Julia's books have long shelf life
By, Mary Schmich - Chicagotribune.com
You are never going to master the art of French cooking.
Go ahead, dream the dream. Snap up a copy of a
Julia Child cookbook like all the other moviegoers who've stumbled out of
"Julie & Julia" and resolved that it's time they embraced that Julia Child
joie de everything.
"People come in frantically looking for it," said Frank, the clerk at Barbara's Bookstore in Oak Park, when I phoned Tuesday to see if Barbara's was riding the surge in Julia Child sales. Sure enough, the store keeps ordering more copies of Child's classic "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" and keeps selling out.
"It's an expensive cookbook -- $40 -- and it's almost 50 years old," Frank said, noting that even the supplier is out of stock. "It's quite a phenomenon."
It doesn't hurt Barbara's that "Julie & Julia" -- the movie in which
Meryl Streep plays the grande dame of flamboyant cooking and
Amy Adams plays a young modern woman who cooks her way through a Child cookbook -- is now playing at the theater a few steps away.
But the moviegoers of
Oak Brook are also hungry to cook like Julia.
"There's been a huge increase in sales," said a clerk at the Borders there. "We've sold more now than we have in 20 years."
Ah,
mes amis. Zees deesire to make la cuisine like zee Frensh ees a tres beautiful weesh. So is flying. No matter how well Julia explains it, chances are slim that you will ever turn duck skin into cracklings.
But maybe you're a more enterprising cook than I am. Maybe this is just my own regret talking.
I own three Julia Child cookbooks, bought a few years ago after she came to talk to a group I belonged to. She spun a strong spell. That lusty laugh, those big bones, the giant earrings on her long earlobes, her embrace of life beyond the small and normal.
Love, espionage, Paris, butter. Who wouldn't want a taste of that?
(She also admitted she sometimes ate canned soup and
McDonald's burgers.)
So I bought the cookbooks, one at a time over a couple of years. They are very pretty cookbooks, as precise as a freshly sharpened knife.
They are also as pristine today as the day I brought them home. Pages crisp, corners sharp, covers glossy, spines unbroken. They sit on a shelf near the stove and tut whenever I toss a couple of chicken breasts on the
George Foreman grill.
Only a grease spot on the excellent roasted chicken recipe in the smallest of those books -- Julia's books, like her, are mostly BIG -- betrays that they were once more than relics of a dream.
Many cookbooks wind up abandoned because cookbooks are never just cookbooks. They're wish books, and wishes often get lost in the crush of daily living.
When we buy a cookbook, we're buying a different life. Healthier. Or more creative. Or bolder.
Butter? Two sticks please! Cream?
Pourquoi pas? Live with more joy, less fear. That's the dream Julia Child incarnated and that her cookbooks keep alive.
"A lot of people who come in mention the beef bourguignon," said Frank at Barbara's Bookstore.
"Mastering the Art of French Cooking" is about to hit the top of
The New York Times best-seller list. If you buy it, may your beef bourguignon dream come true.
And if it doesn't? The book looks really nice on the shelf.
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