by Julie Powell
The usually barren streets of Long Island City were teeming with people, all trudging with the discouraged air of folks who have miles to go before they sleep. Inside the apartment, a reddish afternoon dusk reigned. Eric’s boss was sitting on our sofa, flipping through a magazine. He wasn’t going to be making it to Westchester that night.
Shoes were kicked off into the closet, dress—after a sticky moment or two when it seemed Eric would not be able to work the zipper—was peeled off. Stupid bullet-bra corset was painfully unhooked and thrown in the damned trash. Stockings were balled up and stuffed into the sock drawer, and a pair of shorts and T-shirt donned. I was smelly and hot and hungry, and I thought I’d never felt so profoundly comfortable in my life.
I have always loved a disaster. When Hurricane Agnes blew into Brooklyn, I bought canned goods and bottled water and went down to the boardwalk to watch the ecstatic waves crash up over the railings while everybody hooted in glee but for the Orthodox Jewish family, who bent devoutly over their small leather books, rocking on their heels in prayer. Although I hate winter, I love the first big blizzard of the year—love dashing about town before the storm clouds, stocking up on groceries and booze, sharing delightfully apprehensive exchanges with shopkeepers about the latest news on the Weather Channel. If the big storm hits during Christmas that year, while we’re visiting family in Texas, I feel an obscure pang of regret at missing it.
I even, God forgive me, felt something of this anxious excitement on September 11, as I wandered midtown in my cheap Keds knockoffs looking for a place to donate my O negative blood. When the wolves stormed the city, I thought, set on ravaging the women getting their nails done at the Korean manicurists, the confused businessmen carrying their jackets over one arm, trying their cell phones again and again and again, the strong-willed among us would have to prove our mettle. I felt ready for it that day. I even relished the thought. It’s no wonder they dubbed it the Department of Homeland Security—disasters bring out our innate affection for all that Wagnerian hero crap.
I entered the murky kitchen to feed my spouse and his colleague, feeling keenly my duties as a good helpmeet. (Disasters always make me feel a bit old-fashioned and Donna Reed-y. Expressions like helpmeet just pop into my head spontaneously.) My job was to provide sustenance for my husband and unexpected guest, without benefit of trifling modernities like light. Eric’s job was to bring home the bacon, and in an amazing display of clearheadedness in the midst of emergency, he’d done just that. He came up behind me in the kitchen with a flashlight and whispered, “I got chicken livers. And eggplant.”
“Does your boss like chicken livers?”
“Who knows? Doesn’t matter. The main thing is, he probably doesn’t want to eat at eleven at night.”
“Well, I’d better get on my stick, then.”
(I never say things like “get on my stick” except during states of emergency.)
Eric kissed me, in a very “you-and-me-against-the-world” sort of way that sent a tingle up my spine, and made me think for a moment of the baby booms traditionally recorded nine months after major blackouts. Then he went to dig out every candle in the house. I had just about figured out how to balance the flashlight under my chin so I could cook when Eric’s boss poked his head into the kitchen. “Julie? Someone’s outside for you.”
As I stepped into the living room, I heard it. “Julie! Julie! JULIE!” Peeking down through the jalousie windows, I saw on the sidewalk none other than Brad and Kimmy, staring up at us exhausted. Kimmy held her own excruciating high heels in her hands—her feet were bare, her stockings run to ribbons. They had just finished walking from our office, across the Queensboro Bridge.
Brad took over candle-lighting while Eric got out the large bottle of vodka he had, in his infinite wisdom, picked up on the way home. I, meanwhile, flinchingly lit the stove with my NASCAR lighter. When it didn’t blow up in my face and instead spurted into reassuring blue flame, I knew we were over the hump. These are the times when we aficionados of the gas stove know we are on the side of God. I jammed the flashlight under my chin and Eric arranged candles stuck in mise-en-place bowls and teacup saucers all around me, until I felt I was embarking on a shamanic rite of hospitality, which I guess I was. I sautéed some rice in butter—I would have thrown some onions in there if I could have retrieved them from the refrigerator’s darkened depths—and poured in some chicken broth for it to cook in. When it was done I scooped it into a savarin pan I’d smeared with butter—I am now a person who, in a state of emergency, can always find her savarin pan. This I set into my widest pot, which was filled with about an inch of water. I let it simmer on the stove for ten minutes for a blackout-style Riz en Couronne—a rice ring, of all the silly things to make during a blackout. I was meant to bake it in the oven, but the oven gas proved trickier to light than the stovetop. I sautéed the chicken livers in some butter and cooked down an impromptu sauce with vermouth and broth. Eric helped with frying up some eggplant.
We were just serving plates when again we heard the call: “Julie! Ju-leeeeee!” Down on the street was Gwen, a bit drunk and a bit hungry and a bit worse for wear, having hiked across the Queensboro Bridge after a spontaneous celebration of the blackout and possible end of the world at her office.
Long Island City was in a festival mood that night. In our apartment, dinner was supremely candlelit. My mother had sent us some iridescent lilac sheers to hang on the walls of our dining nook, and they shimmered in the flickering light. We all looked very beautiful and mysterious and satisfied. Kimmy and I bitched mightily about our secretarial jobs, to great hilarity, while Brad and Gwen got surprisingly cozy at the other end of the table. Dinner was a mite sparse for six, but that just added to the apocalyptic funhouse feeling of the night, especially when Eric wandered out into the dark, hectic streets and bought us all some cones from the Good Humor man. It was a good night for Good Humor men—eleven at night and the streets were still full of people walking, walking, who could tell how far they had yet to go. But we were home.
Kimmy managed to get through on her cell to her boyfriend and got him to come pick her up and take her home. Eric’s boss bunked down on the couch while the rest of us stayed huddled around the dinner table a bit longer. Once we’d gotten lightly lit, I managed to pull Gwen to one side to ask her about her married friend, Mitch. (For some reason, I got the feeling it would be better not to ask her in front of Brad—there seemed to be some possibility there.)
“Ah. He got cold feet about cheating on his wife, the loser.”
“Sorry.”
“You know what? I deserve better than occasional fantastic sex. I deserve frequent fantastic sex. Screw him.”
After the dishes were cleared away, we moved the table to one side so Brad and Gwen could crash on the flokati rug in the dining nook. We took to our bed, feeling very cozy and communal, like a bunch of Neanderthals retiring to their cave after a good mastadon feast. Brad and Gwen slept so well that night that they didn’t even wake up when the fuzzy lamp directly over their heads came blazing on, along with the clock radio, at 4:30 in the morning. (Gwen swears up and down that nothing happened, but I still hold out some hope. Brad would be great for her.)
Sometimes, there is nothing better than being a nonessential employee. On the radio the next morning, Bloomberg asked us, for the good of the city, to “stay in, relax, don’t overexert yourself.” Eric’s boss’s wife came down from Westchester to pick him up, and they gave Brad and Gwen rides home. Eric and I washed the dishes together. I can tell you right now that having no light beats having no water any day of the week.
I heard about the subway passengers being stranded and all I could think was “I hope Julie had to work late. I hope and pray Julie had to work late.” Guess I’m a nicer person than I thought, ’cause I’m willing to forgo a REALLY interesting entry in favor of NOT having Julie trapped in an un-air-conditioned subway for HOURS.
I know, I know. My first thought too, after hearing that the po
wer outage wasn’t an act of terrorism, was “Oh, God. Julie is caught in that mess.” It was pretty much like “Oh, God, my sister is caught in that mess,” except my sister lives in Washington, not New York. Actually, after reading you daily almost from the beginning, you are a bigger part of my life than my sister, who never writes.
You’re a better person than I, because my first thought was just “How will Julie cook?” Thank God for gas stoves. And then when I saw all the people walking home on the news, I worried again. So, also, thank God for the profiteering ferry woman. Good luck, Julie!
“Poor Julie!” I wondered. “How will she ever do it?” With a flashlight under her chin of course!!! You’re a freakin’ Indiana Jones of the kitchen with a balloon whip on your belt!
It is a comfort to have friends, maybe especially friends you will never meet. Think about it this way: as I awaited a ferry amid thousands of other disheveled Queens secretaries, a woman named Chris in Minnesota was thinking not, “Oh, poor New Yorkers!” but “Oh, poor Julie!” As I cooked chicken livers with a flashlight under my chin, some guy down in Shreveport was trying to remember if Julie had a gas or electric stove. Around the country, a small scattering of people who had never been to the city, who had never met me, who had never cooked French food in their life, heard about the blackout and thought about me. That’s sort of incredible, isn’t it? Aside from its being an ego-boost, I mean. Because people who would have looked at this as a disaster happening to other people were suddenly looking at it as a disaster happening to one of their own, to a friend. I don’t mean this to be arrogance; in fact, I don’t think it has a whole lot to do with me one way or the other. I think what it means is, people want to care about people. People look after one another, given the chance.
I don’t know if I really believe this, but on the day after the blackout I sure did. And I figure, maybe just believing in goodness generates a tiny bit of the stuff, so that by being so foolish as to believe in our better natures, if just for a day, we actually contribute to the sum total of generosity in the universe.
That’s naive, isn’t it? Dammit, I hate it when I do that.
The next night we ate pasta with a creamy sauce into which I stirred JC’s recipe for canned onions. “All the brands of canned ‘small boiled onions’ we have tried have tasted, to us, rather unpleasantly sweetish and overacidulated,” JC writes. “However they are so useful in an emergency that we offer the following treatment which improves them considerably.”
I figured the day after a major blackout was as good a day as any for emergency canned onions. It was hard to imagine, though, just what kind of emergency JC was talking about here. Let’s see: a situation in which there are no fresh onions to be had, but an abundance of canned ones (leaving aside for the moment that in 2003, finding canned onions is a feat unto itself). The onions must be drained, boiled, drained again, then simmered for fifteen minutes with broth and an herb bouquet, so we’re not talking about an emergency in which speedy onions are of the essence, nor of an emergency in which you are stranded on a desert island with nothing but canned onions to eat (unless maybe your first-aid kit has a spice rack). Add it all up and I don’t know what you’ve got, but I suspect it’s an emergency during which you’d have bigger problems than whether your onions tasted “overacidulated.”
A bleader wrote in on this conundrum:
I wonder if WWII was the sort of emergency Julia was thinking of: decimated crops, sporadic food supplies for years on end, and everyone relying on their canned goods for the duration. . . . We live in much more pampered times: I point to the scarcity of canned onions as proof.
The point is an excellent one, though I still dearly hope JC was never actually in a position to be forced to such measures. Julia and Paul were living in Cambridge when the grandmamma of New York blackouts hit, in ’77, so she didn’t have to cook through that one. But surely even Cambridge gets blackouts. I wonder if she ever made pasta sauce with canned onions during a blackout. Somehow I doubt it. Maybe she iced a cake with Crème au Beurre, Ménagère, then took Paul by the hand and climbed back into bed for the rest of the day. That seems a better bet. After all, Julia has always had a knack for divining the truly essential.
May 1949
Paris, France
When he walked through the door at midday, she gave a great whoop and flung herself into his arms. “I got the most interesting sausage at Les Halles this morning. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.” She took his hand and began to drag him off to their little dining room.
“Hold on, hold on—let me get my coat off!” She greeted him every day just this way, raucous and delighted. It was one of the joys of his day, coming home to her at lunchtime, but sometimes he felt a tiny, insistent prick of guilt, as if he were imprisoning an ebullient golden retriever, who nevertheless always greeted him with simple love and gratitude when she was freed again.
On the table were two plates, slices of a dark, smoked sausage spiked with large nubs of fat, a loaf of bread, and some good runny cheese. For someone who’d known nothing of food until just the last few years, Julie had an unerring and adventurous sense of taste. He pulled out a chair, reached for the bread, tore off a hunk.
Julie sat down across from him and began to nibble on a bit of sausage. “So, it seems it was a false alarm. Just stomach fatigue, as you said. Between the lovemaking and the food, I imagine every woman who comes to Paris winds up thinking she’s pregnant at one time or another.”
Paul put down his knife and leveled a gaze at his wife. They had discussed the possibility of children, of course, in a noncommittal sort of way. To tell the truth, he was not delirious at the prospect, but when she’d voiced her suspicions to him last week, he’d made up his mind that he’d settle himself well to it, for her sake. “Are you all right?”
She wrinkled her nose at him and smiled. “Oh, sure. I wonder if maybe I’m not cut out for children anyway.”
He felt a stab of guilt. “Julie, it’s not as if we won’t have other —”
She waved her hand at him with a gaiety so convincing he’d almost have thought it genuine. “Of course, of course! And I’m so enjoying myself, it would seem a shame to spoil all the fun with a little brat just now. It’s only —” For just a moment she looked wistful. “It’s only, I wish I had something to apply myself to during the days. I can’t spend my whole life tottering about the markets, can I?”
Paul cut a wedge of cheese and smeared it onto some bread. “I’ve been thinking just the same thing. Perhaps you should join a women’s group of some sort, or take a class. Something to occupy your mind. It must be dull stuck up here all day alone.”
“Oh, I do an all right job keeping myself entertained, I guess!” She leaned her chin on her hand. “Still, you know, I think you’re right. I need to come up with a good project for myself. That’s what I need.”
When he had finished his lunch, she walked him to the door. He kissed her good-bye, and when he looked up at her wide face, he saw a gleam in her eye that he recognized. It was a gleam one had to be wary of, he knew, one that could bring about some unexpected developments. “Don’t get into too much trouble, now.”
“Oh, I won’t. Not too much.”
DAY 352, RECIPE 499
“Only in America”
Hi, Julie, this is Karen from CBS? We’d like to do a story about your project.”
“Umm . . . Okay.” Usually, I don’t answer the telephone at home, certainly not when I’m in the middle of writing my blog entry for the day. Usually, it’s no one I want to talk to. But this morning, for some reason, I did. Call it a hunch.
“What we’d do first is send a cameraman to meet you at work. He’d film you at your office, then follow you as you go shopping, and he’d take the subway home with you. The rest of the team would meet you there, and you would just cook as you normally do while we filmed you. How’s Tuesday?”
So. Here I was writing my blog, when I get a phone call from a major media outlet conc
erning their desire to do a piece about me and my blog. Which phone call I immediately proceeded to write about in my blog.
This was when it occurred to me that things were starting to get a little meta.
Evil baby genius Nate was the guy I’d have to talk to before bringing into the office a network cameraman, even (especially) one who wasn’t going to be filming him, so I went down to his office and knocked on the door. His cell phone was affixed to the side of his face, as usual, but he waved me in.
“So the governor is set for 3:15, yeah? And Bloomberg’s at 3:45. Simone says Giuliani wants in on it now. . . . Yeah. I’ll tell ’em. Yeah.” He chortled a bit. “Yeah. See ya down there.
“What’s goin’ on?”
This to me, I think. You can never quite tell for sure when he’s talking to you—he seems like the kind of guy who might have a phone implanted in his inner ear.
“Hey, so there’s a CBS cameraman coming in on Tuesday —”
“Julie, you know all interview requests for Bonnie have to go through me—Gabe will have a shit fit.” (In the whole office, only Nate called Mr. Kline by his first name.)
“No—it’s not—it’s for—well, for me, actually.”
“You’re kidding. This for that cooking thing?”
“Yeah.”
Nate’s face opened into a slightly predatory smile. “Well, that’s great! When did you say he wanted to come? After work hours, right?”
“Yeah. Tuesday.”
“That’s fine. Just don’t let him film anything he shouldn’t. You know, the proposals.”
“Right. Of course.”
“Or any documents, or anything on your computer.”
“Sure.”
“Or the front desk, or our company logo anywhere. And don’t mention the organization. And all that ‘government drone’ stuff? That’s fine on your Web site—funny, funny stuff, Julie, seriously—but you might want to tone that down a little. ’Kay?”