You gotta love a woman who eats with her hands. There’s Julie Powell, author of the award-winning “Julie and Julia,” having lunch in a small back room at Le Central, tucking into a generous plate of lapin au moutarde and relegating bones to one side of her plate.
As she eats, she talks – pretty much like she writes, devoid of guile. She says what she thinks, and that’s before the rosé arrives. Her conversation is laced with the colorful language that punctuates the book.
The unpretentious French restaurant seems like an appropriate venue for someone who spent a year preparing every recipe in one of the most daunting cookbooks of the 20th century, Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.”
Cooking through this encyclopedic endeavor sounds like something a crazy Francophile might undertake. But with Powell, the book was a personal challenge that devolved into an obsession occasionally bordering on pathological.
Maybe there’s something in the water in her hometown of Austin, or maybe Texas writers in general have a knack for taking an idea and riding it to success – whether it’s Frank Tolbert writing about chili or Molly Ivins writing about Texas politics; or Julie Powell writing about how she cooked her way through 524 French recipes in 365 days.
Powell recently read at the Tattered Cover on East Colfax as part of a promotional swing through the West.
Interest in Julia Child’s way with food dates to Powell’s formative years. Not all mothers prepared boeuf bourguignon for the family table over the Christmas holidays. Hers did.
Flash forward to adulthood, marriage and the acquisition of her mother’s 1967 edition of, as she calls it, “MtAoFC.” She and husband, Eric, also had a dog, some cats and a snake in their dumpy New York apartment.
What started as a way to give meaning to what Powell considered a life encumbered by ennui became a highly successful hardback book that is en route to selling well as a paperback.
“Julie and Julia” evolved from a lifelong love of cooking into a blog and then the book – all under the loving guidance (and forbearance) of husband Eric, who had to explain to his wife what a web log was.
As Powell notes in her book, she was stuck in a dead-end job plunging headlong toward 30, “living in a hideous apartment in Long Island City, Queens, and dreading what seemed like a life of terminal mediocrity.”
This quirky work also describes Powell’s efforts to hold on to her job, marriage and sanity “while blazing a nonsensical trail toward fulfillment, with Julia leading the way.”
In time, she discovered that it’s one thing to stir up a pot of potato soup, but quite another to bone a leg of lamb or properly assemble a pot-a-feu by tying string to each meat then attaching the same strings to the pot handle so that the doneness of each meat could be determined with a lift of a string.
The blog led to a Blooker Prize, given to the best book based on a blog, and two James Beard Awards in 2004 and 2005. Her writing has appeared in Bon Appétit, the New York Times, House Beautiful, Food and Wine and the Washington Post.
The Julie/Julia project attracted national electronic media attention too, including features on CBS’s “The Early Show,” “CBS Evening News,” CNN, and ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
Bye bye, ennui.
Powell has a wonderful sense of humor and no hint of food snobbery. This is especially evident in the masterful way she interweaves everyday life with biographical narratives and excerpts from “MtAoFC,” alternating her narrative with the poignant and the absurd.
The blog grew. When she took a time out, readers were concerned.
She knew the blog was popular, but she had no idea just how popular until Knopf came calling.
“I just didn’t get it,” she says, yielding to a chocolate mousse. “Then Amanda Hesser from the New York Times came calling. My life exploded.”
Sort of like her efforts at making an omelet the Julia way. Her voice comes through loud and clear.
Powell sets about practicing a shake-and-jerk technique to flip eggs a certain way. A friend had told her to practice the wrist action using beans in a frying pan and employing a shaking motion designed to get the beans to simulate an omelet flip. She is to consider it perfected when no beans spill out.
So there Powell stands, jerking the frying pan forward then back again and again. A passing truck driver thinks she’s loony. She tells him what to do to himself.
The occupants of a minivan stop for directions and get much nicer treatment. They barely blink as she stands on the sidewalk, surrounded by scattered pintos all over the sidewalk, and points the van toward New Jersey.
Powell eventually masters the art of omelet flipping indoors, but only after several land on the stove, halfway out of the pan and unceremoniously on the floor.
As she polishes off another rabbit bone, Powell concedes that while she’s not sure if she believes in an afterlife, she is sure that if there is one, Child, who died in 2004, is not only enjoying a nice butter-and-cream-
laced dinner with her husband, Paul, who preceded her in death by a decade.
They are chatting about good times, good food, good friends and Julie Powell’s labor of love.
Staff writer Ellen Sweets can be reached at 303-954-1284 or esweets@denverpost.com.
