Channeling Julia Child, one recipe at a time

NEW YORK - She may have mastered the art of French cooking, but don’t call amateur cook-turned-author Julie Powell a foodie.

“Foodie to me implies being really taken with the trappings of the more elitist aspects of enjoying food, so I try to veer away from the term,” she says.

And elitist she’s not.

The first sign is her choice of takeout. Powell and her husband, Eric, frequently order bacon and jalapeno pizza the nights she stays out of the kitchen in the loft apartment in Long Island City they share with a dog, three cats and a snake. The second sign is her inability to use a food mill, as called for in the recipe for the potage parmentier (potato soup) she’s making this particular day. She fumbles with it for a bit before casting it aside for her Cuisinart.

“She doesn’t like to use a food processor,” Powell says as she transfers the soup between appliances.

She, of course, is Julia Child, Powell’s muse as she attempted to cook her way through Child’s landmark 1961 cookbook, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1.”

Powell was blogging about the experience when she was plucked from obscurity and given a book deal for “Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen.” The name is sort of misleading, because Powell’s 9-by-12 kitchen is rather large — by New York standards.

The memoir follows her culinary triumphs and travails, from committing “lobster murder” to extracting marrow from a bone. Powell fleshes it out with back stories about her supportive husband, wacky friends and evil co-workers. Also scattered throughout the book are fictional flashbacks of Child’s courtship with her husband, Paul, which Powell reconstructs based on journals and letters from the 6-foot-2 kitchen icon’s archives.

Copy from her mom
Powell never met her mentor — Child died in August 2004 as Powell was converting her blogs into the book — but said she felt like Child was in her head as she cooked her recipes.

Her fascination for what she refers to as “MtAoFC” began at age 11, when she began reading her mother’s cookbook.

Years later, the cookbook resurfaced in her life. Married to her high school sweetheart, Powell was about to turn 30 and full of anxiety about her dead-end secretarial job at a government agency and ticking biological clock.

She hopped on a plane to Austin, Texas, to visit her parents and wound up stealing her mother’s food-splattered, dog-eared classic. She unwittingly bought the ingredients for Child’s potage parmentier one day back in New York, and it turned out to be so delicious her husband encouraged her to go to culinary school.

“If I wanted to learn to cook, I’d just cook my way through ’Mastering the Art of French Cooking”’ she said. “You could write a blog,” he suggested. And the Julie/Julia project began.

The blog, hosted on Salon.com, garnered her a legion of loyal readers. An article in The New York Times turned Powell into a media darling. Freelance writing and a bidding war for a book contract followed.

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