As I mentioned a couple of days ago this is Julie & Julia week here at Active You.
Last Friday I attended an early screening of Nora Ephron’s movie and was left wanting to share one of Julia Child’s favourite recipes and my views on the Julie & Julia phenomenon with you all.
Julia Child wasn’t very famous outside her native U.S.A., but she had a great influence on the average household with her book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and her TV programmes.
She was the wife of an American spy and had to follow her husband around the world, busying herself with mindless hobbies until she discovered food relatively late in life.
And I am not talking about food per se, of course she knew what food was. But she didn’t know what Food was; she didn’t know the satisfactions and highs a perfectly prepared Sole Meuniere can bring. Until she moved to France that is.
I won’t go too much into detail, because that would be ruining the movie for those of you who don’t already know the story, but you can have a guess.
In this occasion Julia’s life is inter-twined with that of food blogger, Julie Powell, who in 2002 decided to cook her way through all the recipes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 365 days. That’s over 500 recipes. All of them butter-based. Not a diet I would want to follow myself, but who am I to judge?
In the foodie and blogging world there has been much hype about it all, some bad press for Powell’s efforts were taken as a sad attempt to getting 15 minutes of fame and therefore many have refused to go see the movie.
Leave the woman alone, I say. She didn’t do anything wrong; she cooked and she wrote about it. She needed something other than her boring office job to pass the time and she challenged herself.
Granted, she’s not Shakespeare and Julia Child’s life was clearly more interesting as one can gather from her memoirs, My life in France, recently re-publishe by Duckworth.
But I honestly don’t see the problem with the whole Julie&Julia project.
The movie is an over-indulgent “guilty pleasure”, but we all need a good dosis of that every now and again; the world is sad enough as it is!
Just one piece of advice: if you do go watch it when it’s released on 11th September make sure you either have a large and satisfying meal beforehand or have a lot of snacks with you, because it will make you hungry!
