Cut the Cookbook Open, Hack It to Pieces
The Overlooked Genius of Julie Powell, 1973-2022
I love cookbooks too, but look: Most of those we all keep on a shelf in the kitchen and force open as we chop and sweat and try not to scorch our onion, the cookbooks we smudge and cherish, are not much different from each other when it comes to form—they are compendiums of discrete formulas. Obviously they attain a kind of narrative architecture through discursive chapter openers, autobiographical headers, thematic clustering of recipes. Still, the infrastructure of the cookbook is still stubbornly what Irma Rombauer, in her original 1931 edition of The Joy of Cooking, called “an anthology of favorite recipes.” I have nothing but admiration for authors who can take haul off those inherited posts and trusses and build something personal: a cookbook expressing unique identity.
I listened yesterday as Nigella Lawson told Francis Lam, on The Splendid Table, about the importance of writing cookbooks with a definite literary sensibility, a point of view and a voice (like Irma Rombauer had in that first edition, by the way). But apart from formal spinoffs—memoirs with appended recipes, travel writing with appended recipes, essay writing with appended recipes—cookbooks persist at being stubbornly what they have been for at least the past three hundred years, if not all the way back to Apicius. The most common way around that is to stitch recipes onto the backside of a narrative, like endnotes or a soundtrack pairing.
If you think of a recipe, as I do, as something intimate; an author who tells you, one mind to another, how to re-create an intensely sensual moment—to align yourselves, cook and author, through smell and taste and feeling, however improbably—then the cookbook as we know it turns stories into schematics, flattens a potentially vast orb of shared desires into a Mercator projection. It may be the best tool we have for presenting cooking narratives, but it’s a flawed medium for story: for conveying nuance, complex emotion, or the kind of ambivalence that describes what it is to be human. At the end of the day, its value lies in being a bunch of recipes.
This is an overly long windup to say that I reread Julie & Julia last month, after its author, Julie Powell, died of cardiac arrest, the New York Times reported, age 49. With fresh eyes, I saw flashes of genius in Powell’s 2005 book. I hadn’t when I read it the first time, in 2009, soon after catching the movie version, written and directed by Nora Ephron. Julie & Julia had been all tangled up in my mind with Nora Ephron’s movie from 2009: with Streep and Tucci; with Amy Adams, her milky innocence and spunky clabber.
The book, as anyone who’s made beef bourguignon in the past 15 years surely knows, is Powell’s first-person account of the Julie/Julia Project, a yearlong scheme to cook every one of the 500-plus recipes in Volume One of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, by Julia Child and the perennially shafted Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle. Powell blogs about the project, to an engaged and growing readership. Her life jerks and grinds along the rough track of a cheap Brooklyn loft (we’re talking rents from back in the early aughts); Powell’s marriage to her high school steady, Eric; her exasperated mother, reading Julie’s blog in a Texas subdivision; Powell’s Port Authority job interviewing 9/11 survivors; and her sexually restless high school friends, simultaneously liberating and sabotaging themselves by fucking random guys—these motifs haunt Powell’s deeply conflicted thoughts, as she navigates fidelity, feminism, identity, and the uses of pleasure.
What astonishes me now is how Powell butterflies one of the most iconic cookbooks of all time. She takes a butcher’s knife to Mastering the Art: takes on the recipes out of order and exposes them to the pressures and compromises She dissects its fantasy world, the imaginary world every cookbook keeps between its covers. Beneath the breezy, bloggy surface of her narrative, Powell grinds the immaculate anthology world of the cookbook into a fucked up actuality of messy ambiguity. (No surprise that Powell’s 2009 followup book, which I have not read, is called Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession; no surprise, either, that critics hated the book—NPR’s critic described it as one of the most unpleasant reading experiences they’ve ever had—since it seems one hundred percent messy, conflicted, unfaithful Julie, with no trace of Ephron’s romantic, resplendently Streepy Julia.)
There’s a sense of approaching collapse in the book , or of dissolution already begun. Entering Julia’s world doesn’t fix the chaos constantly churning at the edge of Julie’s consciousness, it allows her to feel it more keenly. At the start of the book, before she stars cooking, Julie witnesses a woman struggling to keep it together on a subway platform: seated cross-legged, slamming her head against the floor with a horrible hollow thumping sound. But for Julie’s job, the author suggests, her middle-class sense of herself, and her urgent need to rush home to scrounge up dinner for her husband, this could be Julie’s skull thunking concrete.
The movie muffles the screams and dissonances of Powell’s book. Ephron forces in large chunks of Julia and Paul Child from My Life in France, Julia’s posthumous memoir (with Alex Prud’homme) published a year after the release of the Julie & Julia book. Where Powell stretches a twitchy line between tropes of food as comfort and deep skepticism about the idea, Ephron sweeps Powell’s narrative into conventional rom-com. In Ephron’s movie, the pleasure inherent in buttery recipes with French names is female empowerment: an unthreatening agency that never seriously challenges gender assumptions or structure of conventional marriage. The movie’s Adams/Powell character is naive yet spunky, learning how to navigate life in the noisy, cold, dogshit metropolis with the man she leans on—Jane Fonda in Barefoot In the Park, or Marlo Thomas in That Girl. But Powell, in the book, teeters on the edge of that fearful hollow thumping place.
When Julie the narrator prepares a bordelaise sauce one night, and prepares to deal with extracting beef marrow from a shank bone, the distance between reality and Julia’s cookbook—mythologized, infused with nostalgia, and spangled with fleurs-de-lis—is clear.
“So there I was, scooping out the center of [the bones], thinking mostly that it was some nasty shit. Pink…very wet…gluey clots of stuff that plopped down onto the cutting board with a sickening sound.” The taste of the horrifying yet delicious sauce reminds Julie of a story she once heard: a German man arranging for another to cut off his penis, stir-fry it, and feed it to him, the ultimate gesture of warrior grit. “It’s like eating life,” she says. “It’s almost like eating my own life, you know?” No wonder the real Julia ghosted Julie, refusing to acknowledge her or her project. How could Julia, always careful of her public image, endorse slicing up Mastering the Art and weaving its fragments through a millennial New York real world of ambivalence and shit slime, where survival depends on savage acts of self-affirmation?
Translating a cookbook into flesh compromises is messy. What do cookbooks give us, anyway? Powell presents us with an ambiguity we’re not used to seeking in recipe collections. As she thinks of wrapping up her yearlong cooking project, the narrator Julie goes a little metaphysical. “You could define the beginning of the end as the point when the protagonist has to see that her actions mean something, and that if they don’t work out right, she is well and truly fucked. By this definition, the end was a long time in coming.” For Julie Powell, sadly, the end came far too soon, before her complicated brilliance had a chance to obscure the fame that took our attention away from noticing it. #
brilliant writing, as usual. thanks for this, john!