Watching Julie and Julia,

[elleng]

Julie was just interviewed by Amanda Hesser, and here's the article written about her.

A Race To Master The Art Of French Cooking

'Aug. 13, 2003

JULIE POWELL is in the homestretch. She has 13 days and 22 recipes to go to complete what possibly only Julia Child has done. If she meets her Aug. 26 deadline, Ms. Powell will have cooked all 524 recipes in the 1961 classic, ''Mastering the Art of French Cooking.''

Ms. Powell began climbing this culinary Mount Everest last summer, on Aug. 26, and has kept an amusing, irreverent and increasingly popular daily Web log of her progress on Salon, called the Julie/Julia Project (blogs.salon.com/0001399).

Other than their names, Julie Powell and Julia Child do not have much in common. Ms. Child, 90, is the cosmopolitan television personality and Smith-educated wife of a career diplomat who has made her home in places like Paris, Cambridge, Mass., and Santa Barbara, Calif.

Ms. Powell, 30, is a secretary who lives with her husband, three cats and a python above a diner on a barren street in Long Island City. Her voice does not soar and chortle; it rattles out words that recall Tony Soprano's more exercised moments. (Some of Ms. Powell's language, in person and on her Web log, is very rough. Some of it is very funny. So that this report may be welcomed at breakfast tables and in classrooms, the word ''cookie'' has replaced the occasional expletives. For example, as she wrote on Monday, Aug. 11, ''This Monday [cookie] is just [cookie] killing me.'')

The Julie/Julia Project, though structured and a little manic, is reminiscent of the way many young women taught themselves to cook decades ago. Young wives would latch onto a cookbook and work their way through it, learning basic techniques and finding a handful of recipes they could master.

Few women or men do that now, but there are apparently many who want to cook vicariously through Ms. Powell. According to Salon, since July Ms. Powell's Web log, or blog, had the fourth-most hits of the top 100 on the site, and a total of 394,200 page views. Scott Rosenberg, Salon's blog editor, said the Julie/Julia Project's popularity has grown steadily, and he estimates that it has several thousand regular readers. The blog details Ms. Powell's many cooking triumphs and traumas, and also crisply documents a woman working through a life crisis.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/13/dining/a-race-to-master-the-art-of-french-cooking.html

[TlalocW]

1. A friend made me watch that

I enjoyed it. Apparently Julia didn't appreciate some of the harsher language Julie used in her blog/book.

TlalocW

[elleng]

2. Allegedly!

Julia was not a prude (from what we know about her.)

[PJMcK]

3. Terrific movie

I guess they cleaned up Julie's language for the film! I never read her blog so I can only imagine what her personal demeanor is like.

I was also surprised by Ms. Child's somewhat negative reaction to Juli'e project. I would have thought she would have simply been amused by the idea that someone would try to cook 524 different meals in one year! I suppose she intended "Mastering the Art..." to be instructional and somewhat entertaining and not an invitation to a race.

There's a French woman on YouTube with a cooking channel called French Andparfait. She considers the French to be perfect and is happy to teach us how to be French, too. It's all kind of tongue-in-cheek but her recipes are easy to follow and helpful. On several occasions, she criticizes Ms. Child's choice of ingredients as not being proper French. I think the point she misses is that "Mastering.." was intended to bring French cuisine to American women and some ingredients may not have been available to Americans in the early 1960s. In any event, all cooking is personal so the more input I get, the merrier we'll be!

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

4. I thought the movie was quite good.

However, I cannot begin to imagine why someone would want to make every single recipe in a particular cookbook. Why? There are various things I have zero interest in cooking, so why would I make that recipe? Really?

Don't get me wrong. I realize Julia Child had a profound impact on American cooking, which is good, but I still see no need to make every single recipe she made. I'm sure she would pass on some things I make.

[no_hypocrisy]

5. I'm still impressed that she had enough money to buy all the ingredients for all the recipes.

[Kali]

6. I have never seen it, read the book years ago.

how was the movie?

[elleng]

7. Good, entertaining.

Have seen it many times. Meryl Streep plays Julia, so there's a clue!