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Julie Powell

Julie Powell Books

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“If I had thought the beef marrow might be a hell of a lot of work for not much difference, I needn’t have worried. The taste of the marrow is rich, meaty, intense in a nearly-too-much way. In my increasingly depraved state, I could think of nothing at first but that it tasted like really good sex. But there was something more than that, even. What it really tastes like is life, well lived. Of course the cow I got marrow from had a fairly crappy life – lots of crowds and overmedication and bland food that might or might not have been a relative. But deep in his or her bones, there was a capacity for feral joy. I could taste it.”

LifeSexFoodCookingMeatCowsBeefMarrow
Book:Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously
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“We ate it sitting on the couch, bowls perched on knees, the silence broken only by the occasional snort of laughter as we watched a pert blonde high school student dust vampires on the television. In almost no time we were slurping the dregs of our third servings. (it turns out that one reason we're so good together is that each of us eats more and faster than anyone either of us has ever met; also, we both recognize the genius of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.)”

RelationshipsFoodBuffy The Vampire SlayerJulia Child
Book:Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen
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“We ate our liver and spinach while watching the right honorable gentlemen of the British House of Commons yelling at each other about the Iraq invasion on C-SPAN. And it was damned good. It was good because it was liver and spinach with cheese, but mostly it was good because I didn't have to make it. Sometimes I want to beat Eric's head repeatedly against a sharp rock, but other times he knows just the right thing to do to make me forget about turning thirty- lull me into a comatose state on the couch with British news shows, then dose me with offal.”

UnderstandingLiverMarried LifeOffalJulie Powell
Book:Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously
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“It had started so well. The night after I wrote my first-ever blog entry, I made Bifteck Sauté au Beurre and Artichauts au Naturel- the first recipes in the meat and vegetable chapters of MtAoFC, respectively. The steak I merely fried in a skillet with butter and oil- butter and oil because not only did I not have the beef suet that was the other option, I didn't even know what beef but was. Then I just made a quick sauce out of the juices from the pan, some vermouth we'd had sitting around the house forever because Eric had discovered that drinking vermouth, even in martinis, made him sick, and a bit more butter. The artichokes I simply trimmed- chopping off the stalks and cutting the sharp pointy tops off all the leaves with a pair of scissors- before boiling them in salted water until tender. I served the artichokes with some Beurre au Citron, which I made by boiling down lemon juice with salt and pepper, then beating in a stick of butter. Three recipes altogether, in just over an hour.”

ButterFrench CookingArtichokesJulie PowellSteaks
Book:Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously
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“The Rognons de Veau à la Bordelaise did not taste like piss, no matter what my mother says, because I cleaned them with my deadly boning knife, and because the beef marrow conducted a two-pronged attack with the finishing sprinkling of parsley on any holdout pissiness- extinguishing it between fatty, velvety richness and sharp, fresh greenness. We ate it with a wine that I bought in the city that is cloudy and dark and tastes a little like blood. The lady who sold it to me called it "feral." Like me. For dessert, some creamy smooth Reine de Saba and Season 1, Episode 2, Buffy.”

KidneysFood And WineBuffy The Vampire SlayerChocolate CakeFrench FoodTastesJulie Powell
Book:Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously
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“Somewhere along the way, I discovered that in the physical act of cooking, especially something complex or plain old hard to handle, dwelled unsuspected reservoirs of arousal both gastronomic and sexual. If you are not one of us, the culinarily depraved, there is no way to explain what's so darkly enticing about eviscerating beef marrowbones, chopping up lobster, baking a three-layer pecan cake, and doing it for someone else, offering someone hard-won gustatory delights in order to win pleasures of another sort. Everyone knows there are foods that are sexy to eat. What they don't talk about so much is foods that are sexy to make. But I'll take a wrestling bout with recalcitrant brioche dough over being fed a perfect strawberry any day, foreplay-wise.”

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Book:Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously
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“Do you know Mastering the Art of French Cooking? You must, at least, know of it- it's a cultural landmark, for Pete's sake. Even if you just think of it as the book by that lady who looks like Dan Aykroyd and bleeds a lot, you know of it. But do you know the book itself? Try to get your hands on one of the early hardback editions- they're not exactly rare. For a while there, every American housewife who could boil water had a copy, or so I've heard. It's not lushly illustrated; there are no shiny soft-core images of the glossy-haired author sinking her teeth into a juicy strawberry or smiling stonily before a perfectly rustic tart with carving knife in hand, like some chilly blonde kitchen dominatrix. The dishes are hopelessly dated- the cooking times outrageously long, the use of butter and cream beyond the pale, and not a single reference to pancetta or sea salt or wasabi.”

CookbookFrench CookingJulia Child
Book:Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously
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“Once the leeks and potatoes have simmered for an hour or so, you mash them up with a fork or a food mill or a potato ricer. All three of these options are far more of a pain in the neck than the Cuisinart- one of which space-munching behemoths we scored when we got married- but Julia Child allows as how a Cuisinart will turn soup into "something un-French and monotonous." Any suggestion that uses the construction "un-french" is up for debate, but if you make Potage Parmentier, you will see her point. If you use the ricer, the soup will have bits- green bits and white bits and yellow bits- instead of being utterly smooth. After you've mushed it up, just stir in a couple of hefty chunks of butter, and you're done. JC says sprinkle with parsley but you don't have to. It looks pretty enough as it is, and it smells glorious, which is funny when you think about it. There's not a thing in it but leeks, potatoes, butter, water, pepper, and salt.”

IngredientsSoupJulia ChildPotato
Book:Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously
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“Rognons de Veau à la Bordelaise is simplicity itself to make; no different, essentially, from Poulet Sauté, and no different, especially, from Bifteck Sauté Bercy. In fact, making it that night felt like falling into a time warp- I stood before the stove, melting butter and browning meat and smelling the smells of wine deglazing and shallots softening- but the dishes changed before my eyes, and I heard Julia warbling, "Boeuf Bourguignon is the same as Coq au Vin. You can use lamb, you can use veal, you can use pork....”

KidneysSmellsFrench CookingFrench FoodJulia ChildJulie Powell
Book:Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously
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“For nearly a week I neither cooked nor grocery shopped. Instead, all of our various families took Eric and me out for Mexican food, for barbecue, for beignets. We ate cheese biscuits with Rice Krispies, and spiced pecans, and red beans and rice, and gumbo, and all those other things that New Yorkers would turn up their noses at, but New Yorkers don't know everything, do they? This is what Texas, and family, are for.”

TexansJulie PowellSouthern Cuisine
Book:Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously
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“The good thing about starting your Thanksgiving feast with Oeufs en Gelée is that everything afterward is going to taste pretty goddamned great by comparison, and by the time we'd gotten through the gorgeously crisp and moist goose, the prunes stuffed with duck liver mousse, the cabbage with chestnuts, the green beans, and the creamed onions, aspic was largely forgotten, and we didn't even mind much that I had begun the Thanksgiving preparations with the absolutely insane idea that I would make chocolate soufflé for dessert once we were finished with dinner. This, of course, being the delusion of a diseased mind.”

Thanksgiving DinnerFrench Food
Book:Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously
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“Chris- the one who wrote the halfway creepy thing about missing me so much when I didn't post and thinking I was dead- found it mind-boggling that before the Julie/Julia Project began, I had never eaten an egg. She asked, "How can you have gotten through life without eating a single egg? How is that POSSIBLE???!!!!!" Of course, it wasn't exactly true that I hadn't eaten an egg. I had eaten them in cakes. I had even eaten them scrambled once or twice, albeit in the Texas fashion, with jalapeños and a pound of cheese. But the goal of my egg-eating had always been to make sure the egg did not look, smell, or taste anything like one, and as a result my history in this department was, I suppose, unusual. Chris wasn't the only person shocked. People I'd never heard of chimed in with their awe and dismay. I didn't really get it. Surely this is not such a bizarre hang-up as hating, say, croutons, like certain spouses I could name. Luckily, eggs made the Julia Child way often taste like cream sauce. Take Oeufs en Cocotte, for example. These are eggs baked with some butter and cream in ramekins set in a shallow pan of water. They are tremendous. In fact the only thing better than Oeufs en Cocotte is Ouefs en Cocotte with Sauce au Cari on top when you've woken up with a killer hangover, after one of those nights when somebody decided at midnight to buy a pack of cigarettes after all, and the girls wind up smoking and drinking and dancing around the living room to the music the boy is downloading from iTunes onto his new, ludicrously hip and stylish G3 Powerbook until three in the morning. On mornings like this, Oeufs en Cocotte with Sauce au Cari, a cup of coffee, and an enormous glass of water is like a meal fed to you by the veiled daughters of a wandering Bedouin tribe after one of their number comes upon you splayed out in the sands of the endless deserts of Araby, moments from death- it's that good.”

EggsFrench CuisineJulie Powell
Book:Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously
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“A couple of salmon steaks I'd bought for a shocking amount of money at the Turkish grocery near my office sat on the counter, waiting to be broiled and napped in Sauce à la Moutarde, which is a sort of fake (Julia calls it "mock," but let's call a spade a spade, shall we?) hollandaise sauce, with some mustard stirred in for interest. Slumped beside the fish was a bag of slightly wilted Belgian endive, which I was just going to be braising in butter. Not exactly a demanding menu. Not exactly Foies de Volaille en Aspic, just to cite one example of how I could be living my life more aggressively and bravely and generally being a better person.”

Food PreparationFrench CuisineJulie Powell
Book:Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously
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“For the weekend before, we had had a blowout of tarts, a tart bender, tart madness- even, I dare say, a Tart-a-pa-looza, if you will forgive one final usage of the construction before we at last bury that cruelly beaten dead pop-culture horse. Tarte aux Pêches, Tarte aux Limettes, Tarte aux Poires, Tarte aux Cerises. Tarte aux Fromage Frais, both with and without Pruneaux. Tarte aux Citron et aux Amandes, Tarte aux Poires à la Bourdalue, and Tarte aux Fraises, which is not "Tart with Freshes," as the name of the Tarte aux Fromage Frais ("Tart with Fresh Cheese," of course) might suggest, but rather Tart with Strawberries, which was a fine little French lesson. (Why are strawberries, in particular, named for freshness? Why not blackberries? Or say, river trout? I love playing amateur- not to say totally ignorant- etymologist....) I made two kinds of pastry in a kitchen so hot that, even with the aid of a food processor, the butter started melting before I could get it incorporated into the dough. Which work resulted in eight tart crusts, perhaps not paragons of the form, but good enough. I made eight fillings for my eight tart crusts. I creamed butter and broke eggs and beat batter until it formed "the ribbon." I poached pears and cherries and plums in red wine.”

FruitBakingFrenchFreshnessPastriesFillingsTart
Book:Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously
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“The road to hell is paved with leeks and potatoes”

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Author:Julie Powell
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