by Julie Powell
“Um. Okay. Thanks.” I started to go.
“Oh, and Julie? Try not to let Mr. Kline see the camera guy. You know how he is. He might get curious about the whole ‘blog’ thing.” He actually made quotation marks with his fingers when he said it. Well, it is sort of a silly word, I guess.
Every time I go to Dean & DeLuca, a.k.a. Grocery of the Anti-Christ, I swear “Never again!” Often I swear this aloud, while in the store, slicing through moneyed idiots as if they were swaths of artisanal Belgian grain, as they wait in line for the $150 caviar, or pick up their plastic trays of sushi, or exclaim over all the varieties of green tea, or buy their coffee and croissants, which to do at Dean & DeDevil is just asinine.
After I’ve gotten good and enraged, maybe I’ll head up to Astor Wines and Spirits—where I’ll buy three bottles of wine, might as well since I’m there—and then to the Duane Reade for shampoo and conditioner and toothpaste, before going to Petco and picking up a twenty-two-pound bag of dry cat food, two dozen cans of wet cat food, a fifteen-pound carton of kitty litter, and four mice for my pet snake, Zuzu, to eat. Then on the way out, rolling my unwieldy cart—one of those basket things that crazy old New York ladies have, which I bought my first year in New York before I realized they were only for crazy old ladies, but don’t mind using now that I’m resigned to being a crazy old lady myself—I’ll go through the Union Square Greenmarket, where I’ll spy a bin of enormous dogwood boughs. And because Eric and I had dogwood blossoms on our wedding cake, I will decide that it’s only fitting and proper that I buy one.
It will only be while descending into the subway with my canned and bagged cat food, kitty litter, three bottles of wine, six veal scallops, four mice, shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste, and bough of dogwood blossoms as tall as I am, all wedged into a crazy-lady rolling basket, that I’ll realize this was probably not a good idea. Hopefully the people I slap in the face with dogwood branches will be tourists, and too cowed by the Metropolitan Transit System to try to punch me.
This, of course, is precisely why the CBS cameraman wants to follow me on a shopping expedition.
When the cameraman calls up from the lobby at five-thirty on Tuesday afternoon, I’m ready to go except for the Very Important contracts Legal has sent down the hall for Bonnie to sign, which I haven’t been able to give to her because she’s been in a Very Important meeting for the last two and a half hours. He comes up and films me writing out phone messages while we wait. At 5:40 I’m just getting ready to log off my computer when Bonnie comes out of the conference room. “Where are the contracts?”
“Here you go,” I say, handing them to her in professional secretary fashion. The CBS cameraman films me doing it. Bonnie glances at him bemusedly—she’s been given the bare details as to what’s going on here, but clearly cannot quite fathom it.
“Where’s the cover letter? Legal was drafting a cover letter.”
This is the first I’ve ever heard about this. “Shit.”
Bonnie glares at the cameraman. “Maybe you should turn that off for a few minutes.”
So the CBS cameraman doesn’t get to film me running down the hall to Legal, who are now in a Very Important meeting all their own, or shaking some intern by the shoulder to get across how very much I need him to get that letter for me now, or finding out I need to have three copies of the contracts, not just two, or screaming obscenities at the Xerox machine which has decided to run out of toner, or muttering under my breath fearsome threats entailing the tossing of vice presidents out of twentieth-story windows into big gaping holes bristling with rebar and bulldozers. Which is a shame, that he couldn’t film it, since these were really the only exciting things that happened that night.
I can only assume I’ve been blessed by the attention of CBS because I’m a foulmouthed hysteric with misanthropic tendencies for whom things are constantly going terribly, terribly wrong. So it’s a bloody shame that once the contract debacle is solved and the camera goes back on, suddenly all is smooth sailing. The weather is unawful, the sidewalks clear of surly commuters. The Turkish grocery has everything I need, even the very fancy eight-bucks-a-pound Danish butter. (JC is, as a general rule, not very demanding as to ingredients. It’s one of the reasons I was first drawn to her. So when she specifies “best-quality” butter, I think she must mean it.) The resulting bag of groceries is not heavy. The subway station is not crammed, and a train comes right away. People move out of our path as the cameraman follows me about, filming over my shoulder or rushing ahead to catch me coming around the corner. One guy on the train tries to chat me up, no doubt under the impression that I’m somebody of consequence, what with the attendant cameraman and all.
At home, Eric and I get wired with mikes and, with the camera reverently rolling, we sip wine and chop shallots and stir things on stoves, and pretend there isn’t a camera in our faces. Suddenly I sprout a civil tongue, without even trying. I am serene; I cook with a minimum of fuss. I make shrimp in a Beurre Blanc, which is essentially three-quarters of a pound of melted Danish butter with some crustaceans stirred into it, and some asparagus with Sauce Moutarde, and it kicks ass. I feel like a celebrity chef; I feel like I’m lying. I’m tempted to invent a disaster, fake a grease fire or something. But they all seem sufficiently impressed/horrified by the three-quarters of a pound of butter, so I guess it’s all right.
The news crew—“news” crew, I should say, because who are we kidding? This isn’t exactly the siege of Mazar-al-Sharif here—consisted of four people: a cameraman, a sound man, a producer, and a correspondent named Mika. They were planning to come to the apartment three nights in a row, to shoot. That’s like fifteen hours or something, which struck me as bizarre and sort of unfair. I mean, here was CBS pouring untold fortunes into a five-minute spot about a thirty-year-old secretary from Queens cooking French food. Meanwhile, I can’t get the accounting department to approve a ten-dollar plate of stale cookies for the cultural committee meeting. Anyway. The first two nights of filming went just fine, though they were oddly exhausting, but then on the third day there was an explosion at Yale, and the cameraman had to go cover that. They weren’t able to come back until the next week. The next Tuesday, actually. The Tuesday of—and here I begin to ululate in despair—the very final episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer EVER.
In between which time, I managed to catch a cold, or it might have been SARS, in fact.
It occurs to me that I’ve never adequately explained my devotion to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This is partly because I hesitate to put into words an emotion so delicate and precious, and partly because I have just a bit of residual shame at being obsessed with anything involving Sarah Michelle Gellar. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is—for those of you who’ve spent the last ten years living under a rock where the public schools ban Harry Potter books for promoting sorcery—a television show, known to its devout followers simply as Buffy. It is about a high school girl who is the Vampire Slayer, the one girl in all the world (well, sort of, things get a little complicated on Buffy) who can fight the forces of darkness—the Chosen One. Well, I guess that’s what you’d call the premise. It’s about the agonies of growing up, the importance of friendship in a harsh world, personal responsibility, love, sex, death—and kicking evil ass, of course. In all this it’s not so unlike the Bible, except with stunt doubles and better jokes. Those of you who are offended by this can take some comfort in knowing that I am far from the first person to have made this observation. Also like the Bible, Buffy got a little bloated and Revelations-y toward the end, and between that and the Project I’d not been watching quite as faithfully as I might have in the last few months. But still—this was it. The end. You don’t skip out on Revelations, no matter how kind of weird and lame it is. Or maybe you do. But not the last episode of Buffy.
Except I did. While Eric sat around with the “news” crew watching this historic event (the producer was a fan, too), I slaved away in a hot kitchen, under the watchful eye of a time-lapse camera. I’m not
bitter, of course—even I wouldn’t go so far as to get pissy that I couldn’t watch a TV show, even possibly the most important fantasy martial arts romantic television dramedy in entertainment history, because I’m too busy being filmed for a national news spot. No, I staunchly made my Fricadelles de Veau à la Niçoise, while hacking up large wads of the vile stuff that had filled my lungs over the previous weekend—all alone. At the end I am always alone. In every generation there is a Chosen One.
Fricadelles de Veau à la Niçoise is ground veal with tomatoes, onions, garlic, and, most important, salt pork. The mixture is formed into patties, dredged in flour, and fried in a quite hot skillet with butter and oil. Then, when the patties are cooked, you throw in some beef stock to deglaze the pan, stir in some butter, and call it done. The kitchen slayer also made Épinards Etuvés au Beurre, or spinach braised in butter, and Tomates Grillées au Four, which are baked, not grilled, and egg noodles.
I even plated it all oh-so-prettily, which caused Eric to mutter, out of camera range—though not out of mike range, we’re never out of mike range, we’re like reality-show contestants who are always bugged, even when they’re going to the bathroom or escaping to the woods for lewd trysts—“It’s a Potemkin Julie/Julia Project.” Because Julie doesn’t use fancy plates and serve things at the table. It was as if the mike snaking down between my boobs under my shirt was in fact a direct line to some frosty cool fount of Martha Stewartness—it was kind of freaking me out.
First the correspondent interviewed me. We perched together on the dining room table, a plate and my worn and battered MtAoFC arranged carefully between us, and between hacking fits I tried to deliver witty sound bites. Then I served Eric and myself in our very cute but tiny dining room while the cameraman and sound man and producer all huddled around and shone bright lights on us, and the correspondent sat down with us to eat—or pretend to eat because the correspondent was a vegetarian, which I guess is the kind of thing correspondents tend to be. After the shooting was done I managed to get the rest of the “news” crew to sit down and eat. The sound guy, whose wife was not only a vegetarian but a vegan, for God’s sake, nearly went into a swoon. He couldn’t stop talking about how the tomatoes in the veal patties made them taste so good. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that veal patties with pork fat are what really take the cake. And the producer filled me in on what I’d missed on Buffy, and the camera guy—who was embedded in Iraq before he got embedded in Long Island City, and so was a for-real news cameraman, not just a “news” one—told good embedding stories.
You know how you’ll see some movie star getting interviewed on E!, and she’ll chirp something about how “surreal” celebrity is, and you’ll think to yourself, “Oh, please, give me a break”? Well, I don’t know what it’s like to have reporters digging through your garbage and designers begging you to wear their million-dollar earrings at the Oscars. But cooking a dinner in a crappy outer-borough kitchen with a film crew hovering over you, and ending the night by eating veal-and-salt-pork patties and talking Iraq and vampire-slaying with said film crew—and then, a week later, seeing the whole experience chopped down into a four-minute segment introduced on the CBS Evening News by Dan Rather, who then signs off, when it is over, by intoning, mysteriously, “Only in America”—is, indeed, surreal.
Okay, it’s August. In the wake of the CBS segment I’ve been interviewed by Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and half a dozen public radio stations scattered across the US and, for some reason, Australia. I’ve got thirteen days and twenty-two recipes to go. I’m a little panicked. Bleaders are posting things like “COOK, YOU MAGGOT, COOK!!! Either cook or DROP! Give me 25 in 12! COOK, you worthless little PANSY! COOOOOOK!” They mean it in the best possible way, of course. I’m really not sleeping well, and when I do, I dream. In one of these, I have a very bedraggled pigeon that I’ve captured off the street and brought up to the office. I am keeping it in an empty Xerox paper box. Julia has ordered me to kill and butcher the thing for my evening supper, but I don’t have the heart—and figure it’s too dirty to eat anyway—so I furtively release it in the hallway and then pretend I have no idea where it went.
And then last night Eric almost divorced me over some spoiled Sauce Tartare.
It was going to be so easy. Just roast beef sandwiches with some salad out of a bag and Bouchées Parmentier au Fromage, or potato cheese sticks. I got home ready to whip the stuff up and move on to more important things, like drinking and playing Civilization and falling asleep really early.
The difference between Sauce Tartare and regular mayonnaise is that the base is not raw egg yolks, but hard-boiled ones. Mush up the yolks of three hard-boiled eggs with mustard and salt until they make a smooth paste. Beat in a cup of oil, in a thin stream. Okay, now. Julia says, “This sauce cannot be made in an electric blender; it becomes so stiff the machine clogs.” So I got out my biggest wire whisk and a cup of a mixture of olive and peanut oil (because using all olive oil makes for a very olive-oily mayonnaise, which is not bad, but sometimes you want a change), and started beating. I poured the oil in very slowly, stopping occasionally while continuing to beat to make sure the oil got absorbed. I was doing everything right. But after I’d poured in half a cup or so the oil stopped cooperating.
Julia says:
You will never have trouble with freshly made mayonnaise if you have beaten the egg yolks thoroughly in a warmed bowl before adding the oil, if the oil has been added in droplets until the sauce has commenced to thicken, and if you have not exceeded the maximum proportions of 3/4 cup of oil per egg yolk. . . .
But no. Because I did all of that. I did; I know I did. I ran my eyes over the instructions again, desperately. Yes. I did everything—everything except . . . “Is this all because I didn’t heat the bowl? You’re telling me it’s not working because I didn’t heat the goddamned bowl?!”
“What’s wrong? Who’s telling you?” Eric peeked into the kitchen with that now familiar expression of uncertain solicitude, like the faithful but concerned hound of a serial killer.
“It’s August! It’s ninety-five degrees in here! How fucking warm do you want it?”
Eric, with the quick reflexes of one accustomed to running for cover, ducked back out of the kitchen again.
Well, I tried Julia’s suggestions for fixing it. I warmed a bowl over a pan of simmering water, and beat a little mustard in with a bit of the failed Sauce Tartare. I was supposed to beat until the mustard and the sauce “cream and thicken together.”
“This always works,” Julia says.
This worked not at all.
Bitch.
This was when I began screeching a bit, not really words, just guttural noises. I knew I was overreacting, but screech I did anyway. As I was screeching, I poured the failed sauce into the blender, because fuck it, right? What could happen?
Not much, as it turned out. I blended and blended and blended, wishing like Dorothy for home that the machine would clog, but the sauce just spun loosely around like so much failed mayonnaise, and separated out as soon as I stopped the blender.
This was when I began throwing things.
Now the thing you have to understand, the thing that makes this whole sad scene both so telling and so very damning, is that I was doing all this even though I knew there’d been a bombing of an American civilian compound in Riyadh. See, Eric has an aunt in Saudi Arabia; he couldn’t quite remember what city, though. She works as a nurse in a hospital, teaching nursing to Saudi women. Eric had been glued to the television all evening, but the news was annoyingly saying nothing at all about the bombing. He’d been making calls all evening—to his mom, his brother, his cousins—but disturbingly, no one was picking up. I knew all this, and yet I screamed and sobbed and threw utensils as if Sauce Tartare was the only thing that mattered, as if Sauce Tartare was more important than family, than death, than war.
Eric put up with this for a good long time. But then he couldn’t anymore. And he marched back into the kitchen
. He grabbed me by the shoulders, he shook me, he shouted, louder than I had ever heard him shout:
“IT’S ONLY MAYONNAISE!!!!!!!”
It would kill me to say that he was right.
I threw away the failed mayonnaise, and made Bouchées Parmentier au Fromage in a deep chill. I boiled three small potatoes and put them through a ricer. The ricer broke, but I did not throw the pieces on the floor. I stirred the riced potatoes in a hot pan to absorb the water. I beat in a cup of flour, a stick of softened butter, an egg, a cup of grated cheese, white pepper, cayenne, nutmeg, and salt. I scooped the stuff up into a pastry bag, and started squeezing out lines onto a cookie sheet. When the pastry bag split down the middle, I didn’t scream. Instead I scooped the rest of the potato batter onto the cookie sheet with a spoon, sort of scraping it up into line shapes. I stuck the pan of Bouchées into the oven. I only cried a little, and quietly, so Eric wouldn’t hear. I made sandwiches with sourdough bread, roast beef, lettuce, tomatoes, some really actually quite delicious ancho chile jalapeno mustard that I’d gotten in a care package from a bleader a month or so ago. When the potato sticks were done I piled them onto plates beside the sandwiches as if they were French fries. Eric took his plate from me without a word.
Eric’s mother called as he was biting into his sandwich—she has a gift for that. Turns out Eric’s aunt doesn’t live in Riyadh. She was okay. I was too much of a brat to live. Well, at least the potato cheese sticks were delicious. Maybe karma loves a good potato cheese stick.
“Is this Julie Powell?”
“Yes?” I said this crisply, assuming crazy person since I was, after all, at work.