by Julie Powell
“I said, ‘Fuck her.’” I crack myself up sometimes, I really do. Sally nimbly managed to avoid the champagne spew, but Gwen caught some friendly fire.
“No, you didn’t!” cried Sally.
“No, of course not. I should’ve though.”
The bleeping from the kitchen had stopped. “Hey, Julie?”
“Yeah?” I rolled my eyes, snuffling onto the back of my hand while Gwen dabbed at her shirt. “What’s wrong now?”
“You oughta take a look at this.”
Gwen and Sally stared at me, and I stared back. “Oh God. What is it?”
At that moment Eric came out of the kitchen. He had oven mitts on his hands, and he was carrying a roasting pan before him.
It was my Pâté de Canard en Croûte. And it was perfect.
Gwen squealed, Sally clapped her hands. Eric was grinning at me.
“Would you look at that?” I sighed.
“Julie, this is seventy-five percent as good as Julia could do. At least.”
One more sob/giggle escaped me, but I shook it off. “Okay, then.” I waved him back into the kitchen. “Let’s crack this mother open.”
Julia wanted me to excavate the duck, detruss it, carve it, and return it to the crust. That was simply not going to happen. What I did, while everyone watched with their hearts in their mouths, was carve out a sort of pastry lid, move it carefully to one side, and gingerly reach in with a pair of scissors to cut any strings from around the duck I could get to and pull them out. After that I put the top back on, took my biggest carving knife, the one with which I couldn’t make a dent in a marrowbone most of a year ago, and just sliced right through.
It did not taste unlike anything I’d ever eaten, or even better, exactly—it just tasted more. More rich and smooth and crispy and buttery and duck-y. Culinary plutonium was what it was, but what a way to go. We all sat around the dinner table, sated and burping, under the fuzzy lilac chandelier Eric had gotten me for Valentine’s Day, which looked like a Muppet and which, thanks to CBS, had seen a fifteen minutes of its own. “Well,” said Gwen, “if Julia isn’t happy with this, then there’s just no pleasing the bitch.”
Forget Tart-a-palooza . . . that’s the way we do it in the L.I.C.
Once Sally and Gwen went home and the remaining Pâté de Canard en Croûte, now looking sad and ravaged, was bundled in plastic wrap and stuck in the fridge, Eric and I got into bed. I laid my head on his chest and hitched my leg over his thighs and soon was doing the giggle/cry thing again, only quieter, and heavier on the giggling side of things. “Almost done,” said Eric.
“Almost done.”
“So what’s for dinner tomorrow?”
“Kidneys with beef marrow.”
“Mmm, beef marrow.”
“Yeah.”
“And then, after that —” Eric kissed the top of my head as I snuggled closer—“can we have a dog?”
I did another little giggle/cry. “Sure.”
“And lots and lots of salad?”
“Ohhhh yeah. And a baby? You know I need to get started with that, Eric, because you know I’ve got a —”
“A syndrome. I know. I’m not worried.”
“Why not? Maybe we should be worried.”
“Nah.” He nipped my shoulder. “If you can do the Project, you can make a kid. No problem.”
“Hm. Maybe you’re right.”
And so we slept—like a pair of duck-football-stuffed babies.
The last day of the Project I took off work—because like I said, what were they going to do? I think I thought I would spend the day serenely preparing the final meal, contemplating the meaning of the year and all the bounteous blessings that had been bestowed upon me. But you know, I’ve never been much good at contemplation, and serenity, like French cooking, takes more than a year to master. So instead I spent the morning in a bout of severe Civilfixation (“I’m just going to finish taking Rome, and then I’m stopping for sure. . . .”), and then had to rush frantically to get errands done. At Ottomanelli’s, where I went for my kidneys and marrowbone, the guy behind the counter said, “Heeeey. How’s the cooking? With, whosit, Julia Child?”
“Good. I’m done with it, actually.”
“That’s good, that’s good. I’m tellin’ ya, never saw so many people ordering offal in my life.” He held up the marrowbone I had ordered. “Say, you usin’ this for enrichment? Because I can cut this in half for you so you can get it out.”
Now he tells me.
Eric and I ate our Rognons de Veau à la Bordelaise alone together, with green beans and some sautéed potatoes on a plate decorated with Mayonnaise Collée—that’s mayonnaise you put gelatin into, so you can shape it with a pastry bag into squiggles and designs, should you have a mind. I figured I should save at least one catastrophic failure for the end. Waiting on the kitchen counter as we ate our meal was the very last recipe of MtAoFC—Reine de Saba. Otherwise known as chocolate cake.
My deadly new Japanese boning knife made cleaning the kidneys much easier—it went right after all those bits of white fat, and the white tubes buried in the muscle. The Reine de Saba went smoothly as well. This was almost a torte, really, with pulverized almonds substituting for a good proportion of the flour. The only trick to it was not to overbake it. JC said that “overcooked, the cake loses its special creamy quality,” and I would hate for the final bite of the year to be a cake with no special creaminess, so I was on tenterhooks, I’ll admit, but all went according to plan.
The Mayonnaise Collée, well—it’s mayonnaise. With gelatin mixed into it. What can you expect? I didn’t make it any easier for myself, either. Because here I was, after 365 days, still confusing easy with simple.
“Beating mayonnaise by hand is just too Martha. I’ll screw it up, I know I will. The food processor is easier.”
Disregarding a year’s worth of evidence that I always screw up the mayonnaise when I use the food processor—every single time—I dumped the eggs and mustard and salt into the bowl of the Cuisinart and buzzed it, then added the lemon juice, just like Julia told me to. To add the oil I used the cup that slides into the top of the Cuisinart, which it had taken me an embarrassing number of attempts at mayonnaise to realize has a pinprick hole in the bottom of it that is exactly the right diameter for dispensing oil for mayonnaise. Probably, if I still had the manual for the thing, which obviously I don’t, I would find that that hole is in fact called the “mayonnaise hole.” I poured the oil in there and let it take care of the conscientious drip-drop. This had worked in the past. On this day I wound up with liquid. “Goddammit,” I muttered. However, I heroically did not scream “FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT!” at the top of my lungs. Instead, I started again. This time I would do it by hand. I did not have high hopes.
I beat together the egg yolks, and the mustard and salt. I took the cup out from the top of the Cuisinart and gave it to Eric. “Hold this over the bowl and just let it drip, okay?” So he stood, the oil dripped, and I whisked and whisked and whisked.
I’ll be damned if it didn’t work like a charm. “Eric?” I said, giving a few last beatings to the beautiful, pale yellow, perfectly thick stuff in the bowl.
“Yes, Julie?”
“Don’t let me forget this. If I’ve learned nothing else here, I’ve learned that I can make mayonnaise by hand.”
“We can make mayonnaise by hand,” he corrected, as he shook out his sore wrist with a wince.
“Right. We can.”
I stirred into the mayonnaise some gelatin that I’d softened in white wine and vinegar and stock, and then I set it in the fridge to set.
Rognons de Veau à la Bordelaise is simplicity itself to make; no different, essentially, from Poulet Sauté, and no different, especially, from Bifteck Sauté Bercy. In fact, making it that night felt like falling into a time warp—I stood before the stove, melting butter and browning meat and smelling the smells of wine deglazing and shallots softening—but the dishes changed before my eyes, and I heard Juli
a warbling, “Boeuf Bourguignon is the same as Coq au Vin. You can use lamb, you can use veal, you can use pork. . . .”
I retrieved the split marrowbone from the fridge, where it had been slowly thawing for some hours. Just as the guy at Ottomanelli’s had promised, the strip of marrow lifted easily from its bone-furrow in one piece. I diced it and soaked it in hot water a couple of minutes to soften it further, then tossed it into the sauce along with the sliced kidneys, and reheated the pan until everything was warm.
Julia says of Mayonnaise Collée that it “can be squeezed out of a pastry bag to make fancy decorations.” Reading that sentence wigged me out like nothing I’d read all year—more than brains, more than cutting lobsters in half, more even than eggs in aspic. I thought of a cake iced with mayonnaise florets, mayonnaise curlicues, “Congratulations, Julie!” written out in big cursive letters. Nineteen-sixty-one was a different country, no doubt about it.
I used Mayonnaise Collée to decorate the plate I’d be serving the potatoes on. As you’ll remember, my pastry bag had split apart on the night that Eric almost divorced me over Sauce Tartare, so I jimmied a makeshift one out of a Ziploc bag. With it I made mayonnaise curlicues and mayonnaise florets and, because “Congratulations, Julie!” seemed a little, well, self-congratulatory, a mayonnaise “Julie/Julia,” in cursive letters around the rim of the plate. But, as it turns out, Mayonnaise Collée works significantly better on cold dishes. Once I scooped warm potatoes onto the plate, my fancy decorations swiftly melted into undistinguished blobs, and the letters of “Julie/Julia” grew fatter and more vague, and finally completely illegible. I guess I should have thought of that. No matter. Mayonnaise Collée, jelled or not, still tasted delicious on sautéed potatoes.
The Rognons de Veau à la Bordelaise did not taste like piss, no matter what my mother says, because I cleaned them with my deadly boning knife, and because the beef marrow conducted a two-pronged attack with the finishing sprinkling of parsley on any holdout pissiness—extinguishing it between fatty, velvety richness and sharp, fresh greenness. We ate it with a wine that I bought in the city that is cloudy and dark and tastes a little like blood. The lady who sold it to me called it “feral.” Like me. For dessert, some creamy smooth Reine de Saba and Season 1, Episode 2 Buffy.
And all of a sudden, that was it. For twelve months I had been doing this thing. I had cooked for friends, and for family, and for anchorwomen on CNNfn, and somewhere in there it had gotten a little surreal. But now here we were, back exactly where we started—just Eric, me, and three cats, slightly worse for wear, sitting on a couch in the outer boroughs, eating. Buffy was on the TV, and somewhere Julia was chortling—even if she did hate me.
The End
Except of course that then I woke up and had to go to work again. I’d kind of forgotten about that. And although my kidneys had not tasted like piss, I did notice that, the next morning, my piss smelled faintly of kidneys. And I went to work, and it was pretty much the same as it had been before, and here I was just a secretary, albeit a fatter one who had been on CBS and CNNfn.
“Eric, this is weird.” I called him between the crazy people, while Bonnie was in a Very Important meeting.
“Yeah, I know.”
“I’m at work. It feels sort of like it’s not over, and sort of like it never happened.”
“Just wait until you cook something without butter, then you’ll know it’s over.”
But then I decided to make a stir-fry for dinner. I’d forgotten what a pain in the ass stir-fries are. There was no butter and no Julia, but we still ate at 10:30 at night, so it still didn’t feel over.
That was when we decided that in order to finish it for real we had to do something serious. We had to make a pilgrimage. We would go to the Smithsonian Institution, and we would visit the Julia Child exhibit there. We would see her kitchen, which she had donated to the museum when she went to live in a California retirement community, and which had been moved—lock, stock, and pegboard—from the house she used to share with Paul in Cambridge, Massachusetts, down to DC. We would leave a stick of butter in thanks. For closure, we figured, you couldn’t get much better than that.
One thing about Eric is that he really hates to drive. And one thing about me is that I’ve got a freaky Bermuda Triangle-style disruptive force field centered on my belly button. Just before the occasion of our pilgrimage this force field had eaten up my driver’s license. Eric, good citizen that he is, would never let me drive without it, which meant that the only one doing the driving up and down the NYC-DC corridor would be the one of us who really hated to do it. So on the beautiful morning in early September when we collected our rental car and started off, there was that little frisson of resentment brewing from the beginning—keep in mind, of course, that even in the best of situations, Eric and I are not exactly Amazing Race material.
It’s wonderful not to be in New York on a beautiful day. It’s wonderful to have the wind in your hair. It’s wonderful not to be making a shopping list. It’s not so wonderful getting into DC with a lousy map and a worse navigator. My big idea was to take the exit for Georgia Avenue and just shoot straight on down to the Mall. As it turns out, it takes approximately fifteen years to do this. When Eric started making audible rumblings about committing hara-kiri on the gear shift, I got my second bright idea, which was to make a right turn somewhere. Which decision sent us careening off like a (very slow) pinball, spinning around traffic circles and screaming like, well, apoplectic New Yorkers, at pedestrians crossing the street so slowly it was like all of Washington DC was either developmentally disabled or on drugs. We might have been lost forever had we not happened upon Pennsylvania Avenue. Talk about something I’d never think I’d be saying during the current administration, but God bless the White House.
Eric had a friend from DC who’d said that parking around the Mall was no problem. This might have been the case on some other day, but it certainly was not on the occasion of the National Association of Negro Women conference and American Black Family Reunion. It was two in the afternoon by this time, and we had eaten nothing all day. We didn’t know what time the Smithsonian closed, or where it was, or where we might be able to buy butter, which we had to do before we went to the museum because if we didn’t get the butter then the entire point was lost—and there were all these goddamned trees everywhere, plus the masses and masses and masses of people on the Mall didn’t walk any faster than the ones crossing the streets. So we were feeling a little panicky. The reflecting pool had been drained during the construction of the mind-bogglingly hideous World War II memorial, which meant we could just dash straight across it. We wandered and wandered, both warm and astonished, asking cops for directions as we went, dodging children with fried snacks, stopping along the way to buy Eric (a) a Polish sausage, (b) camera batteries, and (c) (once he realized, after he’d thrown away his first set of batteries, which he’d bought about a week before, and put in the second set of batteries, and freaked out because the “no battery” icon was still blinking, except we figured out that that was actually the “no film” icon, and that the first batteries, now in a public garbage can and covered in ketchup and powdered sugar, had been fine all along) film.
The prospects for butter were looking exceedingly grim. The vicinity of the Mall in Washington, for those of you who’ve never been there, is a good place to go for big gray government buildings, and statues of presidents, and bookstores, but don’t try to get any grocery shopping done there. I asked the manager of Harry’s restaurant if I could buy a stick of butter off him. The manager wasn’t a New Yorker, you could tell because he wasn’t an asshole, but he couldn’t fix me up because Harry’s uses no butter. Which freaked me out and made me think that even though the slow-walking populace is very nice, and there are all these trees, I really couldn’t live in DC. He did say, though, that I could probably find some at the CVS three blocks down.
Which indeed we did.
Okay. We were ready. It was now 3:30. Eric had
eaten his Polish sausage, and we were in possession of both butter and the camera and film we would need to document the drop-off. We got to the Smithsonian and took our place at the end of the line of museumgoers filing through security at the entrance. Now we just had to get the butter inside.
One thing you might not know about me, because it’s not something I exactly go around bragging about, is that I’m a total goody-two-shoes. No, that’s not quite right, because I’m not all that honest, or courteous—hell, I’m not even clean. I guess what I am is a coward. When I was a kid, I fancied myself a bit like Scarlett O’Hara—brave, resourceful, ruthless, irresistible. But these days, I mostly just see myself in what Rhett says to her when she tells him she’s afraid of going to hell: “You’re like a thief who’s not at all sorry he stole, but is very, very sorry he got caught.” Nothing upsets me more than the prospect of getting caught. And there’s not much I won’t do to avoid it. Am I proud of offering to hold Eric’s carryall while he tied his shoe, then slipping the box of Land O’Lakes into it while his back was turned? Of essentially turning my husband into a butter-mule, so that should the burly guards with billy clubs hanging from their belts, shining their small flashlights into every bag, find the contraband, it would be Eric’s ass and not mine? Of course not. I’m ashamed. All I can say in my defense is that the security guards could’ve cared less about Eric’s carryall or his butter, so it all turned out fine. We got through security with no hassle at all, then hoofed it down a long, wide hallway, and in no time at all we were there, at the Julia Child exhibit.
Footage of Julia and interviews with other people about Julia were playing on a continuous loop on a large television in a smallish room. The walls were lined with cases, in which were arrayed strange and wondrous kitchen utensils from Julia’s enormous collection—a device called a manché â gigot that looked like a really vicious nipple clamp, the very same blowtorch that I’d watched her char a tomato with. Along one wall was laid out all seventeen pages of her French bread recipe from MtAoFC, Volume II—if I’d thought that after Pâté de Canard en Croûte nothing could scare me, that recipe would put me right.