century earlier, as
recounted in “My Life in France,” the memoir published a few years after
her death in 2004. Julia Child in 1949 was in some ways in the same boat
in which Julie Powell found herself in 2002: happily married to a really
nice guy but feeling, acutely, the lack of a life project. Living in
Paris, where her husband, Paul Child, was posted in the diplomatic
corps, Julia (who like Julie had worked as a secretary) was at a loss as
to what to do with her life until she realized that what she liked to do
best was eat. So she enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu and learned how to cook.
As with Julia, so with Julie: cooking saved her life, giving her a
project and, eventually, a path to literary success.

That learning to cook could lead an American woman to success of any
kind would have seemed utterly implausible in 1949; that it is so
thoroughly plausible 60 years later owes everything to Julia Child’s
legacy. Julie Powell operates in a world that Julia Child helped to
create, one where food is taken seriously, where chefs have been
welcomed into the repertory company of American celebrity and where
cooking has become a broadly appealing mise-en-scène in which success
stories can plausibly be set and played out. How amazing is it that we
live today in a culture that has not only something called the Food
Network but now a hit show on that network called “The Next Food Network
Star,” which thousands of 20- and 30-somethings compete eagerly to
become? It would seem we have come a long way from Swanson TV dinners.

The Food Network can now be seen in nearly 100 million American homes
and on most nights commands more viewers than any of the cable news
channels. Millions of Americans, including my 16-year-old son, can tell
you months after the finale which contestant emerged victorious in
Season 5 of “Top Chef” (Hosea Rosenberg, followed by Stefan Richter, his
favorite, and Carla Hall). The popularity of cooking shows — or perhaps
I should say food shows — has spread beyond the precincts of public or
cable television to the broadcast networks, where Gordon Ramsay
terrorizes newbie chefs on “Hell’s Kitchen” on Fox and Jamie Oliver is
preparing a reality show on ABC in which he takes aim at an American
city with an obesity problem and tries to teach the population how to
cook. It’s no wonder that a Hollywood studio would conclude that
American audiences had an appetite for a movie in which the road to
personal fulfillment and public success passes through the kitchen and
turns, crucially, on a recipe for boeuf bourguignon. (The secret is to
pat dry your beef before you brown it.)

But here’s what I don’t get: How is it that we are so eager to watch
other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to
brown them ourselves? For the rise of Julia Child as a figure of
cultural consequence — along with Alice Waters and Mario Batali and
Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse and whoever is crowned the next Food
Network star — has, paradoxically, coincided with the rise of fast food,
home-meal replacements and the decline and fall of everyday home
cooking.

That decline has several causes: women working outside the home; food
companies persuading Americans to let them do the cooking; and advances
in technology that made it easier for them to do so. Cooking is no
longer obligatory, and for many people, women especially, that has been
a blessing. But perhaps a mixed blessing, to judge by the culture’s
continuing, if not deepening, fascination with the subject. It has been
easier for us to give up cooking than it has been to give up talking
about it — and watching it.

Continued...
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/ma....html?_r=2&hpw

--
It is simply breathtaking to watch the glee and abandon with which
the liberal media and the Angry Left have been attempting to turn
our military victory in Iraq into a second Vietnam quagmire. Too bad
for them, it's failing.

Once Upon A Time,
Ubiquitous wrote:

>Every so often I would watch “The French Chef” with my mother in the
>den. On WNET in New York, it came on late in the afternoon, after
>school, and because we had only one television back then, if Mom wanted
>to watch her program, you watched it, too. The show felt less like TV
>than like hanging around the kitchen, which is to say, not terribly
>exciting to a kid (except when Child dropped something on the floor,
>which my mother promised would happen if we stuck around long enough)

I especially liked the episode where she cut her finger off and started
gushing blood all over the kitchen. That was HILARIOUS! But then she
made that *terrible* movie "Nothing but Trouble" and I totally lost
interest in her, what a disaster that was.


**
Captain Infinity

On Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:05:50 -0400, Ubiquitous >
wrote:

> So whenever people talk about how Julia Child
>upgraded the culture of food in America, I nod appreciatively. I owe
>her. Not that I didn’t also owe Swanson, because we also ate TV dinners,
>and those were pretty good, too.

I agreed with you up to the Swanson's part. The only dinner I liked
was their chicken dinner. The rest were putrid.

--
I love cooking with wine.
Sometimes I even put it in the food.