by Julie Powell
It was a very good thing that the Bronco was running. After all this, just lugging the stuff around the teetering sofa bed and up the stairs back to the apartment was enough to get me feeling whiny and put-upon—if I’d had to haul that load home on foot, I’d have probably wound up braining Eric in his bed with a pork shoulder.
He was, of course, still racked out when I came back to the apartment. “Do you need any help, honey?” he moaned as I huffed up the stairs with my bags of meat.
“Oh, shut up and go back to sleep.”
“Okay. I’ll get up soon, I promise.”
“Whatever.”
On the way home, I had had a sudden stab of dread concerning the beet and potato salad. It had made me a little sweaty under the arms, and even more irritable than I might have been otherwise. Once I dumped the meats into the fridge, I rushed to consult my MtAoFC, and it was as I feared: the potatoes and beets needed to sit together for “at least 12 hours, preferably 24.”
The Bavarian needed to set “3 to 4 hours or overnight.”
The Pot-au-Feu you should “start cooking 5 hours before you expect to serve.”
It was 10:30 in the morning, and I was already running behind. This is hardly unusual, but it pisses me off every single time.
Sam Pepys threw dinner parties as a young man—he enjoyed food as much as he enjoyed impressing people, so he was a natural. But of course he didn’t actually cook—he had a wife and a servant for that, or he could just go around the corner to pick up some meat pies or barrels of oysters or something or other. And besides, there just were not as many things to freak out about, foodwise, in Restoration England. Life could be pretty treacherous, what with the plague and the bladder stone surgery sans anesthesia and the occasional violent overthrow of the kingdom, so food just wasn’t all that high on the list of people’s anxieties. Sam didn’t have to worry about no-carb regimens or his father’s heart condition or his neighbor’s new vegan lifestyle. The chickens weren’t getting shot up with antibiotics. There was no mad cow disease. Neither did he agonize over the symbolic weight of the fare—“Will the Secretary of Ships be bored to death of prawns with cheese?” At least if he did, he didn’t write about it, and this is a man who wrote about being blue-balled by scullery maids.
Well, if Sam wrote about blue balls, it seems like recounting a dinner party disaster or two is the least I can do.
What happened was this: I got called up by this reporter from the Christian Science Monitor, of all things, who had had the totally insane idea to have me cook Boeuf Bourguignon for the editor of MtAoFC.
I won’t lie to you—when I started my blog, I certainly entertained daydreams about unlikely fame and fortune. I was, after all, Out There, hanging out on the Internet like it was Schwab’s drugstore, popping gum in a tight sweater, penning off-the-cuff culinary bon mots. But, as we all establish to our sorrow by the time we are about eleven, these things don’t happen, not really. And anyway, it would have been almost heresy to consider the actual Julia Child and my own endeavor within the same theater of possibility. Maybe blogging Christians believe that Jesus Christ is reading their online diaries; but I didn’t have the chutzpah to even contemplate the possibility that Julia, or any of her delegates, might be reading mine.
But now Judith Jones was coming to dinner. The Judith Jones—She Who Got It, the woman who recognized history in the onionskin manuscript of a French cookbook, the person who brought JC to the world.
I share with neither Samuel Pepys nor Julia Child a sanguine nature, and for me a dinner party with Judith Jones—“Like the Virgin Mary, only with better clothes and a corner office in midtown!” I shrieked to my nonplussed husband—was the occasion of much hysteria.
And then too there was the matter of the blog. Old Sam could write whatever he wanted because no one was ever going to read it. But I had an audience, disembodied and tiny though it might be. I wasn’t much afraid of writing something that would make me look pathetic or incompetent, nor of getting myself sued. But I didn’t want to look, you know, conceited. Because under the sheer terror, I was feeling pretty damned proud of myself. After all, I’d gotten the Judith Jones to accept an invitation to dinner at my house. Or the Christian Science Monitor reporter had, anyway. But I didn’t want to seem like I was bragging or anything. On the other hand, I couldn’t just not mention it. I was going to be cooking Boeuf Bourguignon, after all—the classic dish of French cookery, the first dish Julia Child ever cooked on The French Chef. People would notice if I just skipped over it. And I didn’t want to seem coy, either.
Worst of all, though, I might jinx the whole thing.
Quite a cyber-tightrope to walk, let me tell you.
The violent flurry of interest that ensued when I let slip that Someone Important was coming to dinner took me by surprise. High-flying guesses were bandied about in my comment box—at one time or another everyone from Iron Chef’s Chairman Kaga to Nigella Lawson to actor-I-most-want-to-have-sex-with David Strathairn to Julia Child herself were supposed to be heading out to Long Island City on a Wednesday night to eat with me. And the guesses were made by some in an apparently near-religious state of ecstatic apprehension. “Who IS IT??????” wrote Chris, whom I was beginning to picture for some reason as a Minnesotan woman of late middle age with a pixie haircut and slight thyroid condition. “This is KILLING ME! I HAVE to KNOW!!! Pleeeeez tell us NOW, I can’t STAND it!!!!”
It was oddly exhilarating, the grand ambitions all these strangers had for my dinner party. These people thought that Julie Powell, with her yearlong cooking project, was sufficiently fascinating to draw the greatest lights of food celebrity chefdom, and maybe even some minor movie stars, to her crappy outer-borough apartment. Hell, maybe it was true. Maybe my Boeuf Bourguignon, the ninety-fifth of the 524 recipes I had challenged myself to cook in one year, was fascinating. It must be, in fact. For while Julia Child wasn’t coming to dinner, her editor was. This was just the beginning. I was going to be famous! Famous, I tell you!
It’s a good thing there’s always another disaster to poke a hole in the old self-esteem before it gets dangerously inflated.
I started my first Boeuf Bourguignon at about 9:30 on the night before the Dinner. I began by cutting up a thick piece of slab bacon into lardons. When my mom made this for Christmas Eve in 1984 in Austin, Texas, she used Oscar Mayer; she didn’t have any choice. But in 2004 New York, there’s no excuse—certainly not when the woman who discovered Julia Child is coming over. I simmered the lardons in water for ten minutes once they were chopped so they wouldn’t make “the whole dish taste of bacon.” I personally didn’t see the problem with this, but I’m no Julia Child, and in a situation as fraught as this one it must be assumed that Julia’s opinion is the correct one.
I browned the bacon, meat, and vegetables, each in turn, then put them all back into the pot and poured in red wine to cover it all, along with a spoonful of tomato paste, some crushed garlic, and a bay leaf. I brought it all to a simmer on the stovetop and then stuck it into the oven at 325 degrees.
This was when things began to fall apart. Because Boeuf Bourguignon is meant to cook three to four hours, and it was already after ten o’clock at night. And so I made the fateful—or maybe I should just come right out and say “very bad”—decision to drink a vodka tonic or two while I waited. After about two and a half—vodka tonics, I mean, not hours—I made fateful/very bad decision #2, which was to just set the alarm for 1:30 a.m., get up and take the stew out of the oven, then let it cool on the stovetop until morning. I reached over Eric, already racked out across the bed from his share of the vodka tonics and the jalapeno-bacon Domino’s pizza we’d eaten for dinner, and grabbed the alarm clock. It was one of those NASA-designed battery-powered jobbies you always get from more distant relatives who don’t really have the first idea what to get you for Christmas. I sat down on the edge of the bed to set it, but I couldn’t figure the damned thing out. In the course of fiddling with it, I found that if I lay prone wit
h my cheek resting on my husband’s naked bum, I was in a good anchored position from which I could focus my eyes better on all the tiny, tiny buttons and the nearly illegible script describing a needlessly baroque clock-setting procedure. The buttons were so very small, though. The method so very unclear. I fiddled and fiddled and fiddled.
And next thing I knew it was four o’clock in the morning. My neck ached from being cushioned on Eric’s ass, my contacts had adhered to my eyeballs. The Boeuf Bourguignon, needless to say, was toast.
The nice thing about waking up at four on the morning of the most important dinner party of your life to a thoroughly destroyed French beef stew inside your oven is that you will definitely not be going to work. Once the situation became clear, I felt free to sleep a few more hours before calling in sick and heading out to the grocery store to replenish supplies for the second Boeuf Bourguignon. And the second time I made Boeuf Bourguignon, I’ll have you know, it turned out perfectly. Sometimes it just takes some trial and error, that’s all.
And so I wrote my day’s post and cooked my second Boeuf Bourguignon, all while recovering from what I had told my boss was a stomach flu but was in fact something somewhat less innocent, and by a miracle something more than minor, the meal was well in hand by 5:30 or so. I was just contemplating taking a shower—in my house the ultimate expression of hostessing confidence—when the phone rang.
It wasn’t even Judith who called. I’ve never spoken to Judith—and now it looks like I never will.
“I’m so sorry,” moaned the journalist. He was distraught. “I know how much you were looking forward to this. She just doesn’t want to venture out to Queens in this weather.”
Of course, since this journalist was a freelance one, and young, I wasn’t the only one who’d lost an opportunity at career advancement. I held it together valiantly, for his sake. “Well, she is ninety, after all, and it is sleeting. Maybe next time. You should come over still, though. There’s all this food, we’ll never eat it all.”
“Oh—you sure you wouldn’t mind? I’d love to—that would be great!”
I’m such a good Southern girl at heart, I didn’t even start wailing disconsolately until I was in the shower.
The peas that night were lovely, the conversation wide-ranging. And the Bourguignon rocked, so it’s really Judith who lost out, isn’t it?
Samuel Pepys wrote of a dinner disaster of his own: “. . . and thither came W. Bowyer and dined with us; but strange to see how he could not endure onyons in sauce to lamb, but was overcome with the sight of it, and so was forced to make his dinner of an egg or two.” It seems that guests have always disappointed. But when someone turned up his nose at Pepys’s sauce, did some benevolent stranger comfort him by saying, “W. Bowyer can suck it!” Nope.
This, I learned the next day after informing my readers of my cruel jinxing, was one thing I had up on Samuel Pepys. That felt good.
Let’s just hope Judith Jones isn’t a big blog reader.
There are dinner parties ruined by guests, and there are dinner parties ruined by hosts, and then there are dinner parties when everyone contributes to the disaster. I feared that the Pot-au-Feu and Bavarian night was turning into one of the latter.
Sally called again at noon.
“You’re going to kill me.”
“What.”
“The Croatian movers? They’re leaving Providence at nine p.m.”
“Your movers are driving in from Rhode Island at nine o’clock at night on a Saturday?”
“I told you—they’re on crank.”
“So, what—they’re going to come move the sofa bed at half past midnight?”
“Is that okay? I’m so sorry about this.”
“No, it’s fine. Hell, I’ll probably still be cooking.”
“How is that cooking thing of yours going, by the way? You’re crazy, you know.”
“I’m crazy?”
Sally’s laugh burbled. “Fair enough.”
“Why don’t you come over and eat dinner with us? You can see the new place. I’ve got entirely too much food for the three of us.”
“That would be fun. Oh, and hey! I can bring over this guy I met. I think you’ll really like him. He’s got red hair, and a motorcycle, and his name is—wait for it!—David.”
“You’re not serious. Sally, it’s really getting eerie, with you and the Davids.”
“Yeah, I know. You know what else? He’s a sex maniac. He’s why I haven’t been sleeping. So, would that be okay?”
“Sure. The more the merrier.”
“Okay. I’ll see you around eight? Should I bring wine?”
“Sure. Call if you get lost.”
The water was boiling now. I threw in potatoes, let them cook until tender, boiled the beets while I was peeling and slicing the potatoes, peeled and diced the beets, tossed the potatoes and beets together with some minced shallots and a vinaigrette of olive oil and vinegar with some salt and pepper and mustard. So that was done. It was nearly one o’clock. I started mooshing up the sugar cubes with a fork. Which is oddly difficult, actually. When you press the tines down onto the cube, it just flies out from under them, so that the sugar cube goes flying and the fork smacks down on the bottom of the bowl with a scraping clang that puts your teeth on edge.
In the middle of all this, the phone rang again.
“Hey.”
“Hey. How’s the soap selling?”
“Oh, pretty good.” Heathcliff sounds just like our father on the phone sometimes. “Hey, would it be okay if I invited Brian over for dinner?” Brian was one of Heathcliff’s oldest friends—they’d been buddies since first grade—a chubby, smiling super-genius with big dorky glasses. Remember Nate, the evil genius at the government agency I work for? Well, Brian is like a Nate for the forces of good. Heathcliff had told me he was in New York, getting some kind of higher mathematics degree at Columbia, but I hadn’t seen him, not for years and years.
“Sure. Sally’s coming over—she wants us to meet her new guy.”
“Sally has a new guy? That was fast.”
“Yup.” I tried to detect some hint of forlorn loss in my brother’s voice, but no dice.
“Okay, so we’ll be over there around seven or eight. Should we pick up some booze?”
“Sounds good.”
“All right. Later.”
The orangey sugar cubes at last mooshed, I proceeded to zest and squeeze oranges, soften gelatin, separate eggs—doing it just the way Meryl Streep does in The Hours, by gently juggling them back and forth in my hands, letting the white slip through my fingers into a bowl waiting below. Felt like the way Julia would do it—very cook-y. I was feeling very cook-y in general, actually, cool and collected, until I got to “forming the ribbon.” This sounds like some ancient Asian euphemism for kinky water sports, but it was really just what I was supposed to do with the egg yolks and sugar. The yolks are supposed to “turn a pale, creamy yellow, and thicken enough so that when a bit is lifted in the beater, it will fall back into the bowl forming a slowly dissolving ribbon.” But you are not to “beat beyond this point or the egg yolks may become granular.”
Granular? Scary.
I beat and beat and beat, guessed rather blindly at the right consistency, then beat in some boiling milk and poured the mixture into a saucepan. I was supposed to heat this stuff up to 170 degrees. I was not to heat it over 170 degrees, or the eggs would “scramble.” (Terrifying.) Judging by sight and hovering fingers the precise temperature of hot milk is an inexact science, to say the least, but I did my best. Then I took it off the heat and stirred in the orange juice with gelatin. I beat the egg whites up to stiff peaks and folded them into the egg yolk-orange juice-gelatin mixture, along with some kirsch and rum—I was supposed to use orange liqueur, but I didn’t have orange liqueur, and I figured in a pinch booze was booze. I stuck the whole thing into the refrigerator. I was having my doubts about all this.
Don’t know much about gelatin, but I know a little somethin
g about foul moods. And if only Bavarois à l’Orange was a foul mood, I could tell you for sure how to set it like a damned rock. Just make it take a shower in our apartment on a cold day. When it has to wash its hair.
“Aaah! Goddammit!”
“Honey? You okay?” Eric warbled weakly from the bed, where he was still racked out.
“The hot water’s gone!”
“What?”
“No. Fucking. Hot. WATER!”
I finished the shower mewling, then hurried out, hair still slightly bubbly with shampoo, and rubbed myself roughly with a towel for warmth. I pulled on a hideous old plaid flannel robe I’d bought for Eric back when we were in college, when I thought flannel was quaint and New England-y, then, shivering, hurried back into the kitchen, beat some chilled whipping cream until stiffish, stirred it into the custard in the fridge, poured the mess into the Bundt cake pan that was the only moldlike accoutrement I possessed, and stuck the thing back in the fridge. Not feeling so cool and collected now—perhaps that was why I folded the whipping cream into the custard too early, before the custard was halfway set. This was not going to turn out at all. Oh well. A little dessert soup never hurt anybody.