Julia and Julie : labours of love

I'd read Julia Child's "My Life in France" and loved it enough to read it again. So when the movie came out, I promptly went out with a couple of friends and we sat, laughing our way through it. It's a great story of how Julia Child found her vocation late in life. She married late (especially for those days) and her marriage was evidently a very happy one which lasted the rest of her husband's natural life (and he died at 92). And in the course of following her cultural attache husband around Europe, she discovered she loved both food and cooking in France. It was the beginning of what would be a long labour of love, her master cookbook on French cooking with her good friends and co-writers, Simca and Louise. It was also one which fit well into her married life and the one supported the other and eventually her hobby grew to the extent her fame as a celebrity teaching chef became their joint means of earning a living after he retired from service with the US government.

Julie turns out to be a modern day blogger who cooks her way through Julia Child's masterpiece of a cookbook, all 500+ recipes of it in the space of a year and blogs about it under a blog called the Julie/Julia Project. Young, married and living in Queen's borough, New York, she finds Julia Child to be her saving grace from a tedius job and a cramped apartment. The movie, one rather suspects, is kinder about her than her blog is but as I've yet to spend much time reading her blog or her book, I'll reserve judgement on that.

As a movie, it was thoroughly enjoyable and bits of it are certainly memorable. Meryl Streep steals the show as usual and she gets Julia Child's voice pat down. I find that it's not that well sewn together in terms of how the two stories are intertwined. It's done simply enough with long takes of each story leaving you wondering sometimes what's happening on the other end. The cakes Julie bakes don't quite look French, and resemble the hasty American slap-together ones far more but other than that anomaly, the scenes of Julie battling with the lobster and duck are quite amusing.

I tend to think that the Julia Child story deserves a movie by itself but then I am generally fascinated by stories of how people learn to cook seriously and how they study the art of cooking and make their own discoveries in it. I also noticed in the nearby Harris bookstore near the movie theatre I went to, while they stocked the Julia Child, "My life in Paris" and the Julie Powell, "Julie and Julia: My year of cooking dangerously", Larousse Gastronomique, they only stocked a highly shortened version of Julia Child's masterpiece, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." So, is it that Julia Child's masterpiece has not stood the test of time and the editors were right, that there would be no demand for her demanding cookbook? I hope they're wrong.

So here's to good cooking and good eating!

Bon Appetit!