by Julie Powell
“Let’s see. . . .” He looked up the street with the hand that held his cookie stretched out before him as if to point. He appeared distracted, though, and kept glancing at me with a searching eye. “Two blocks up and one over, I think.”
“Thanks so much. And congratulations.”
I took Eric’s hand and we walked on. “You should have told him who you were. He clearly recognized you.”
I kissed him. “No time. I need me some liver for my birthday.”
One very good and simple recipe for calves’ liver is Foie de Veau à la Moutarde. Just dredge some thick slices of liver in flour and briefly sauté them in hot butter and oil, just a minute or so on each side. Set the seared slices aside while you beat together three tablespoons of mustard, minced shallots, parsley, garlic, pepper, and the bit of fat from the sauté pan, which makes a sort of creamy paste. Schmear this over the liver slices, then coat the slices in fresh bread crumbs. If you have a husband who is mad for you, you can probably get him to whip you up some good fresh bread crumbs in the Cuisinart. Once the liver is well coated with the crumbs, place it in a baking pan, drizzle it with melted butter, and stick it under the broiler for about a minute a side. That’s all there is to it. The crunch of the mustard-spiked crust somehow brings the unctuous smooth richness of the liver into sharp relief. It’s like the silky soul of steak. You have to close your eyes, let the meat melt on your tongue, into your corpuscles.
This is the liver I ate on the last night of my twentysomething life. It was a good way to end the decade.
Someone who doesn’t know the first thing about the sexuality of cooking wrote this about English TV cook Nigella Lawson: “Sex and domesticity. This is the inspired coupling that is Nigella’s invention, a world far removed from the dithering, high-pitched admonitions of Julia Child.”
I read this sentence, which is benighted and offensive to me in about a dozen different ways, in an article from Vanity Fair. Because Vanity Fair publishes photos of its contributors in the front of the magazine, I know that it was written by a woman with a ropy neck who’s had too many glamour treatments, and on the evidence of that sentence alone I would put down good money that she wouldn’t know a beef bourguignon if it was dropped on her head.
It was the morning of my thirtieth birthday; I sat on the toilet with a foam rubber dental tray crammed into my mouth, drooling excess tooth-bleach. (It had so far not been the best of mornings.) So at first I thought I might be overreacting, with these unbidden fantasies of dumping large chunks of beef onto some poor journalist. But luckily Isabel reads Vanity Fair too, and I got this e-mail later that very morning:
Did you read that shitty little piece on Nigella in VF? Did the whole thing stink vaguely of (1) calling Nigella fat many times, quietly, (2) really, really rotten insinuations created by tabloidic placement of blurbs not actually MADE in the copy, and (3) the vaguest hint of anti-Semitism? Yes, IT DID. AND the JC slam didn’t go unnoticed, either. I can’t believe the trash. I’m writing a letter. Ms. Ropy-Neck WISHES she could get half the nooky and general joy in life that Nigella clearly gets.
Amen, thought I. And I thought that Nigella and Julia, Isabel and I knew what sex was really about. We knew sex was about playing with your food and fucking up the sauce from time to time. Sex was about the Spiced Pecan Cake with Pecan Icing. Sex was about learning to stop worrying and love the liver.
One of my favorite JC stories comes from a letter her husband Paul wrote to his brother, Charlie. He tells of sitting in their kitchen in Paris while she boiled cannelloni. She reached into the boiling water—he mentions this astounding feat only in passing, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for his wife to boil herself—and said with a yelp as she pulled out the pasta, “Wow! These damn things are as hot as a stiff cock.”*
I am no Julia Child, though, and my fingers are not asbestos. This I learned when I tried on my thirtieth birthday, not very optimistically, to regain the title of Crepe Queen.
When Julia makes crepes on her television shows, she just flings them up into the air with a sharp pull on the skillet, not unlike the maneuver she uses to roll omelets. I had just assumed that this was a lunatic notion. But after half an hour of shrieking and cursing, scraping up stuck crepes and tossing them in the trash, I stood before my stove, sucking on my fingertips, and thought, Well, why not? What could happen, right?
“Eric! Oh my God, Eric! Come quick!”
Eric had gotten used to hiding out during crepe-making sessions, and he came around the corner into the kitchen only reluctantly, sure he was about to be sucked into a fit of pique. “Yes, honey?”
“Watch this!”
And so Eric stood by my side as with one decisive gesture I flipped my perfect golden crepe into midair and back into the skillet.
“Holy shit, Julie!”
“I know!” I slid the crepe onto a plate, poured out another ladleful of batter.
“That’s amazing!”
I jerked the skillet’s handle, and again, the perfect crepe flipped. “I am a goddess!”
“You sure are.”
“You ain’t seen nothing yet.” I slid the last crepe out of the pan and poured in some cognac and Grand Marnier. I let it heat up for a minute, then poured it atop my beautiful crepes and, with my NASCAR Bic lighter, set them aflame, then crowed, shaking my hand to extinguish a singed hair or two.
My husband cooed as he dug into his plate of delicious flambéed crepes. If there’s a sexier sound on this planet than the person you’re in love with cooing over the crepes you made for him, I don’t know what it is. And that blows Botox and ropy necks all to hell.
November 1948
Le Havre, France
She blew a lazy cloud of cigarette smoke that melted into the mist off the water. “Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“It was a good idea. I mean, it is.” He paced the pier fretfully, staring up at the belly of the ship as if he could lift his car out of it through sheer force of will. “But it’s been nearly two hours. You’d have thought, after all that infernal paperwork —”
“Paul, I was teasing you. Of course it was a good idea. We couldn’t leave the Flash! Take it easy. Look, it’s barely dawn. We have plenty of time. And it’s simply beautiful right here.”
Paul gave his wife a sour sideways look. “You must be the first person in history to call Le Havre beautiful.”
Julie grinned. “So what if I am? I’m in France for the first time. I’m happy! And no manner of gloom-and-doom out of you is going to change that.” She stood and laced her hand in his. He had long ago gotten used to how she towered over him; it made him feel powerful, her height, like one half of a very dynamic duo indeed.
“Look—there she is!” He pointed as the Buick was at last lifted out of the hold by an enormous crane. It swung slightly in its cradle of chains and rubber, the morning light glittering on the drops of condensation scattered across its cobalt skin. It alit on the pier with a gentle bump, and the dockworkers scurried to free it.
“Now, you see there? Can you tell me that isn’t beautiful?”
“It’s beautiful. Now let’s get going. We’ve got a lot of miles before Paris.”
“We are going to eat, aren’t we? I could eat a horse!”
When he kissed her, his lips made a playful smacking noise, and he laughed. He was finally going to be showing his France to Julie. “Darling, when have I ever starved you? There’s a wonderful place in Rouen, we’ll stop there. You are going to eat a real sole meunière, with real Dover sole, and I guarantee you, your life is going to change!” He came around to the passenger door and opened it for her.
“Oh, that’s all right, I don’t expect a fish to change my life, so long as it changes this growl in my stomach.” She climbed in, folding up her legs with the insectile grace of someone used to fitting into spaces too small for her. She rolled down the window and stuck her elbow over the edge, giving the old Buick the kind of hearty pat you’d give to a fa
vorite horse. “Hah hah!” she cried, as Paul got in and started the ignition. “We’re off!”
DAY 340, RECIPE 465
Time to Move to Weehawken
I’m going to bring on a nuclear attack at Times Square with these goddamned shoes, I swear. They’re the shoes I was wearing on September 11, and I had to stand in line at a Payless on Sixth Avenue for a good part of an hour to buy some Keds knockoffs so my feet wouldn’t be bloody stumps by the time I got back to Brooklyn. They’re the shoes with which I trashed the office of the gynecologist who had the misfortune to be the third medical professional in a month to tell me I was pushing thirty and had a syndrome and needed to get knocked up quick if I was going to do it at all. And now this.
One of the few nice things I can say about my cubicle is that it’s near a large window, which is why I didn’t notice at first. I was in the middle of performing a spot-on (if I do say so myself) impersonation of a powerful and contemptible person—whose name I can’t mention because my government agency would sue me—for the amusement of my few Democrat colleagues, when Nate called to us from down the hall. “Hey! Have you got power down there?” I glanced down at my screen, which was dark, and the phone, which for the first time ever was not blinking at all.
“No. Wow.”
Next thing we knew we were all grabbing the flashlights our government agency had given each of us, being rounded up and sent toddling off down pitch-dark halls to the stairwells. We New Yorkers are getting to be hardened evacuation veterans, let me tell you. We laughed and gossiped and speculated idly about terrorist actions as we trundled in a galumphing sort of spiral down the stairs.
Then again, maybe we’re not such experts as all that, because down on the sidewalks a gentle sort of chaos reigned; we knew the whole nearest-exit routine backward and forward, but that congregation point part had eluded us. Other buildings had evacuated too—it looked like electricity was out for a few blocks all around. There was no smoke, no sirens, no wounded people. People milled about, looking a little warm but not too astonished, trying to get through to people on their cell phones and BlackBerries.
Some of us from the office—maybe two dozen all told—hung out across the street, under a sculpture in the shape of a giant red cube with a hole through the middle of it, for twenty minutes or so. Brad from the development department started up a list of people accounted for, though that was a bit of a lost cause. One might consider this the responsibility not of Brad from development but of the president of the government agency. Mr. Kline, though, didn’t make it as far as the congregation point. Instead he hopped into a livery cab, pulling along his favorite program manager, who is twenty years old and gets paid one dollar a year for tax purposes because his father contributed like umpteen million dollars to the New York Republican party. According to later rumor, this program manager then swept our beloved president up to his father’s home on Park Avenue to safely spend the night. That’s what our president was doing while his colleagues stood stranded under a piece of bad corporate sculpture, and I’m so getting sued for this, but you know what? Screw ’em if they can’t take a joke.
And to be fair, there wasn’t a hell of a lot our president could have done, anyway, except demonstrate that he gave a shit about the fact that his secretaries were going to have to walk to the outer boroughs in excruciating shoes. I stood around awhile avoiding the obvious fact of this trek as my colleagues peeled off in pairs and trios. All the good-looking, supercilious Harvard grad junior planners of course had cute tiny apartments in the East Village and could easily amble back on home. Brad and Kimmy were headed up Broadway to the Queensboro Bridge to Queens. I knew I should probably go with them, but I couldn’t bear it. So I stood around alone with a few thousand strangers, thinking about my feet.
(Also—and I didn’t mention this before because it’s rather embarrassing—but under my too-tight dress I was also wearing an extremely binding corset/girdle sort of a thing. I had bought it in college for—God, this part is really embarrassing—a musical theater troupe I was in, because we were performing—this is mortifying—“Like a Virgin.” So it’s a “Like a Virgin” kind of a corset, a black lace bullet-bra thing. I used to wear it because it was kind of sexy in a silly sort of a way, and as a theater geek semireformed I was into the retro bullet-boob look. Since the Project, though, I’ve been wearing it because it’s the only way I can squeeze into a lot of my clothes.)
I guess sometimes sheer discomfort and sartorial dread are the mothers of invention, because as I stood there staring disconsolately at the cute bows on my excruciating navy blue faille pumps, my brain began to churn, winching up some bit of deeply buried information.
F . . . it’s F something . . . eff eff eff . . . fffffee . . . FERRY!!! There’s a FERRY here somewhere, I’m SURE of it!
And so there is—ferry service directly from South Street Seaport in lower Manhattan to Hunter’s Point in Long Island City, a mere dozen blocks from our apartment. It’s a ten-minute ride, quite pleasant really, especially on a breezy summer evening when all the lights have gone out in New York, and a strange gloaming hush has fallen over the city.
Really, it was only the three-hour wait in an unrelenting press of angry Queensers that made me wonder about the five dollars they charged me for the trip.
The posted charge was $3.50, but that’s not what the woman at the entrance ramp stuffing bills into a plastic I Heart NY bag said. A good day for the ferry business, apparently. Or maybe just for one woman with an I Heart NY bag, some brass cojones, and a dream. On the other hand, maybe the extra buck fifty was for the entertainment—sort of a waterside musical chairs sort of a thing. For three hours, a diminutive Latina woman stood on a bench like a camp director, with her hands cupped around her mouth, yelling things like:
“Queens!!! Queens, slip SIX!”
“Everybody going to Queens, Slip TWO, slip TWO!”
“Slip TWELVE. Queens, slip TWELVE!”
We’d obediently shuffle back and forth from one slip to another, secretaries of every color and creed, shoulder to shoulder, our shoes in our hands, at least one of us gasping in a stupid too-tight corset, and just when we’d gotten to whatever slip the small Latina woman had just called out, a boat would arrive—bound for Weehawken. Big bald burly security men would appear out of nowhere, screaming, “Move back! Move back!” and Queensers would part like a howling Red Sea before a neat file of Wall Street analysts and soccer moms. Why did this woman do this to us? Because watching thousands of exhausted working-class people lumbering around like confused cattle is fun, I guess.
The Weehawken ferry arrived, I kid you not, every five minutes. I timed it. It’s the kind of thing you do while you’re being herded about by a suddenly empowered ferry toll collector for three hours. The population of Weehawken Township, as of the 2000 census, is 13,501. This means, by my calculations, that every man, woman, and child of Weehawken was in lower Manhattan on August 14—twice.
All kidding aside. I’ve no ambitions to the office of Homeland Security, believe me. But Mr. Secretary, sir? It seems to me that perhaps it might have occurred to someone sometime during the past two years that ferries might come in awfully useful in Manhattan for evacuation in the event of, I don’t know, a nuclear explosion or something. Are bullhorns such a strain on the nation’s security budget? Have they just decided that everyone who doesn’t have a livery cab waiting for them at the time is expendable?
One sort of fun thing did happen, though. We were being pushed back in a crush to make way for another load of fleeing Weehawken citizens—I think it was at Slip Five. There were, of course, plenty of reasons in this situation why someone might be saying “excuse me” over and over, so it did not at first occur to me that the woman a few bodies over to my left might be saying it to me. But she kept on saying it, with increasing urgency, until I looked up. She was looking right at me, but I couldn’t figure out what I could be doing to attract her attention—I was too far away from her to be stepping on he
r foot.
“Um, yes?”
“Are you Julie Powell? Of the Julie/Julia Project? I saw your picture in Newsday.”
(I know, I know, I didn’t mention that I had my picture in Newsday. It’s just such an awkward thing to bring up. How does one broach the subject of being photographed cooking dinner in one’s crappy Long Island City apartment, without sounding like a vain, pretentious jerk? Anyway, it was no big deal, really. Sort of a fluke.)
“Oh. Yes, I’m Julie. Hi!”
“I just wanted to say I’m a big fan. And I live in Long Island City too!” The girl was young, pretty, probably had a much better job than I did. She seemed nice.
“Oh, thanks! Thank you.”
All the secretaries around us were beginning to take notice of this conversation; they peered at me curiously. My goodness—I was a celebrity! It felt great. Unfortunately, I didn’t have anything else to say. I just nodded some more and grinned vacuously, and the next time we got ushered to another slip, I unobtrusively shifted to another part of the crowd. I’d be a really terrible famous person.
But so that was nice. Creepy, but nice. And the ferry ride itself was, once it finally happened, most pleasant. I sat while around me people took pictures with their digital cameras and pointed and just stared at the uncharacteristic quiet beauty of both shores. Getting off the train at Hunter’s Point, I caught a ride home from a man who was offering rides to people going in the direction of Astoria, which was so generous and thoughtful that I almost forgot about the woman with the I Heart NY bag taking the opportunity of a state of emergency to shaft a bunch of secretaries. We drove down Jackson Avenue with the nice man, his pretty dark-haired girlfriend—whose mother was stuck underground in the subway, can you imagine?—and a seventy-year-old woman with bottle-job red hair and a thick Queens accent who probably sent me a memorial design at some point, who was saying she’d heard the blackout had affected the whole eastern seaboard, and was certain it must be terrorists. The man dropped me off right in front of the apartment.