by Julie Powell
Jude had been writing more poems for Isabel—and not exactly violets-are-blue stuff either. These overheated missives Isabel promptly shared not only with her entire e-mail list, but with Martin as well. “Well, I just think they’re brilliant, don’t you?” Martin, Isabel reported, had had no reaction.
The mind reels.
Her next e-mail to me on the subject was the one I had been waiting for, and dreading:
I really, really like Jude, and I can’t wait to meet him, but this ISN’T just ABOUT Jude, and it ISN’T just about being BORED or something. And so I think I’ve nearly almost decided that regardless of how it works out with Jude, I’m going to ask Martin for a divorce.
As I’d feared, the great abyss was opening up under Isabel’s feet, while I just mm-hmed away.
I got one last e-mail from her the morning she got on the plane to fly to England. She’d told Martin where she was going and why. He was heartbroken, of course. He asked if she’d go to counseling with him to try to save the marriage, but she refused. “I don’t want to save the marriage,” she told him. “I don’t want to be married to you anymore.” I’m sure she said this very kindly. Isabel is a kind person. But the cruelty of it took my breath away and left me with an icy spot in my chest, a fear that wasn’t just for her. Isabel said she had to be cruel to rescue her life. I understood rescuing your life, and how much you might be willing to sacrifice to do it. But I thought of Eric and me, twisted away from each other in our double bed at night, exhausted and cold and smelling of too much French food, and I wondered if it was worth it. I wondered if, in fact, rescuing our lives was really what we were doing.
Our beloved former mayor Rudolph Giuliani once maintained that the progress of civilization is all about keeping excrement off the walls. It is an interesting point, but I must respectfully differ. As far as civilization goes, it’s all about the running water. When ours returned at 8:30 on Tuesday morning, after an eighty-four-hour absence, Eric and I felt like humans again. And it wasn’t just for the sake of a long, hot, thawing shower that we called in sick that day.
As for the Bitch Rice, I wound up abandoning it without coming to a definitive opinion on its merits. I didn’t go out and buy myself a rice cooker, either. Not that I have anything against them. I just didn’t want to go to Chinatown. I had some bad associations there. At this point I’m like the Switzerland of rice—not going to make any firm stands on the matter, but for the moment boiling Uncle Ben’s in a pot is good enough for me.
On the day that Isabel got on a plane to England for her week’s worth of monkey sex with some Brit punk she’d never met, I found myself thinking about her odd theory of the Rice Veil. And I began to get what she was saying. Within this world maybe there are divides that, once crossed, separate people from one another, as surely as if they were in different universes. Once someone begins to use a Japanese rice cooker, perhaps she can never go back. But perhaps this barrier she has passed through is transparent; perhaps she can look back at her former companions in the shadowy world of Those Who Cook Their Rice in Pots with bemusement and contempt. For a while, Isabel and I were together on this side—not of the Rice Veil but of another curtain. Then in her search to save herself, Isabel, either inadvertently or in resolute decision, crossed over. For a while—maybe as I screeched at Eric that night after too many waterless days, too much cold, too much cooking—I looked across and saw that I might follow her. Then morning came, the water came on, I made love to my husband who is also my partner, and the curtain closed, with Isabel forever on the other side. Maybe that’s what Isabel meant by a veil.
Or maybe I just worry too much.
Warning
Do not attempt any dessert calling for a mold lined with ladyfingers unless you have ladyfingers of premium quality—dry and tender, not spongy and limp. Inferior ladyfingers, unfortunately the only kind usually available in bakeries, will debase an otherwise remarkable dessert.
— Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1
HELL AND DAMNATION, is all I can say. WHY DID WE EVER DECIDE TO DO THIS ANYWAY?
— Letter from Julia Child to Simone Beck, July 14, 1958
DAY 221, RECIPE 330
Sweet Smell of Failure
The Project is over. We can’t do this anymore.” I looked down at the floor, at the spattering of half-crushed cauliflower and mangled watercress there. I looked at the food mill falling in crumpled, bright pieces from my fingers, limply resting on my splayed thighs. I looked up into my husband’s face, his eyes dark and stern.
“You . . . think?”
The Project is over.
I thought I had never heard words so beautiful in all my life.
It had started out okay, if any scenario involving going to work on a Sunday to do data entry can be considered “okay.”
Imagine voting in an election. Only imagine that when you step into the booth, instead of a butterfly ballot or a Diebold black box computer, and a series of simple choices to make—Yes or No on Proposition 12; Democrat, Libertarian, or Pure Evil—you find a cheerful, shiny brochure with “We Want To Hear From You!” splashed across its cover. Imagine opening it and seeing inside a series of questions, designed to get at the nuances of your positions on a variety of issues: the soundness of architectural schemes, the philosophical underpinnings of memorial design, the social implications of various economic initiatives. Imagine that below each of these questions are several ruled lines for you to fill in as you wish, and that you have been handed a nice blue ballpoint pen, with my government agency’s logo printed on it, that’s yours to keep.
Sounds nice, doesn’t it? Makes you feel a part of the democratic process, doesn’t it? Makes you feel like your thoughts are valuable.
Yeah, well. Now take an extra moment to imagine what happens to all those carefully considered words. Imagine them being painfully deciphered—a lot of you have really shitty handwriting—and entered—not scanned in but typed, letter by letter, with every single typo intact—into an enormous computer program. By young and underpaid women, because in addition to passing out Kleenex and hugging strangers, another thing that male recent Ivy League graduates don’t like to do is data entry. That’s thirty thousand of these brochures, we’re talking. Throw in a constantly crashing server and the fact that they don’t turn on the heat in the office on the weekends, and you’ve got the makings of a twenty-first-century Triangle Shirtwaist fire disaster.
I took comfort in the fact that at least I wasn’t the one responsible for designing a program capable of incorporating such helpful comments as “Please make five towers each a different color, white, black, brown, yellow, and red, to represent all the races of those who died,” and “ALL This Shit SUCK!!!!” into a cohesive analysis appropriate for distribution at board meetings.
So anyway, I did my share of data entry for the day and headed home, stopping by the grocery store for supplies for that night’s dinner. I was making plain broiled chicken with Sauce Diable and Chou-Fleur en Verdure (puree of cauliflower and watercress with cream). Sauce Diable is an enrichment of Sauce Ragoût, a classic brown sauce, a sauce to make one feel virtuous and steady and French. The cauliflower and watercress puree, too, had the whiff of authenticity, I thought. So anticipation had me feeling warm and happy. I got off the subway in Queens that afternoon at a stop I usually don’t, an elevated station, and as I stood there a moment on the platform, taking in the unusually warm day, the tender blue sky, the skyline of Manhattan stretching out before me, I thought, “See, New York ain’t so bad.”
Ha.
Sauce Ragoût must cook for at least two hours, so I started with it as soon as I got home. Since I had no spare chicken carcasses lying about, I’d picked up some chicken wings and gizzards with which to enrich the sauce. I began by browning them, with some chopped carrot and onion, in butter and lard. Only I put too many chicken parts in the pot at once, so they didn’t brown very well. I was only able to get them sort of stiff and yellow before I took them out
and made a lightly browned roux with some flour and the fat in the pot before pouring in several cups of boiling beef broth, some vermouth, and a bit of tomato paste. I put the chicken back in, along with thyme, a bay leaf, and a few sprigs of parsley. I was now going to just let that simmer for a good long while. Smelled great. No problem.
Next up, ladyfingers, for the Charlotte Malakoff aux Fraises. I’d made ladyfingers before; I’d made a Malakoff before. I couldn’t imagine that this would give me too much trouble. I serenely measured out my powdered sugar, my granulated sugar, my cake flour, sifted. I separated my three eggs; I buttered and floured my cookie sheets.
“You must be particularly careful to obtain a batter which will hold its shape,” JC writes. “This means expert beating and folding.” So there’s a trick to it; it’s all right, I’m a tricky girl. And I’d done this before, it was a snap. I beat the granulated sugar into the egg yolks, then added vanilla. I beat the egg whites until stiff with a pinch of salt and a bit more sugar. Then I scooped a quarter of the egg whites on top of the egg yolks, and sifted a quarter of the flour on top of that. One quarter at a time, I folded the ingredients together with a light hand, so the batter wouldn’t deflate, then spooned it all into a pastry bag.
I began squooshing out lines of ladyfinger batter onto the cookie sheet. Now, pastry bags and I don’t really get along, and this batter was quite sticky, so at first I thought I was just experiencing the initial bumps of a rapid learning curve. But soon it became obvious that something was seriously wrong. The batter just puddled out over the cookie sheets, and though the recipe was supposed to make twenty-four ladyfingers, I only ended up with maybe fifteen. The whole “expert beating and folding” thing had clearly not happened.
I was beginning to get a very bad feeling about this, but what was there to do but carry on? I sprinkled on a thick layer of powdered sugar. JC said I could remove the excess by turning the pans upside down and tapping them gently, that the ladyfingers would stay in place.
You know the old joke? “Guy walks into a doctor’s office with a duck stuck to his head. Doctor asks, ‘What can I do for you?’ Duck says, “Get this guy off my ass!’” This was like that. Tap the upside-down cookie sheets, and half the ladyfingers fall off, but the excess powdered sugar sticks like a charm. Just the opposite of what I was expecting, see? Ba-DUM-bump.
I stuck the sad remains of my broken ladyfingers in the oven. When I checked them twelve minutes later they were, to my utter lack of surprise, a mess. The powdered sugar had caramelized and blackened into a sucking tar pit in which my ladyfingers languished like so many sunk mastadons.
That would have been enough to call a halt to the whole Malakoff fiasco right there if only Eric, cheery fucking Eric, had not chosen that moment to grow a work ethic on my behalf. “I’ll bet they’ll still work. Sure they will! Don’t give up!”
Oh, fine.
So I pried off a few of the cookies, even managing not to break a few of them, and set them on a rack to cool. I hulled some strawberries and mixed up the orange liqueur and water I was supposed to dip the ladyfingers in before lining the soufflé mold with them.
Lining the soufflé mold involved cutting the ladyfingers into small puzzle pieces so they’d fit precisely inside the bottom and sides. It was entirely obvious that I didn’t have enough ladyfingers, but I tried anyway. I dipped the carefully trimmed ladyfinger-puzzle-pieces in the orange liqueur mixture, then pressed the resulting disintegrating sugary clay up against the sides of the mold.
It was getting late; the Sauce Ragoût would be done soon, and I hadn’t even started on the cauliflower and watercress puree. I put a pot on to boil. I trimmed my cauliflower and my watercress.
Back to the Malakoff recipe I flipped.
The Malakoff required half a pound of unsalted butter. I did not have half a pound of unsalted butter. I did not have half a pound of any kind of butter at all.
Balls to this.
The hulled strawberries went back into the fridge; ditto, the soufflé mold with ladyfinger mush. I threw the cauliflower into the pot of boiling water, then, after a few minutes, the watercress. Drained it all as soon as the cauliflower was tender.
There were so many dishes in the sink. So very, very many dishes. My husband had done nothing else for nearly six months but wash dishes. Just as I had done nothing but screw up my ladyfingers.
How had it gotten to be nearly ten o’clock at night? I was so tired. The next day’s data entry loomed in my increasingly fretful mind. I dug my food mill out from the pile of sticky appliances erupting out of the pantry. It had been a Christmas present from my mother-in-law; I’d never used it before. How was I supposed to put the damned thing together, anyway? Oh, there we are.
I put the cauliflower and watercress in the mill, over a bowl, and began to crank.
No. No. This was wrong.
I dumped the cauliflower and watercress out into another bowl, now just another dirty dish. I tried again to put the food mill together. No. No. Can’t make it fit. Just. Can’t. Make it. Fit.
You can insert the hideous collapse here. You’ve heard them before. Suffice it to say, this was worse. The granddaddy. The Krakatoa. The End of the Fucking World.
In the blogverse, an ominous silence. Crickets. Then:
. . . So what happened?! Oh God, the suspense is killing me!
Slowly, the faithful gathered in vigil.
Julie? Are you there? You’re not going to quit, are you? It can only get better from here. And think of the dark void that would overcome our world if you quit now.—Chris
None of the rest of us out here are ever going to make 1/8 the recipes in any cookbook in our whole lifetimes. We love the Project, but my God! What about one dish a day? Like peas on Tuesday, chicken on Wednesday, ladyfingers on Saturday? It doesn’t have to be all or nothing is what I am saying. Just do your best. We are all behind you—and you, too, Eric!—Pinky
Take two weeks and stay far from the kitchen. Do dishes for Eric. Eat takeout. This isn’t a quest for self-improvement; it’s a death march.—HandyGirl5
. . . Can you give yourself an extension? . . .
. . . Can you take a vacation? . . .
. . . Take care of yourself . . .
If only you wouldn’t use f*** so much—it adds nothing.—Clarence
Is it love, or is it Memorex? I don’t know—the World Wide Web is a tricky animal. All I know for sure is that Sauce Ragoût can keep for a day very easily. Which is why I was able to wait until the next day to strain it and cook it down with some vermouth and a generous amount of pepper to make a luscious Sauce Diable to go over my broiled chicken.
Oh, and I also know that when you’ve gotten a night of sleep, no matter how tear-stained, and then some bolstering from people who love you—or “love” you, or whatever—even if they’re people you’ve never met, sometimes the end of the world doesn’t seem like that anymore. Like the end, I mean. Which is why the next night I was able to puree my cauliflower and watercress with the potato ricer instead of a food mill, make up a béchamel sauce with all the élan of someone born with the stuff coursing through her veins, and bake it all up with some cream and cheese into an insanely delicious white-and-green-and-golden mush that went with my chicken and Sauce Diable just perfectly.
End of the Fucking World? No problem.
HOORAY—I never had a doubt. In fact, I wanted to say I was ASHAMED of all those people yesterday, telling you to take a break. To imply you’re made of anything less than the steeliest stuff is just a travesty! I was going to say, no! no! Don’t listen to them! Soldier on! For that is the kind of stuff you’re made of, soldier stuff (I’m starting to make myself laugh, here). But seriously—people need to understand that since there’s only a handful of people who could, physically and mentally, even ATTEMPT what you’re doing, that means you HAVE to do it. The romance of the death march should be an obvious thing to your faithful readers, and the great thing is that you won’t die at the end (knock wood . . .
). Hugs and Puppies, Isabel.
What she said . . .—Henry
So the next thing that happened started with some hot sauce.
The delivery guy left them downstairs in the diner; Papa Johnny, who owned the place—everybody literally calls him Papa Johnny, it’s adorable—waved me down as I was coming home from work. “I got for you,” he called, beckoning me inside. He pointed at two boxes on the counter, one a little bigger than a shoebox, the other bigger than a hatbox and very light. “For you.”
I carried them upstairs and ripped them open right away. In one box: an enormous bag of authentic Texas-style tostito chips, cushioned by great quantities of Styrofoam peanuts. In the other: three jars of Religious Experience. Medium, Hot, and “The Wrath.”
Dear Julie,
I hope you don’t mind me sending this along. You mentioned that Religious Experience is your favorite brand of hot sauce, and I figured this might come in handy the next time your food mill flies into a rage.
Best Wishes,
A Fan from Texas
I suppose I could have wasted time worrying about how easily a random person had tracked down my home address. I suppose I could have been creeped out. But I’m telling you, Religious Experience hot sauce is the best.
When I mentioned this unexpected manna from heaven on the blog, a few other people began to get ideas.
From Oregon I got a picture book with food made up to look like cute animals and a Phillip Pullman novel.
From Louisiana I got filé powder and a Ziploc bag full of dried rosemary from a fan’s garden.
From LA I got a bar of Scharffen Berger chocolate, some ancho mustard, and a messenger bag that was made especially for the cast and crew of Laurel Canyon, a movie I love because—seriously?—girl-on-girl action just doesn’t get any better than Fran-McDormand-on-Kate-Beckinsale.