In most English-speaking American homes that have china and place mats and
best glass, you will find, on the thinly populated shelf in the kitchen
devoted to cookery books, a thick volume that doesn’t have a photograph of
ingredients or an illustrated serving suggestion on its cover. Neither does
it feature a glossy photo of a familiar, smiling TV chef. It doesn’t have a
picture at all. Like the Bible, it doesn’t need one. This isn’t just any
cookery book. This is a manual that is instantly recognisable from 100
paces. It is Mastering the Art of French Cooking, first published in 1961,
and it’s a book that is a statement, not of culinary intent, but of
aspiration, a commitment to a certain sort of good life, a certain sort of
world-view; a votive object implying taste and appetite and a little je ne
sais quoi. It was written, in collaboration with Simone Beck and Louisette
Bertholle, by the Californian-born Julia Child, who you are about to hear a
lot more of, as she is the subject of a new film, Julie & Julia.
What you will hear is that Meryl Streep is channelling Julia. People will talk
about an astonishing performance. There will be a great deal of assumptive
Oscar talk and a lot of bad puns about finding her inner Child. This is a
career-defining performance, a remarkable transformation. And then you will
go and see the film, and, as the opening scenes unfold, you may well imagine
that Hollywood has lost what little critical judgment it still clings to,
and that Meryl has been taking lessons in projection and gesture from Brian
Blessed. And that’s because you’ve never come across the late Ms
Child before. She lived to almost 92, dying in 2004, but she is not a public
persona who has travelled well. She didn’t do abroad. She was a very
American phenomenon, and this is a very parochial film. It makes no concessions
to an audience’s ignorance, or innocence, of Julia Child.
But if you do know about her, then Meryl will make you gasp with admiration.
It’s not so much an impersonation as a distillation, a broad, warm, astute
interpretation of a woman who became so much of the American cultural
digestion that they dismantled her kitchen and installed it, along with the
Native American canoes and the rocket that went to the moon, in the
Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. And if you care a little about
what you put in your mouth, and who you eat with, or cook for, then this
film will truss you and lard you, smother, rub and toss you, in the most
comforting and agreeably candlelit way.
So you should see the film. But before you do, you should know something about
Julia Child. And perhaps look up her television shows on the internet. She
was married late, to a spy, Paul Cushing Child. In 1948, they went to live
in Paris, where, searching for something to do, some hobby to fill her days,
she coupled serious eating with learning how to cook. And while learning how
to cook French, she realised there wasn’t a book of French cooking written
for Americans. I say Americans, because there were quite a lot of French
cookery books written in English, often by Frenchmen who knew quite a lot
about cooking, such as Escoffier. But they tended not to be read by
Americans. There were none that were deemed to appeal to their picky
digestions and shy sensibilities and squeamishness. Child wrote down the
method and explained the mystery of French food for back home.
But what really made her famous was television. In 1963, in her late fifties,
she was oddly and contrarily given a show that became the first of some of
the most loved and precious programmes broadcast in America.
It’s difficult to explain the attraction of Child; she looked like the front
end of a pantomime horse, with the most extraordinary fluted accent,
delivered with the stridency of an Ivy League Jean Brodie. She was an
ungainly and lumpy 6ft 1in, and sported a blustering touchline enthusiasm.
She was like nobody else on American television — few chefs anywhere have
used professional welding equipment, including the goggles, to caramelise a
tower of profiteroles — and that perhaps is why she became so popular. Dan
Aykroyd relentlessly parodied her on the hit TV satire show Saturday Night
Live. And why shouldn’t a TV cook look like this infectiously quixotic
woman, who, at a time when most Americans were besotted with the modernity
of packets, tins, ready-mixes, gadgets and the mantra of time-saving,
insisted things be made from scratch; who thought that greed was good, and
that it should be pandered to, with care and commitment. Her series were
simple, kitchen-bound affairs, but they had a charm that went beyond the
subject, a surprising profundity.
It’s easy to compare Child to our own Fanny Cradock, but like most easy things
in the kitchen, it’s wrong. They were very different creatures; Cradock was
a snob who turned mashed potato green and made vol-au-vents to impress the
neighbours. Ultimately, she was just a comedy turn who did vaudeville
cooking in the Albert Hall, dressed as a gypsy with a French accent. Child
was really more like Elizabeth David, the English writer who brought the
warmth and languor of the Mediterranean table to austerity-lean Britain in
the decade after the war. The two women were similar, in that for them food
was a metaphor and the catalyst for troubled lives. Child was punningly
childless, and a Francophile liberal in McCarthyist America. Food, and the
love of eating and feeding and being fed, was a nurturing displacement for
her. In David’s case, it was healing a broken heart. For both of them, the
mixing bowl was the receptacle for excess emotion.
There is a second thread to this film: the Julie bit. It is the true-ish story
of Julie Powell (played by Amy Adams), a government worker in a strained
marriage who decides to cook all 500-odd Child recipes in a year in a small
flat in Queens and keeps a blog about it. Their lives appear in many ways to
be entwined. Julie’s blog becomes a cult; The New York Times profiles her.
She writes a book, which is made into this film. Just recently, she has
become a butcher, while having an affair (the troubled marriage is a useful
plot point and character motivation). It may well end up as an Andrew Lloyd
Webber musical.
In fact, it is the differences between the two women and their stories that
are really telling. There is a pragmatic cynicism in Julie's page-by-page
cookery by numbers. It’s a career opportunity: food as endurance
competition. Here, the therapy isn’t the eating, or the feeding, or the
hospitality; it’s the construction. It’s edible basket-weaving. The script
is written by the admirably brilliant Nora Ephron, who makes film scripts in
a culinary way, where the ingredients are folded together with craft and
affection, and presented with a steaming flourish. Nobody writes about
tenderness and the balm of love like Ephron. Her films nurture and edify,
and leave you feeling emotionally well fed, at a time when every other
script is hard-boiled, pickled in vitriol and cynicism and vicious humour.
Ephron is a rare and joyful companion to share the dark of the cinema with.
She can turn phrases that melt your resolve not to cry, like dark chocolate
in a bain-marie.
The Julia Child section of this film is far more compelling and endearing than
the Julie section. Whenever the young blogger and her publisher husband open
their mouths, you hear the faint echo of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. It is a
reheated soufflé, a memory of a dish you once loved, remade by a TV cook
with olive oil instead of butter. That is also in the nature of food, a
celebrity tool. Julie doesn’t learn to cook French food because she wants to
cook French food, but because she wants to write American bestsellers. The
21st century incarnation of Julia Child is Martha Stewart: entertaining as
ambition and business opportunity.
The American kitchens that have Mastering the Art of French Cooking probably
also have the service manual still inside their spotless ovens. The book is
grandly credited with having changed American cookbooks. It may have done.
But it did precious little to change American cooking. They still don’t eat
French food in the bourgeois, labour-intensive, butter-rich way that Child
was a missionary for. American homes are still just as wedded to instant
gratification and eating with their fingers as they ever were.
For the Americans, cookery is an entertainment, a reality show; and foreign
food is suspect, and stuck up, and possibly poisonous. The French are
duplicitous, eat mould and burn flags. America has whittled itself a cuisine
that is egalitarian, free of class, plain-speaking, repetitive and open-hearted,
with straightforward flavours and nursery textures. And — most important —
it can be consumed in different sizes.
They never, ever cooked Julia Child recipes from the book or the television,
but they were pleased that she did. Julia Child was like Amelia Earhart, or
Eleanor Roosevelt: she was a hero who’d gone out there and made a
difference. Julia Child had taken on French cooking and wrestled it to the
ground, forced it to speak a strange, ululating English, tied it up and
brought it back to America in a saucepan. Her books are a triumph, and also
a trophy, like the stuffed head of a white-toqued chef kept on a shelf. And
Mastering the Art of French Cooking has just topped the New York Times
bestseller list, selling 22,000 copies the week before last, selling more
this year than in any year since it was written.
Julie & Julia opens nationwide on September 11 and previews in selected
UK cinemas from September 9
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