by Julie Powell
< Shut up and let him worry about the state of his marriage. I say, if he wants to send someone not his wife lewd instant messages, that’s his lookout.
I know, I know. I’m a terrible friend and a traitor to the institution of matrimony. I would be the world’s worst advice columnist. I have nothing to offer in my defense but the insistence that I did do nearly a full minute of soul-searching before offering this bit of highly questionable guidance. I asked myself what I would do if Eric was given the same recommendation by one of his friends. This was slightly hard to envision, because I couldn’t imagine Eric (a) being tempted into infidelity, (b) daring to tell anyone he was being tempted into infidelity, or (c) having a friend of the sort who would offer this kind of advice. Still, I did my best. I felt not a flicker of anguish. The most I felt was the barest hint of envy. How come nobody ever sent me lewdly suggestive instant messages?
> Well. It probably won’t happen anyway.
Yeah, right. Now Gwen was going to go out with this guy, make wild jungle love with him because I told her she could, and then not tell me about it because she thought she’d make me feel bad, me the old married lady with her married-lady sex.
Great. Just great.
Another thing Sam might have served at one of his dinner parties, besides oysters and lamb in onyon sauce, is Oeufs en Gelée. Oeufs en Gelée is poached egg in aspic. Technically, if I am to trust Julia’s word—and when it comes to aspic, I suppose I must—“aspic” usually refers to the finished dish, and gelée refers to the jelly itself that the eggs, or whatever, get immersed in. In the case of Oeufs en Gelée, my very first aspic, the gel in the gelée comes from calves’ feet—which I imagine is just how Sam would have made it. Or would have had it made, rather. I simply can’t see Sam making gelée out of calves’ feet himself. For one thing, as it turns out, making gelée out of calves’ feet makes your kitchen smell like a tannery. The gelée also, in my admittedly limited experience, tastes like a tannery.
What you do is, you simmer these calves’ feet that you’ve soaked and scrubbed and otherwise attempted to make somewhat less toxic, along with some salt pork rind, in a (homemade, of course) beef broth for a good long time, until all the gelatinous properties of the feet and skin and whatnot have leached into the broth, and at that point the broth should, when chilled, transform into a very solid jelly, capable of holding a poached egg (or chicken livers, or some braised beef, or whatever) securely in its rubbery maw.
I think I can safely say that no one—not me, not the blog readers, certainly not Eric—considered eggs in aspic when making the decision to embark upon this culinary journey. And it’s a good thing, because eggs in aspic is enough to quail the sturdiest heart.
The crosses of tarragon over the snowy-white poached egg centers were like the negative images of chalk marks on the doors of quarantined houses. But we sallied forth, Eric and Gwen and I, and with a single tap of our forks cracked open our Oeufs en Gelée. I suspect the aspic was not quite so solid as it should have been, for it slipped off and puddled on our plates with almost indecent eagerness—like silk lingerie, if silk lingerie was repulsive. When the (cold, runny) poached eggs were cut, their innards inundated the aspic remains. The resulting scene of carnage was not, let us say, that which Gourmet magazine covers are made of.
Also, it tasted slightly of hoof.
Chris was the first to protest this post concerning my very first aspic. “Can’t you just SKIP the aspics?!!! I don’t know if I can take any more of that!!!”Now, Chris had become known around the Julie/Julia Project as a bit of a hysteric. But in regard to the aspic, she had many fellows.
Isabel suggested that rather than eating the aspic, I might want to unmold it and preserve it in polyurethane. RainyDay2 reminded me, “When Julia was MtAoFCing, aspic was da’ bomb. Coating anything with the stuff somehow made it chichi (at the time, anything French, ‘à la mode de whatever’ and poodles were cool, too . . .). Why bother?”
Stevoleno seconded the motion, and the blog readers—I was beginning to think of them as my “bleaders”—then carried it nearly unanimously: No More Aspic, Please.
It was not as if I began this project in pursuit of the perfect Oeuf en Gelée. Certainly not. To tell the truth, I couldn’t remember exactly why I had begun. When I thought back to the days Before the Project, I remembered crying on subways, I remembered cubicles, I remembered doctor’s appointments and something looming, something with a zero at the end of it. I remembered the feeling of wandering down an endless hallway lined with locked doors. Then I turned a knob that gave under my fingers, everything went dark, and when I came to again, I was chortling away at midnight at a stove in a bright kitchen, sticky with butter and sweat. I wasn’t a different person, exactly, just the same person plunked down into some alternate, Julia Child-centric universe. I didn’t remember the moment of transition—I expect that wormholes do funny things to the memory—but there was no question I was in a different place. The old universe had been subjugated under the tyranny of entropy. There, I was just a secretary-shaped confederation of atoms, fighting the inevitability of mediocrity and decay. But here, in the Juliaverse, the laws of thermodynamics had been turned on their heads. Here, energy was never lost, merely converted from one form to another. Here, I took butter and cream and meat and eggs and I made delicious sustenance. Here, I took my anger and despair and rage and transformed it with my alchemy into hope and ecstatic mania. Here, I took a crap laptop and some words that popped into my head at seven in the morning, and I turned them into something people wanted, maybe even needed.
I couldn’t figure out the origin of the forces acting on me. It couldn’t be this arbitrary challenge I’d set for myself; I’d never risen to a challenge in my life. Surely it couldn’t be Julia Child. A year ago at this time, Julia meant even less to me than Dan Aykroyd, and that’s saying something. She seemed the polestar of my existence now, it was true, but surely not even Julia could be the driving force of a whole universe. For a while, until the great Aspic Mandate, I satisfied myself by simply working to fulfill the needs of my bleaders. That was enough to get me through the days without questioning the odd new circumstances I found myself in. It’s strange how easy it is to get used to things.
But then the No Aspic verdict was passed down. Lingering with me along the edges of the great dark moorlands of Aspic—nine recipes in all—the bleaders had given me a free pass:
“Dinnae ga on the moooors.”
They meant it as a kindness. And yet I found myself thrown into a terrible confusion. My bleaders would stay with me if I did not make the aspics; in fact their loyalty was being severely tested by the prospect of endless posts on boiled calves’ feet and the casting of various foodstuffs in cold jelly. But I knew I had to do it. I was being pulled relentlessly forward, not by my own will (who has the will to make aspic?), and not by the people who needed me (for I was beginning to feel that, in this alternate universe, these bleaders were people who needed me, for reasons for the present obscure) but by some other implacable gravitational force, over the horizon or buried in the center of the earth. It frightened me, but there was no resisting.
The Oeufs en Gelée that provoked this flurry of bleader revolt and subsequent existential turmoil were served as a so-called appetizer for a Thanksgiving supper that, thank God, went uphill from there. Preparing them was the work of several days—not so much because that’s how long Oeufs en Gelée requires as because before each step I had to gird my loins all over again. First I made the initial gelée itself, which aforementioned odor succeeded in chasing me out of the kitchen and putting me off any cooking whatsoever for at least twenty-four hours. Then I had to let the stuff cool, skim off the fat, and clarify it, which is one crazy hell of a process. First you combine beaten egg whites with the stock and stir it gently over low heat while it comes to a bare simmer and the whites get white, then you balance the stockpot on one edge of the burner so only one side of the stock at a time bubbles. Turn the pot in quart
er circles every five minutes until the pot’s hit the points of the compass. You ladle the stock out into a colander lined with cheesecloth, and, the theory goes, the egg whites get left behind in the colander, taking all those cloudy, impure bits out with it.
This sounds like something our friend Sam might attempt when he found himself with some extra lead on hand and his coffers a little light on gold, but it actually worked. Still, for all that mumbo-jumbo-type work, I want at the very least something that doesn’t smell like processed livestock. It pissed me off so much I had to go buy some vintage clothes on eBay to get over it.
Then there were the eggs to poach. I am still pretty far from an egg-poaching expert, and these eggs weren’t going to be napped in cheese sauce—they were going to be out there in front of God and everybody, clothed only in a crystalline coating of calves’ foot jelly, and they had to be pretty. So that took a while, too.
After that there’s the composition of the Oeufs en Gelée proper. This is a matter of layering. You start by pouring a thin layer of the gelée, warmed back up to liquidity on the stove, into each of four ramekins. That’s the idea, anyway. Actually, I used small clear Pyrex dishes I’d been given for Christmas one year—mise en place bowls, if you want to get all hoity-toity about it. I’d’ve used my real ramekins, but one of the four I had had been hijacked by Eric, who was using it to hold his shaving soap, because Eric shaves with old-fashioned shaving soap and a brush, because GQ told him to and when it comes to shaving, Eric is GQ’s servant. Only actually, now I’m using the shaving soap in the ramekin for my legs, because Eric’s gotten too good for the buck-fifty Duane Reade shaving soap and has graduated to fancy Kiehl’s stuff.
Anyway, after I’d poured in that first layer in each of the dishes, I put them into the refrigerator to set, then got a tiny pot of water boiling and dumped in some tarragon leaves, just for a few seconds, before draining them, drying them, and setting them, too, in the refrigerator. Once the leaves were cool and the jelly was almost set, I began laying the leaves in their X pattern on top of the jelly. Fiddling with damp tarragon left me so intensely irritated that when I was done I had to stick the ramekin/mise en place bowls back in the fridge and go watch both the episode where Xander is possessed by a demon and the one where Giles regresses to his outrageously sexy teen self and has sex with Buffy’s mom, just to get over it.
I woke up at six a.m. on Thanksgiving morning to finish putting the little bastards together. I rewarmed the aspic and placed a cold poached egg on top of each tarragon X in each chilled ramekin. The least attractive side of the egg is supposed to face up. This was largely academic in the case of my eggs. Then I poured over more liquid aspic and set the eggs in the refrigerator for their final chilling. By then it was eight a.m., and though I still had a whole Thanksgiving meal left to cook, roast goose and cabbage and onions and green beans and soufflé, I felt giddy with relief. The rest of the day would be a picnic, a Victorian one with parasols and white georgette dresses and games of whist and servants to carry all the baskets, compared to fucking eggs in aspic.
And it really was a cakewalk. Or at least it all went as smoothly as could be expected. Or maybe not, but between all the Pepsi One and having my first aspic done, by six o’clock, when Gwen arrived, I was flying anyway. Famished, but flying.
Gwen is not so much polite as she is considerate. So while she had the good sense not to eat any more than the token bite that proved indubitably that Oeufs en Gelée was not something she would ever again in this life sample, she also had the good grace to say, “Julie, this isn’t your fault—it’s just the recipe.” The soul of kindness, that Gwen. I wanted to believe her, but when I nodded my head as if to agree, I could hear a familiar voice in my head, yodeling on about how frightfully elegant an aspic might be, and I felt ashamed.
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. Then, having fed the aspic to the cats, who didn’t mind it at all, we moved to the couch for the annual holiday screening of True Romance, a tradition begun the year that my brother was living with us in Bay Ridge, when we decided to make a drinking game out of it and take a sip every time someone said the word fuck. (That’s not part of the tradition anymore; if you’ve seen the movie you know why.) Doped up on fat calories and wine, Eric drifted off to sleep about twenty minutes into the film, right in the middle of Gary Oldman’s very boisterous death scene, but Gwen and I made it all the way to James Gandolfini’s equally impressive death scene, and got so drunk together that Gwen had to spend the night on the couch, and eat some Oeufs en Cocotte the next morning to recover.
If there are two kinds of friends in the world, those who inspire in you all that is great and good and those who’d prefer to get right down on their haunches and help out with the mud pies, Gwen definitely falls into the latter category. I call her the devil on my shoulder. Sally encourages me to find my inner greatness, to love myself and treat my body like a temple. She wishes I’d quit drinking so much and wants me to go to therapy. I probably should spend more time with her. But especially during the tough times, the days of aspic and freezing rain, I found myself craving not betterment and hope and an exercise partner so much as a fresh bottle of booze, a pack of Marlboros, and someone content to eat butter sauce and watch reruns on TV with me. It’s lucky for me, though perhaps too bad for Gwen, that I’m just a solitary outer-borough secretary with a taste for vodka and cigarettes, rather than, I don’t know, a bi-curious stripper with a small coke habit—I get the feeling that with such a wealth of potential disaster to work with, Gwen would truly come into her gift as some sort of Shakespearean corrupter of innocence.
I don’t want to give the wrong impression. It’s not as if Gwen is some uncontainable libertine, Falstaff personified as an impressively bitter, petite blonde with fashion sense (and I say this as a person with nearly depthless reserves of bitterness). Really what she is is accommodating. If I want to get drunk and eat myself silly and watch four episodes of Buffy and smoke so many cigarettes that I feel like an ashtray the next morning, well then, so does she, by God. Probably if she was hanging out with Sally, the two of them would be applying to graduate school and taking Bikram yoga classes together. But she’s hanging out with me.
I suppose that, knowing the thoroughly questionable advice I gave her about the whole Mitch Thing, one could argue the question of who exactly is the bad influence on whom, here. But I’m sticking to my guns on this one.
December descended. One day I was taking an appointment for Bonnie in her Outlook and it came to me that I was officially more than one quarter of the way through the Project. I realized I didn’t even know how many recipes I’d done. I rushed home that night to count up all the small black checks I had been making beside each recipe as I went along, like a trail of bread crumbs. (Along with the actual trail of bread crumbs, and other foodstuffs, that had begun to lodge themselves near the spine, and glue the pages together.) It was as I feared.
“Eric, I’m not going to make it.”
“Make what?”
“‘Make what’? My deadline! What’s wrong with you?”
I was bent over the Book, which lay open on the island in the kitchen, with a pen in hand with which I’d made a bunch of hash marks in the margin of the Times sports section. 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.
The NewsHour was turned up in the living room. A daunting stack of dishes teetered in the sink, but Eric had his laptop on his lap at one of the kitchen stools and was playing FreeCell. Badly.
“I’ll have turned myself into a whale for nothing. I’ll have wasted a year of my life! Dammit. Goddammit! GOD. DAMN. IT!”
Over the years, Eric has developed the defensive tactic of selective hearing. I’ve seen this kind of evolution before—my father has the same skill. The benefits of this are obvious—much less time wasted in attending to every fleeting hysterical fit his wife indulges in. I, however, have in response mastered a technique of incremental amplification that has proven most effective in breaking down his defenses. And once he is roused to a reaction, he is at a distinct disadvantage, as he has not heard much of my rant and therefore cannot accurately judge what piece of it he should best respond to in order to defuse it. Plus, because he was the one not listening to me, I gain the moral high ground. Darwinism at work, my friends.
“You won’t waste it. I won’t let you.”
“So you do think I’m fat, then. Is it that bad?” (See?)
“What? No! You’re going to make it. How many recipes have you made?”
“One hundred and thirty-six. One thirty-eight after tonight.”
“See? You’re more than a quarter of the way done. You’re golden!”
“No, no, no. I have aspics. I have to bone a whole duck. Can you even conceive of boning a duck? Of course you can’t. Your brain’s too consumed with the NewsHour and FreeCell to waste time on something just because it’s of all-consuming importance to your wife.”