by Julie Powell
Gosh. I suppose Cindy had a point. Things could be worse, I guess. . . .
Julie, on my 30th birthday I was living in a homeless shelter. I made a homemade pizza for the other residents. That was my 30th. All I had to show for my life was that I didn’t have kids and hadn’t dragged them through the hell my life had become.
Ten years later, I had several years as a journalist/editor under my belt, and my family (who I’d avoided like the plague 10 years earlier) threw me a surprise birthday party.
No matter how crappy it seems now . . . it gets better. Somehow, it always gets better. Hang in there, kid.—Chris
Great. So now I’m a fat failure of a thirty-year-old and a pathetically self-involved twit. Maybe this online whining isn’t such a great deal after all.
The other right thing that Eric did was shell out a hundred bucks for tickets to a staged reading of Salomé, which we went to see the night before my birthday.
Now, I understand that most people would consider it an act of unconscionable cruelty to force one’s wife to trek out on a cold and damp April night to watch a reading of possibly the least successful play in history. That’s because most people are not recovering theater geeks whose idea of a good time is watching Al Pacino flouncing about on a stage playing Herod, King of the Jews, as Jerry Stiller. Also, it’s because most people have not discovered the paragon that is David Strathairn.
The best job I ever had was actually an internship at a nonprofit theater organization that paid fifty bucks a week. One of the things that was so very good about it was that I was always getting free tickets, because Theater Is Dead, except for the occasional hit musical version of My Two Dads or whatever, so butts in seats are a real commodity. Nine times out of ten the plays were crap, but I look back on them with fondness, and sometimes even glean advantage from them, as in: “Oh my God! That red-headed guy from the prematurely canceled Joss Whedon outer space-western series was in that godawful thing we saw at the Belasco with Kristen Chenoweth that was open for about a week and a half!”
Now it’s eight years later. There are no free tickets anymore, and in addition to being married and thirty and a secretary at a government agency and engaged in an entirely senseless and probably emotionally damaging quest to cook every recipe in a forty-year-old cookbook, I also have not been to a play in ages.
The other great thing about this internship, by the way, was that I got to meet famous people—well, famous-for-a-theater-geek people, anyway. Once, I was stage-managing a big-deal play reading, and the guy directing managed to snag David Strathairn, an actor I’d seen in several high-minded independent films, as well as in The Firm, as Tom Cruise’s brother, and in Dolores Claiborne, as the father who makes his daughter give him a hand job on a ferry. I’d only been in New York for a month or two, so I didn’t know from celebrities. All I knew was that I would be spending two days in the same room with a wonderful, somewhat famous actor, and that after the reading a party was planned, to which everyone had been asked to bring “a little something.”
It was my first—though not my last—genuine attempt at star fucking, and I was at a disadvantage. I was neither bleached and waxed and giggly, nor thin and well put together in the manner of a William Morris personal assistant. I did know I’d have to forgo my overalls and Ecuadoran wool sweaters—all that awful college stuff I hadn’t yet had the sense to get rid of—for sleek professional wear, dark, respectable, but slightly clingy stuff that doesn’t suggest sex until you’ve already got him thinking that way. What I didn’t know was that that stuff made me look kind of like a William Morris personal assistant—probably the last sort of person David wanted to see one more of, but oh well.
I played it cool. I handed out scripts and took notes and sat at the table with all the actors, listening to them rehearse. I spoke only rarely, when I was sure I had something subtly amusing and self-evidently intelligent to say, and then I used a voice understated but clear, maybe just a bit smoky. Also, I stared. And I’m not going to apologize for it, either. There was no horseshit, no looking away and tittering, not me, boy. I was bold. I let him have it—all the power of my quiet but searing sexuality, right between the eyes. I stared when he was rehearsing, and when he was taking a break from rehearsing. I stared when I handed him his sides, and I stared, most of all, when I had to pass him in the conveniently narrow halls of the old church the theater organization was housed in.
So okay. David Strathairn is a fabulously talented and gorgeous minor movie star, he probably gets this kind of thing all the time. There are lots of starey-eyed sluts in the world, and many of them are shaped more like Gwyneth Paltrow than I am. But I had something those other girls didn’t have. I had Spiced Pecan Cake with Pecan Icing.
I got my recipe for Spiced Pecan Cake with Pecan Icing from the great Paul Prudhomme, so of course it is divine and lust-inducing. First you coarsely chop pecans for the cake batter. (At the time of this incident I owned nothing approximating a nut chopper, and so accomplished this step with a large rubber mallet.) Roast them on a baking sheet for ten minutes. Sprinkle with a mixture of melted butter, brown sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Roast another ten minutes. Add vanilla, creating a pleasant hiss and whoosh of sweet-smelling steam. Roast for a final five minutes. Chop pecans for the icing, finely this time. It goes on like this.
(Yes, it is a royal pain in the neck. But there is something intensely erotic in making elaborate, nearly impossible food for someone you’d like to have sex with.)
(In my experience.)
(Okay, I’ll be honest—I detect more than a whiff of masochism here. I’m not entirely comfortable with this revelation about my character, but there it is.)
I finished the sucker a little after two a.m., was in bed by two-thirty. I drifted off in an exhausted, sugary sweat, the taste of icing still on my lips. Just what I’d taste when David, after one bite, took me in his arms and kissed me with all the consuming passion that Spiced Pecan Cake with Pecan Icing can kindle in a man’s soul.
When I awoke, I clothed myself in a freshly pressed, black Banana Republic suit with a draping, mannish cut of the sort that would hang so much more beguilingly off the frame of someone shaped like Gwyneth Paltrow. My statuesque three layers of cake wore only a gauzy layer of plastic wrap.
The day passed in an anxious blur—in my memory it’s as if I stepped straight off the subway into the shabby library where the postreading party was in full swing.
David was sipping from a plastic cup of cheap red wine and surveying the buffet table. I held my breath as his knife hovered a moment over the store-bought apple pies and pans of Duncan Hines brownies before plunging deep into the center of my Spiced Pecan Cake with Pecan Icing. I stood at a discreet distance near the far corner of the table, nearly panting as he cut a thick slice, lifted it onto a plate, and sank a plastic fork through the voluptuous layer of icing to the moist cake beneath.
His eyes grew wide as he slid the cake into his mouth, then narrowed to slits as he swallowed. He moaned, softly. “Delicious. . . . Julie, where did you get this?”
It was the first time he had spoken my name.
“I made it,” I replied, simply.
Our eyes locked. And he saw that this Spiced Pecan Cake with Pecan Icing could be a mere taste of ecstasy to come. In that moment, David Strathairn fell in love with me, a little.
But David Strathairn is a fine, upright man, a man who loves his wife, a man who would never take advantage of the young and innocent girl he (quite mistakenly) took me for. So no, he did not take me into his arms and cover my face with tiny angel kisses. He did not press me down onto the table laden with crappy merlot and celery sticks, did not slide those long, strong fingers under my Banana Republic suit and blouse to the soft, sweet flesh at the base of my spine. Instead, he whispered, in a voice grown husky under the weight of suppressed desires, “This. Is. Wonderful.”
And took another bite of cake.
I have never hidden from Eric the culinary pass I made at
David Strathairn, and he, to his everlasting credit, has managed—for the most part, anyway—not to resent me for it. He even knew that when I was so near the end of my rope, what with the frozen pipes and the dozen leg-of-lamb recipes awaiting me and the horrid job and, most of all, the whole turning-thirty thing, I just needed an emergency Strathairn shot. So he got us the tickets (even though Al Pacino was one arrogant son of a bitch to charge fifty bucks for tickets to a reading, for God’s sake, and one that would almost certainly suck) just because David Strathairn was in it and his wife was in love with David Strathairn. Which is why Eric is the most generous and selfless husband a woman could have.
Getting to watch Marisa Tomei do the dance of the seven veils did make it all go down easier for him.
I blame Eric. It was only because of him that I started cooking in the first place—I was a picky kid, but he was the most mysterious and beautiful boy in school, and I would cook anything to impress him, no matter how weird. It didn’t take long for things to get twisted.
Quail in Rose Petal Sauce was the first really bad sign.
It was the summer before I went off to college, Eric and I had just started dating, and the biggest terror of my life was that as soon as I headed up to the Northeast for school, he’d get snapped up by some cute blonde model-looking girl—actually, I was pretty sure one particular blonde already had her eye on him. On one of our dates we went to see Like Water for Chocolate, which when you’re under the age of twenty and madly in lust can be a fairly persuasive film. I had already read the book, and after we’d gotten out of the theater and I jumped him in the parking lot, and after he drove me home and I practically swallowed the poor boy before finally getting ahold of myself and saying good night, I went back to my room and, entirely unable to sleep, pulled it down off the shelf.
The book Like Water for Chocolate is interspersed with recipes that I at that time had no way of knowing were largely literary, i.e., fictional. As I flipped idly through the volume, it came to me: I’ll make quail in rose petal sauce! That’s it! He won’t be able to keep his hands off me, and he’ll never think about that blonde again!
The hormones had me addled, I guess.
I used roses from a bin at the 7-Eleven and papaya instead of pitaya. When I tasted the sauce, it seemed pretty inedible to me, but I figured I was so picky I might be totally wrong, so I called my brother in to give a second opinion. The look on his face was enough to make me burst spontaneously into tears. But Eric couldn’t keep his hands off me that night, even if I did taste like pizza instead of delectable game birds, and it turned out he never really did think too much about that blonde.
In coming years there were further disasters as well as, eventually, some modest successes. My first gumbo was aborted after a plastic spoon died in the roux, and the barbecued pastrami didn’t work out so well, but by the time I graduated from college I could turn out a mean chicken-fried steak.
Somewhere along the way, I discovered that in the physical act of cooking, especially something complex or plain old hard to handle, dwelled unsuspected reservoirs of arousal both gastronomic and sexual. If you are not one of us, the culinarily depraved, there is no way to explain what’s so darkly enticing about eviscerating beef marrowbones, chopping up lobster, baking a three-layer pecan cake, and doing it for someone else, offering someone hard-won gustatory delights in order to win pleasures of another sort. Everyone knows there are foods that are sexy to eat. What they don’t talk about so much is foods that are sexy to make. But I’ll take a wrestling bout with recalcitrant brioche dough over being fed a perfect strawberry any day, foreplay-wise.
(Julia too started learning to cook because of a man—Paul Child was quite a gourmand when she met him, and she didn’t know a thing about food. For a while the war flung them together, but then of course the war ended. Maybe Julia was afraid she couldn’t keep him, and that’s why she began cooking him all sorts of crazy things. I’m particularly impressed by her attempt at calves’ brains in red wine sauce. She had no idea what she was doing, of course, and apparently it turned out just awful—nasty pale shreds in a purplish, lumpy sauce. He married her anyway. I say “anyway,” but I’d bet a dollar he married her because she was the sort of woman to try to seduce him with brains, however badly prepared—because she was willing to risk repulsing him to win him. How utterly illogical of her, and yet how utterly right.)
In honor of his performance as John the Baptist in a $50-a-ticket staged reading of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, I baked David Strathairn absurdly complicated pecan-cornmeal cookies, the recipe for which I got from Martha Stewart. Unfortunately, Martha’s recipes, though suitably complex, fall a tad short if you’re looking for aphrodisiac cooking, perhaps only because everything about a Martha recipe, from the font it’s printed in to the call for sanding sugar, with appended notes on where to find such a thing, simply screams Martha. Wildcat though she may be in bed, for all I know, Martha just isn’t someone you necessarily want in your head when you’re trying to seduce someone. I would rather have made something from the Book, but Julia isn’t much for stalker food—neat nibbles you can leave on a doorstep or send backstage with an usher without risking breakage or messiness. For stalker food, Martha Stewart is the woman to go to.
I can’t imagine anyone—a few of the more repressive Islamic societies aside—who would consider baking an act of adultery. Still, for Eric, knowing what he knew of my proclivities, watching me roll out thin layers of cornmeal dough, sprinkle them with chopped pecans, cinnamon, and melted butter, then lay another layer of dough on top, and repeat over and over with infinite patience, must have been a little bit like noticing I’d gotten a bikini wax and a tight red dress the day before leaving for some business convention in Dallas. He didn’t do anything but roll his eyes and grumble with careful good humor, but he knew what I was doing. I arranged to meet Eric at the theater after work, then got there early, skipping out on work and rushing off into the chill rain, not because I was doing anything illicit, exactly, but because I didn’t want Eric to have to witness me sheepishly slipping the girl in the ticket booth the plate of cookies with the flirtatious note attached, asking if someone could take these backstage for Mr. Strathairn, I was an acquaintance of his.
As it turned out, though, all this was a lot of fuss for not much payback. You see, the problem with John the Baptist in Salomé is that it’s just about the least sexy role in existence. You’d think a part that features being crawled all over by a lithe nymphomaniac would be hot, but the only opportunities David was given were for solemn intoning and hair-gel abuse. It was brutal.
So we were sitting there in the dark watching David intone and Al kvetch and Marisa lithely convulse, and all this excess erotic buzz I’d built up with my cookie baking was spinning around with nowhere to go. My stomach was growling because I hadn’t had any dinner yet, and I found my mind wandering. My mind wandered, specifically, to liver.
Now, this is going to be a stretch for some people, but I believe that calves’ liver is the single sexiest food that there is. This is a conclusion I’ve come to relatively recently, because like almost everyone else on the planet, I’ve spent most of my life hating and despising liver. The reason people despise liver is that to eat it you must submit to it—just like you must submit to a really stratospheric fuck. Remember when you were nineteen and you went at it like it was a sporting event? Well, liver is the opposite of that. With liver you’ve got to will yourself to slow down. You’ve got to give yourself over to everything that’s a little repulsive, a little scary, a little just too much about it. When you buy it from the butcher, when you cook it in a pan, when you eat it, slowly, you never can get away from the feral fleshiness of it. Liver forces you to access taste buds you didn’t know you had, and it’s hard to open yourself to it. I got to thinking that it was a shame Eric had served his liver to me on that particular night, when I was too tired to really take it in—it was a waste of its potential.
When the reading ended—fi
nally—the audience, stretching, slightly dazed, started filing out of the theater, but I remained in my seat. Eric stood over me, palpably irritated by the giddiness he felt coming off me in waves. “I guess you want to wait for him to come out?”
But I wasn’t listening to him. “Is there a decent grocery store around here, do you think?”
“What?”
“I was just thinking about that liver you made me last week. That was really good.”
“Oh yeah?” Eric didn’t know where my thoughts were tending, but it was enough that I’d said I liked his cooking. He was sensitive about that. He beamed. “I’m sure we can get some somewhere, if we hurry. It’s early yet.”
And so we left the theater, stepping back out into a warmer night. The freezing rain had stopped, and suddenly in the air was a softness, as if spring might someday come after all. We walked toward the subway, setting a good pace. As we came alongside a man in a forest-green Polartec jacket, I turned to him, too anxious for some liver to be shy. “Excuse me—do you know —”
It was David Strathairn. He held a pecan cornmeal cookie in one gloved hand, and there were crumbs in his scraggly beard. He had a distracted, faraway look in his eye. “I’m sorry?”
“Oh—Mr. Strathairn—I’m so sorry to bother you. We just saw your show. It was—great.”
He waved his cookie dismissively in the air, then took a bite of it. “Oh, thanks.” He looked at me, and a curious expression blossomed. “You were asking me something?”
“Oh, just if you knew of a grocery store around here.”