by Julie Powell
Oh God. Oh God.
Clear blood leaked off the edges of the cutting board onto the floor as the lobster continued to flail vigorously, despite the fact that its head was now chopped neatly in two. The muscles in its chest gripped at the blade, so that the knife’s hilt trembled in my hand. I sawed away at the thing, managing to get about halfway through before I had to leave the room for a bit to clear my head.
But I think perhaps I’m approaching a Zenlike serenity when it comes to crustacean murder, because when I reentered the kitchen to the sight of the giant thing pinned to the cutting board with a huge knife, still squirming, instead of being horrified by man’s inhumanity to lobster, I just giggled. It really was pretty amusing when you thought about it.
Laughter through nausea is my favorite emotion, and after that, things got easier. In not too much time I had the thing cut into four pieces, plus detached claws. I cleaned out the intestines and “green matter,” which looked more like an organ when it was unsteamed. The pieces of the thing kept twitching throughout, even keeping on awhile after I threw them into hot oil.
My final victim was sautéed with carrots, onions, shallots, and garlic, doused with cognac, lit on fire, then baked in an oven with vermouth, tomato, parsley, and tarragon, and served atop rice. I arranged the rice into a ring on a plate, as Julia asked. I’ve committed brutal murder for the woman, why not make a rice ring? I piled the lobster pieces in the middle and ladled the sauce over. “Dinner’s served.”
Eric overcame his momentary horror at being presented with a heap of mutilated lobster and dug in. “I suppose it’s no worse to eat an animal you killed yourself instead of one they kill in the factory. Maybe it’s better.”
“It’s true.” I took a bite of lobster meat with rice. It was quite tasty. “Arguing the morality of slaughter will send you into a tailspin of self-loathing every time.”
“Unless you’re a vegan.”
“Uh-huh. But then you’re a vegan, and you don’t count. Hey, have you read about how they slaughter chickens? See, they hang them upside down on this conveyor belt with their little feet clamped in manacles, and —”
“Julie, I’m eating here.”
“Or what about pigs? And pigs are way smart.”
“But —” Eric jabbed his fork in the air rhetorically. “Does the intelligence of the creature have any bearing on its right and desire to live?” Eric had already finished his first serving of Homard à l’Américaine and was reaching for his second.
“George Bush would say no.”
“So, the question is, is George Bush a vegan?”
“No, the question is—wait, am I turning into George Bush? Oh God!”
“I think we’re getting a little confused. Let’s just eat.”
“Oh, hey, I just remembered—I forgot to tell you about this crazy call I got at work today.”
So sometimes I’m irritated by my husband, and sometimes I’m frustrated. But I can think of two times right off the top of my head when it’s particularly good to be married. The first is when you need help with killing the lobsters. The second is when you’ve got an inspirational story to relate regarding a large African American woman who runs an S&M dungeon. I told it to him as we sopped up the last of the buttery lobster juice with some hunks of French bread.
“That’s great.”
“I know, I know!” I knew of no one else I could have told who would have understood the joy this story brought me.
“It just makes you happy, thinking about the possibilities out there.”
He didn’t mean the possibilities of getting naked ladies to clog dance for him, or at least he didn’t only mean that. He meant that sometimes you get a glimpse into a life that you never thought of before. There are hidden trap doors all over the place, and suddenly you see one, and the next thing you know you’re flogging grateful businessmen or chopping lobsters in half, and the world’s just so much bigger than you thought it was.
So that night I made my New Year’s resolution, better late than never: To Get Over My Damned Self. If I was going to follow Julia down this rabbit hole, I was going to enjoy it, by God—exhaustion, crustacean murder, and all. Because not everybody gets a rabbit hole. I was one lucky bastard, when you came down to it.
January 1946
Bucks County, PA
When he got to the bit about Bartleman in her letter, Paul choked on his wine chuckling, thinking without too much regret that perhaps he had been a corrupting influence on little Julie, after all. He’d not been sure it was right to tell her about the astrologer’s predictions—he knew she was in love with him, and Bartleman didn’t seem to think the two of them had much of a future. He’d thought she might be hurt. But he should have known. Julie wasn’t about to let herself get deflated by some honey with a star chart and a few solemn intonations.
Charlie’s wife, Freddie, called up. “Paul? We’ve got dinner on!”
“I’ll be right down—just finishing reading a letter!”
Sometimes Paul wondered if he was leading the poor girl on—for a girl was how he thought of Julie still. An unsophisticated, charming, excitable girl. Paul had never before allowed himself to become involved with someone so unformed, so unsure of herself. Still, it was a fact that Paul missed her far more than he’d imagined he would when he left China.
In Julie’s letter, she boldly asked him to come out to visit her in Pasadena. And after dinner that night, a lovely roast lamb, he sat down and wrote a letter to tell her that he would. He didn’t know yet that he’d decided to marry her, but he had.
DAY 198, RECIPE 268
The Proof Is in the Plumbing
There are many ways of arriving at plain boiled or steamed rice, and most cooks choose one which best suits their temperaments. We find the following to be a foolproof system.
— Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1
Let me say first that I’m fully aware that simply copping to the fact that I possess a half bath is liable to completely obliterate any chance I ever had for sympathy among my fellow non-hideously-rich New Yorkers. (My mother would call it a “powder room,” but use that term in a room of frustrated apartment dwellers and see who gets lynched.)
Also, to be fair to the vile black shit that began spewing from the sink in the half bath one Monday in February, it really was just the capper on an independently miserable day. It started with the leftover Charlotte Malakoff au Chocolat I’d made over the weekend. I’d even made my own ladyfingers to put in it, because Julia warns that store-bought ladyfingers will “debase an otherwise remarkable dessert.” Debase. Jesus, Julia, no pressure or anything. So I made my own, which was a trial in itself, then soaked them in Grand Marnier and tried to line the charlotte mold with them. (Who could possibly guess a year ago that I would be the kind of person to own a charlotte mold?) But they just sagged down until they were bent over at the waist like sad little swooning ladies. Well, the finished product came out looking like an as-is discounted Baskin-Robbins cake. And maybe it was debased by the crappy ladyfingers—I wouldn’t know, being rather the debased sort myself—but it was chocolatey and sweet and creamy and cold. Pretty damned good, actually. Good enough that I didn’t want it sitting around in my refrigerator to tempt me. So early in the morning of this very bad day I wrapped up the leftover Charlotte Malakoff in waxed paper, set it in a ceramic soufflé dish, and put the dish in a big H&M shopping bag. Just as I was finishing up this operation, the radio news reported that one of the two subway lines out of my station was not going into Manhattan due to track damage. Staff meeting at nine o’clock, of course.
You can probably guess how this ends, right? As I climbed out of the Cortlandt Street stop across from the office, late and sweaty and hurrying, yes of course the bottom of the bag gave way abruptly, and of course my Charlotte Malakoff tumbled to the pavement, and of course my ceramic soufflé dish shattered. Of course a freezing rain that stuck in icy clumps in the Mongolian wool of my coat collar was coming down very,
very hard. I picked up my waxed paper-covered Charlotte Malakoff and the pieces of my soufflé dish and rushed into the building, face hot with humiliation. And after I got up to the office and left the heaped remains of charlotte out on the counter of the staff kitchen with a note saying “Please Enjoy!” I had to go to the six Democrats in the office and tell them they might want to take a pass since there might be ceramic shards or antifreeze in it.
Then there was work, which of course is quite bad enough in itself. I signed a confidentiality agreement when I took this job, so I can’t go into details, but I think the fact that bureaucrats are assholes is rather a matter of public record, isn’t it? It’s probably also not top-secret information that dashing back and forth to the community printer down the hall to print out dais cards for the bureaucrats who decided at the very last minute to join the memorial committee meeting when they heard the governor’s people were going to be there is all kinds of annoying. Nor that doing this while at the same time trying to point out to the conscientious but non-English-speaking delivery guy from the caterer where to put the sandwich assortment and cookie plate and coffee urns is even worse.
Then the Turkish grocery near my office was out of the mussels I would need to make the Moules à la Provencale that were next up, and if God wanted me to wander around Chinatown in February he’d have let that hormonal syndrome of mine go ahead and grow me an even layer of blubber and a thick waterproof pelt, like a seal, instead of just unruly eyebrows, Fu Manchu whiskers, and unsightly bulges of butter fat. And who wanted to eat mussels anyway, which I don’t even like, when it was about thirty degrees below zero in our apartment? And when I made it home, mussel-less, Eric was watching the NewsHour instead of washing the dishes that were overflowing in the kitchen sink and spread over the floor.
“It’s not my fault,” he protested moodily before I even started sighing and stomping around. “The sink isn’t draining right. We need to get some Drano.”
I kicked off my awful shoes and retreated to the half bath, perhaps to powder my nose.
The sound that came out of my mouth when I stepped into the room cannot be exactly reproduced in print, but it went something like:
“Aihohmafug? AewwkrieeeeeshitEw. Ew. Ew!!!”
The vile black shit wasn’t actual shit. It was something far more disturbing. Bits of rice and parsley drifted about in it, and floating puddles of what I can only imagine was melted butter.
A gimlet is, to my mind, the ideal cocktail, exquisitely civilized and not at all girly, even if it is served in a chilled martini glass and gleams with a pearlescent hint of chartreuse. Philip Marlowe drank gimlets, after all. Gimlets originally were made of a one-to-one ratio of gin to Rose’s lime juice. This was back when gin was made in bathtubs. Most bars now mix it 4:1, which is still convulsively limey, in the Powell opinion. No, it is best for beginners not to mess about with bars at all. Mix yourself one at home instead, with just the barest smidge of Rose’s, well chilled. Eric and I make ours with vodka instead of gin, which many would consider heresy, but we consider perfect. The one he mixed for me after I finished howling wordlessly at the sink in the half bath was a quintessence of a gimlet, enough to make up for any number of unwashed dishes and NewsHours. If Daisy Buchanan’s laugh is the sound of money, then a gimlet, well executed, is the color of it. It is just the thing when you are feeling impoverished, financially or spiritually.
Like, for instance, when the sink in your half bath is spewing vile black shit.
Neither Eric nor I was sufficiently steeled (nor, soon enough, sufficiently sober) to handle plumbing problems that evening; instead, we awoke early the next morning. After Eric made a run to Queensborough Plaza for Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and supplies in the bone-chilling predawn hours, we spent the morning excavating the sink out from under the dishes and, with the aid of four bottles of Drano, coaxing the pipes to take their effluents back to wherever they had come from. Consumed with such, I didn’t manage until that evening to get online to post about my plumbing situation and make excuses for not cooking the previous night. Isabel, though, kept things entertaining in my absence by writing in the comment box the most beautiful single paragraph about Julia Child I have ever read:
God, Julia Child is definitely the all-time coolest person in the world. I just caught her show on TV—I turned it on just as Julia leaned gamely onto her knuckles like some otherworldly primate god of kitchens and good humor, and told the lady she was cooking with, who I didn’t recognize, “I haven’t had cobbler in a coon’s age!” I think it was cobbler, anyway. They’d also made delicious-looking gingerbread, so maybe it was the gingerbread she hadn’t had in so very, very long.
“Julia leaned gamely onto her knuckles like some otherworldly primate god of kitchens and good humor.” I think that if I live to be ninety-one, I may never come up with a sentence more ravishingly true than that one. And Isabel doesn’t even care all that much about Julia Child. She wrote it because she knew how very much I loved Julia Child. I felt an utterly unexpected prickle of teary gratitude. I couldn’t write something ravishing and true about, say, Richard Hell for her. I knew I couldn’t.
That night, after a dinner of Suprêmes de Volaille aux Champignons and Fonds d’Artichauts à la Crème—creamy, as the title would suggest, but not difficult; I had by this time become quite adept at the mutilation of artichokes—I finished my extralong post detailing our eating experience and plumbing woes, then opened up MtAoFC to see what was on for tomorrow’s dinner. And that was when I realized something wonderful.
“Eric, come look!”
Eric was up past his elbows in the dishes he’d not been able to get to the previous night; he poked his head out of the kitchen with a quizzical look. I waved him over. “Come here!”
He came to where I sat at my desk and peered over my shoulder at the book I was holding open for him.
“Mouclades. Yeah?”
I turned the pages, then turned them back again.
“Mouclades, chapter six, mouclades, chapter—oh! You’re finished with chapter five? Finished with fish?”
I grinned up at him. “Mouclades is the last.” I giggled giddily. That was four chapters down—soups, eggs, poultry, and now fish. I’d decided at some point to skip the recipe variations, and the fish sauces all appeared elsewhere in the book, so I really was finished with fish. Yes, those were the shortest chapters, and the simplest, but still, it was evident—progress was being made. I was making my way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I was Mastering the Art of French Cooking! “Let’s get us some mussels!”
The next night Eric and I stood over the sink shucking the mussels from their shells, after I’d steamed them in vermouth flavored with curry, thyme, fennel seed, and garlic. The kitchen smelled divine, the mussels were plump and pink and ruffled as tiny vulvas, or perhaps that comparison was just a reflection of my jaunty mood. The next morning I would inform my bleaders that another chapter had been completed, that 268 recipes had been made, that Julie Powell was well on her way to completing her insane assignment. “Just go ahead and schedule that triple bypass surgery and the stay in the mental hospital. I’m a-comin’!” I crowed to the husband at my side, whom I loved so intensely at that moment I couldn’t shuck straight. When, later, the butter sauce for the mussels began inexplicably to separate, and I hovered delicately over the pot, gingerly adding dashes of ice water, stirring in butter that wanted nothing more than to come out again, Eric stood beside me. I was Tom Cruise hovering with a bead of sweat. I was Harrison Ford in a battered fedora, weighing a bag full of sand in my hands—and Eric understood. He was my partner. It occurred to me, as I beat my rebellious sauce into submission, that my husband was doing more than just enduring this crazy thing I’d gotten myself into, doing more than being supportive. I realized this was his Project, too. Eric wasn’t a cook, and like Isabel, he only cared about JC because I did. And yet, he had become part of this thing. There would be no Project without him, and he would not be the same
without the Project. I felt so married, all of a sudden, and so happy.
My mood was so fine that even Riz à l’Indienne could not spoil it. To make Riz à l’Indienne, you must sprinkle a cup and a half of rice into eight quarts of boiling water—which in this age of environmental crisis can be seen as really very nearly immoral, if you care about that kind of thing. I’m no nut on the subject, but even I blanched as I filled up a stockpot. You boil it for ten minutes, then test it “by biting successive grains of rice.” Julia writes that “when a grain is just tender enough to have no hardness at the center but is not yet quite fully cooked, drain the rice into a colander.” Normally it would be kind of a hoot thinking of Julia Child picking out individual grains of rice from an enormous pot of boiling water, nibbling each one delicately and peering into its center, but I was too busy doing it myself to be amused. After you’ve drained the rice, you have to rinse it under hot water, then wrap it in cheesecloth and steam it for half an hour.
Riz à l’Indienne has got to be the single most willfully obtuse recipe in all of MtAoFC. Wrangling a recalcitrant butter sauce can be a tricky business, certainly, but it doesn’t fill you with the angry sense of futility that consumes you in making Riz à l’Indienne. I guarantee you, you cannot make it without at least once screaming at the open book, as if to Julia’s face, “My God, woman—it’s rice, for fuck’s sake!” Eric, witnessing this, dubbed it “Bitch Rice,” in honor of both the trouble it is to make and the obvious hidden nasty streak in anyone who would ask you to do it.
Still, we wound up eating before nine o’clock that night, for the first time in ages. Eric washed all the dishes; I mixed up some gimlets. I still had a glow on from finishing the fish chapter, and the mussels had been a light meal; for once, I didn’t feel as if I had swallowed a bag of Quikrete for dinner. I sipped my drink. There was a reality show on TV. A pregnant silence settled over the apartment, as we tried to remember: now, what is it, again, that people do when they aren’t cooking?