by Julie Powell
“Your what?”
“Mom, I just need to.”
“Julie, what you need to do is relax. I want you to think very hard about why you’re doing this. Julia Child can fucking wait!” (Yes, it’s true—I come by my sailor’s mouth honestly.)
For nearly a week I neither cooked nor grocery shopped. Instead, all of our various families took Eric and me out for Mexican food, for barbecue, for beignets. We ate cheese biscuits with Rice Krispies, and spiced pecans, and red beans and rice, and gumbo, and all those other things that New Yorkers would turn up their noses at, but New Yorkers don’t know everything, do they? This is what Texas, and family, are for. Eric and I slept late in my childhood bedroom, which I had never realized was so blessedly quiet and cool, in an enormous, comfortable bed made up with stylish 400-thread-count bed linens that never had even a single pebble of kitty litter in them.
After five days of it, I was miserable. I spent breakfasts eyeing my mother’s gorgeous stainless steel six-burner stove longingly. I took to perusing MtAoFC compulsively, and sneaking back to my parents’ office to check the blog. Every forlorn comment from some person wondering where I was, if I’d given up, produced a throbbing pulse in the pit of my stomach, like the one I felt when I thought about my hormonal condition and how I might not be able to have a baby. In addition, someone seemed to have attached some sort of transmitting device on my medulla oblongata. I could not understand the words that seemed to emanate from the deepest recesses of my brain, but the warbling voice was unmistakably familiar. I began to question my sanity.
Luckily for me and the Project (though maybe not ultimately so lucky for the New York lobster population), Isabel and her husband, Martin, came into town from their country house for my parents’ Christmas Eve party. She was wearing a mauve fifties prom dress (back in high school Isabel and I used to hit the vintage stores together, and neither of us has lost the habit), had her hair ratted up into a bouffant, and had painted her lips brick red. Martin was carrying a bag of presents and wearing his usual invisibility suit. The first thing she said when she walked in the door was, “You’ve been a naughty widget. Your followers are despondent. What’re we eating tonight?”
“Nothing,” I sighed miserably. “At least nothing I made. Mom’s not letting me cook.”
“What?!”
“She got a buffet basket from Central Market.”
Isabel took me by the arms. “Okay, Julie. Let me handle this.”
One thing you have to say about Isabel is that she does have the gift of gab, and she could sell ice to Eskimos. She is also persistent. All night long she worked on my mother, slipping in beside her at the bar, cornering her in the kitchen. She would not be ignored.
“So, Elaine, aren’t you proud of what Julie’s doing? She’s a goddess, in my opinion.”
“Oh?”
“Abso-lutely. You have been reading the comments, right? Julie is adored! She’s inspiring people all over the damn place!”
“Yes . . . I guess. . . .”
The truth of the matter was that my mom hadn’t really thought much about the people reading about what I was doing. She read my posts faithfully, but she tended to think of them much as she would a hospital stat sheet, perusing them mostly for any signs of imminent crack-up.
“Well, it’s no surprise to you, of course—you Foster women can do anything.”
(Foster is my maiden name. Even among the handful of women of my age and socioeconomic status who have in fact married, those of us who actually took our husbands’ names are considered freaks of nature.)
“I suppose. But, Isabel, I do worry. She’s so stubborn when she gets a notion in her head, and she’s just pushing herself so hard with this —”
“Oh, come on, Elaine! When has Julie ever not managed brilliantly? Remember drill team?”
“Of course I remember drill team! That’s exactly what I’m talking about! She lost twenty pounds and cried herself to sleep every night!”
“Exactly. And she ate nothing but Skittles and Coke for a year and we all thought she was killing herself but she came out of it fine, and with a mean high kick to boot. She didn’t even turn into a Junior Leaguer! Hey, did you know Henry reads the blog?”
Henry was my ex-boyfriend from high school, the one who’d had such trouble forgiving me for that whole dropping-him-for-Eric thing eleven years ago. My mom always really liked Henry.
“Really?”
“Yeah. He’s really proud of Julie, too.”
“That’s nice of him.”
“Your daughter’s doing a great thing. She’s cooking for our sins!” (This had become Isabel’s favorite new phrase. She was thinking of making T-shirts.) She popped a chipotle-grilled shrimp into her mouth. “This is pretty good. For something from a grocery store, I mean.”
Heathcliff, of all people, chimed in, just before Isabel managed to undo all the good work she’d done. “You know, I don’t actually think Julie’s freaking out all that much. I mean for Julie. I saw her rip up like a dozen artichokes, and she didn’t scream even once. It was kind of eerie, in fact.”
“But I read about it! I see what she’s doing! She’s taking on too much!”
Heathcliff has always known how to end an argument, and he’s a genius with a raised eyebrow. “Mom. You do know you sound just like Granny. That’s like on purpose, right?”
So that was that. That very night my mother agreed, with many sighs and much rolling of eyes, that if I absolutely had to do it, maybe I could cook something for New Year’s Eve.
“Thanks, Isabel.”
“Well, sure. Small price to pay to keep the Project alive, right? But listen, I’ve got to tell you something.” She grabbed my hand and pulled me out onto my parents’ back deck. It was absolutely balmy out there, or seemed so to my New York-hardened skin, but Isabel shivered in her tulle dress as she pulled me over to the Adirondack chairs, looking for all the world like a woman with a secret. She pulled me down into the chairs and bent toward me to whisper.
“Remember that dream I e-mailed about, about the dildo? Well, I was right, it was totally precognitive.”
“Um. Oh?”
“There’s this guy, Jude. He plays guitar in a punk band in Bath—England, you know. I met him on the Richard Hell fan site. I’ve never heard his music before, but I’ve read his lyrics, and they’re amazing. And then I dreamed about the music, like I could hear exactly what it sounded like. I bet I’m right, too.”
“Uh-huh?”
“And he sent me a picture of him, and he’s sent me some of his poems, including one he wrote just for me, which I think are brilliant.”
“Okay?”
“And I think I need to meet him.”
Suddenly it did feel a little chilly, and I glanced around, worried suddenly that maybe Martin was lurking around in his invisibility suit, smoking a cigarette in some dark corner of the deck. “But—I mean, do you mean you’re going to—?”
“No! That’s what my mother thinks, that I should just go and have sex with him and get it out of my system, but that’s so wrong, don’t you think?”
Looking at the slightly crazed gleam in Isabel’s eyes, I had the uncomfortable feeling that her mother’s scheme might be the most reasonable one I was going to hear.
“No, I want to meet him, and if he’s as wonderful as I think he is, then I’ll talk to Martin, and we’ll just see what happens next.”
“Isabel —”
“Hey, Isabel, we’ve got to go if we’re going to catch your dad at the thing.” Martin was standing at the door, peeking out. I could just see the spiky silhouette of his mussed hair.
“Yeah, okay, honey. Coming.” Isabel gave my hand a squeeze and was gone.
I had no idea what to think about that.
And so on the eve of the New Year, I made Veau Prince Orloff for eleven cousins and aunts and uncles, who I’m sure believed their crazy Yankee-fied niece had dropped completely off the deep end.
Veau Prince Orloff is
an absurd recipe. What you do is this: You roast the veal with some vegetables and bacon. You save the juices. We did this the night before, and then left the roast sitting on the counter overnight—slightly overdone, I think, as I so often do with Julia’s meats, which is particularly a shame when the meat you’re roasting is $15.99 a pound. Then you can wake up a few times in the early hours of the morning in a cold sweat, convinced your parents’ golden retriever has gotten to the eighty-dollar veal roast. That stress should offset some of the catastrophic caloric intake you’re about to experience.
On the day you’re serving, you make a soubise, which is a bit of rice briefly boiled and then cooked slowly with some butter and a lot of sliced onions for forty-five minutes or so. The water that sweats out of the onions is sufficient to cook the rice, which is kind of neat, sort of like a chemistry experiment or something. Then you make duxelles, which are just minced mushrooms sautéed with shallots and butter.
Out of the veal juices and some milk you make a velouté sauce, which is a roux-based type of thing. You combine the velouté with the soubise, run the soubise through the sieve/Cuisinart, then stir in the duxelles and cook it all up, thinning it out with cream.
This, surprisingly, takes all morning. And produces a hell of a lot of dirty dishes, which my mother, being my mother, patiently washed. Which is as it should be, because guilt is what Christmas is for.
I sliced the veal as thinly as I could, then stacked it back together again, one slice at a time, smearing mushroom filling on each slice as I went. I stirred some cheese into the warm velouté, then poured it over the veal. The veal now looked like some kind of wet beige footstool. I sprinkled some more cheese on top, and some melted butter. My mother is a Texan and knows the value of cooking fats, but even she was horrified when she did a stick-of-butter count. The veal got thrown into the oven about half an hour before it was time to serve, just to warm through.
If you fed this veal to a racehorse, it would instantly drop dead of gastric torsion. Very good. Who cares if the roast is overdone, I think, when you’ve got that much shit on it? It goes a little oddly with San Antonio squash casserole with Velveeta and canned chiles, cornbread dressing, turkey, and pecan pie. But no matter.
We flew back to New York on January second. As I sat at the kitchen table that morning before our flight home, sipping a cup of coffee and maybe wallowing a bit in the vague dissatisfaction that the day after the first day of the new year always brings, Heathcliff came in, rubbing his eyes, his red hair kicked up by sleep. Heathcliff is not much of a morning person; I’d kind of figured I wouldn’t see him again before we left.
“Hey.”
“Hey. You’re up early.”
“Mom said we’d all go to breakfast before your flight.”
“Yeah.”
He flung himself into a chair, picked up the front page, peered at it sleepily. Then I must have sighed, because he looked up again and said, with a crooked grin, “What’s the matter, sis?”
“I don’t know. Have to go back.”
“Aaah. You’ll be fine. Gotta get back to your cooking.”
“I’ve got to kill a lobster, though. I’ve got to chop it into bits while it’s still alive. I don’t know if I can handle it.”
“Julie. I’ve watched you brain a mouse against a marble counter before feeding it to a python.”
“That’s your fault.”
“You can kill a bug. Man up, dude.”
Flying back to New York after being in Austin is like being thrown into a pneumatic tube—an airless shuttling, inexorable. No matter how often Eric said, “It’ll be nice to see the cats, won’t it?” I could not be cheered. Homard à l’Américaine awaited.
I didn’t know why I was doing this, I really didn’t. I didn’t want to kill lobsters. Hell, I didn’t want to cook at all. The bleaders would be disappointed, sure, but they’d get over it. I was used to disappointing people. Besides, how had I become so absurdly arrogant as to think that anything I wrote about Julia Child and French cooking on a blog mattered two shits to anybody?
Come on, Julie. You’re a vapid secretary with a butter fetish, and that’s all.
But I couldn’t quit. I couldn’t quit because if I wasn’t cooking, I wouldn’t be the creator of the Julie/Julia Project anymore. I’d just have my job, and my husband, and my cats. I’d be just the person I was before. Without the Project I was nothing but a secretary on a road to nowhere, drifting toward frosted hair and menthol addiction. And I’d never live up to the name I’d been born with, the name I shared with Julia.
Funnily enough, if it weren’t for being a secretary I might never have gotten out of this funk. Because I would never have had the opportunity to field this phone call:
“Hi, I own a business downtown and I wonder if I qualify for business assistance.”
“Well, I can try to help. Where are you located?” I actually had nothing to do with business assistance, but once you started forwarding some person to another department, that person often got shunted around for half an hour, and as often as not wound up back at your phone, none the wiser and pissed to the eyeballs. So it was the unofficial position of the personal assistants to answer all questions they got, even if they had no clue what they were talking about.
“My business is in the seaport, and many of my clients used to work in the towers —”
“The seaport is in the designated Area 1, so you should qualify for full benefits. What you need to do is call —”
“Can I be honest with you?” The woman on the other end of the line had a deep, gravelly voice; she sounded like she’d just finished laughing about something. I was intrigued; can I be honest with you? is not a question you get a lot when you work for a government agency.
“Uh, sure.”
“I own a dungeon. It’s the only dungeon in lower Manhattan. We’ve gotten the NYPD’s Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.”
“The police give out seals of approval?”
“The chief of police told his men, you know, ‘If you want to go to an S and M dungeon, this is the one to go to’ . . .”
I was still sort of just sitting there gaping into my headset when the woman confessed that it wasn’t so much that she needed assistance, business was quite good, actually, but she really did want to expand, and her accountant suggested she should give us a call—
“That is so awesome.” It came out a little belatedly, and rather without the husky cool detachment I might have wished for.
“I know!”
I suppose a breathless awesome was by far a better response than she expected to get in calling a government agency for assistance. It must have taken some guts to call; what if she’d gotten Natalie, the loon with the What-Would-Jesus-Do bracelet? Then again, I guess it takes guts to open an S&M dungeon in lower Manhattan.
We spent a few minutes chatting about the vagaries of the polymorphously perverse lifestyle, culminating in her anecdote—probably the one she keeps for cocktail parties—about the client who once a week comes in with three pairs of clogs and a Riverdance tape: “He lies on the floor naked while we clog dance for him. I can’t clog dance, and I’m an overweight black woman. I look ridiculous. But this is my life, what can I say?” She erupted in a peal of laughter, and I felt a pang of envy. It’s not that I think clog dancing naked for financial analysts is really my bag. But I can’t imagine loving my job. I never have.
Nate popped by my cubicle, as he was wont to do, just as I was hanging up. “Look at Miss Pink Cheeks! You got a secret admirer?”
“What?” I touched my face, felt the heat of a blush. “Oh, no—it’s nothing. What’s up?”
“Just wanted to say congratulations on the article.”
“What article?”
“Didn’t you see it? Christian Science Monitor. Kimmy pulled it up doing her Nexus search this morning.” He handed me a xeroxed page: holy crap. I hadn’t even thought about that reporter since he came to eat Boeuf Bourguignon with us. “Looks like you
r cooking thing is really turning into something.”
Nate was grinning down at me. Press always got him a little high. “One thing, though. There’s not really any need to mention where you work, is there? I mean, it’s not part of the story, right?”
“Um. I guess not. Sorry.”
“No problem. Just for next time.” He gave me a wink and turned to go. “Oh, and hey. I checked out your Web site. Very funny.”
“Oh. Um. Thanks.”
Okay. That made me nervous.
My final victim was another Chinatown denizen. He was spryer than his predecessors, flailing around in his bag for the entire subway ride. Because shivving a dead lobster in the back would be no challenge at all.
I put him in the freezer for a while when I got home, to try to numb him, maybe make it go a little easier, but is there such a thing as an easy vivisection, really? After half an hour or so, while Eric retreated to the living room and cranked up the volume on the TV, I took the lobster out of the freezer and laid him on the cutting board.
JC writes: “Split the lobsters in two lengthwise. Remove stomach sacks (in the head) and intestinal tubes. Reserve coral and green matter. Remove claws and joints and crack them. Separate tails from chests.”
“Well, gosh, Julia, you make it sound easy.”
The poor guy just sat there, waving his claws and antennae gently, while I stood over him, my largest knife poised at the juncture of chest and tail. I took a deep breath, let it out.
It’s like shooting an old, dying dog in the back of the skull—you’ve got to be strong, for the animal’s sake.
“Oh, you’ve shot a lot of dogs in your time, have you?”
Go ahead.
“All right, all right. Okay. One. Two. Three.”
I pressed down, making an incision in the shell where Julia said I could quickly sever the spinal cord.
The thing began to flail.
“He doesn’t seem to think this is particularly painless, Julia.”
Chop it in two. Quickly. Start at the head.
I quickly placed the tip of my knife between its eyes and, muttering “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry,” plunged.