Julie & Julia

I just finished Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, by Julie Powell. I first read about this book somewhere on the web on someone's blog (I am sorry I don't remember whose). My mother picked it up first and passed it on to me. (That is how we work. We both read a tremendous amount and share books.) The book is written in the first person style which I really enjoy. The author turns 29 and has a "Oh, no. I'm gonna be 30" kind of crisis. For no real good reason she decides to cook through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, vol I in a year. The book chronicles the chaos that ensues as she tries to hold her marriage and sanity together through this project. She begins a blog (in 2002 when most of us had yet to hear of blogs) and reaps some publicity which leads of course to the book. I'm not sure what Julie's cooking experience was before the book. I certainly wouldn't attempt to master french cooking. I have always thought I could cook but reading through her harrowing experiences I am not so sure. The recipes seem to require a lot of skill and special tools. MtAoFC was first published 40 years ago and I think the recipes and ingredients are probably outdated. Julie does need to start over quite a lot and there are lots of disasters. What I liked most about this book was how real Julie is. (Although, I could have used a lot less swearing.) She is a real person who has real failures and when it is over she has little more than a sense of accomplishment (and a book deal). Also, she has apparently married a saint. The book is not, as some unsuspecting readers thought, about cooking. The cooking details are there. But this book is a lot more about relationships and the hysteria a lot of women can relate to when we take on too many projects.

If you can tolerate some 'f' words (along with some 'b', 'mf' and 'gd' ) in your reading and you enjoy first person accounts I highly recommend this book.