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365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen
by Julie Powell
Book Reviewed by:With the humor of Bridget Jones and the vitality of Augusten Burroughs, Julie Powell recounts how she conquered every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and saved her soul!
With the humor of Bridget Jones and the vitality of Augusten Burroughs, Julie
Powell recounts how she conquered every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the
Art of French Cooking and saved her soul.
Julie Powell is 30-years-old, living in a rundown apartment in Queens and
working at a soul-sucking secretarial job that’s going nowhere. She needs
something to break the monotony of her life, and she invents a deranged
assignment. She will take her mother's dog-eared copy of Julia Child's 1961
classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and she will cook all 524 recipes.
In the span of one year.
At first she thinks it will be easy. But as she moves from the simple Potage
Parmentier (potato soup) into the more complicated realm of aspics and crépes,
she realizes there’s more to Mastering the Art of French Cooking than meets the
eye. With Julia’s stern warble always in her ear, Julie haunts the local
butcher, buying kidneys and sweetbreads. She sends her husband on late-night
runs for yet more butter and rarely serves dinner before midnight. She discovers
how to mold the perfect Orange Bavarian, the trick to extracting marrow from
bone, and the intense pleasure of eating liver.
And somewhere along the line she realizes she has turned her kitchen into a
miracle of creation and cuisine. She has eclipsed her life’s ordinariness
through spectacular humor, hysteria, and perseverance.
If you're a keen home cook or a fan of memoirs, real or fictionalized, such as Bridget Jones, this is one for you; and with the holiday season coming up dangerously soon, you might also want to keep a note of Julie & Julia as a potential gift item for a domesticated relative - perhaps paired with Julia Child's autobiography My Life In France (with the caveat that Julia Child, who died while Julie was working her way through The Art of French Cookery, wasn't a fan of Julie or her project!)..continued
Full Review
(192 words)
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Julie Powell says... 'My answer to "what's your favorite read" changes every time I'm asked it, but I can say that as far as cookbook authors, Paul Prudhomme*, Andries de Groot and, yes, Nigella Lawson are folks I enormously admire. Elizabeth Gilbert is a fantastic writer as well as a great person, and I look forward to her next book with bated breath. I am in awe of Alice Munro. As a kid I was a bit of a sci-fi and fantasy geek, and read Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's trilogy on a bi-yearly basis, and was a ...
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If you liked Julie & Julia, try these:
by Isabel Vincent
Published 2017
A nonagenarian and a recently divorced reporter meet weekly for dinner, and the discussion ranges from the importance of beauty, to living after loss, to the power of love to redeem and renew, to how to make a succulent duck breast.
by Gabrielle Hamilton
Published 2012
Blood, Bones & Butter is an unflinching and lyrical work. Gabrielle Hamilton's story is told with uncommon honesty, grit, humor, and passion. By turns epic and intimate, it marks the debut of a tremendous literary talent.
Ann Beattie
Julie and Julia has all the ingredients of a tasty novel: it's
original, funny, and slyly provocative. I also learned a lot, and I will channel
Paul Child when I renovate my kitchen.
