When I chose
Julie and Julia for our book club selection, I wasn't quite sure what I was getting into. Mainly, I'd heard about the movie with Meryl Streep- like most people- and I thought it would be kind of fun to do a postmortem book club meeting after seeing the movie and comparing it to the book that we'd all read that week.
The book was good, the movie was great (why haven't you seen it yet?) and what I took away was that I wasn't as impressed with the character of Julie as I was with the relationship she had with the mentor inside her head.
Finding an imaginary mentor is not as easy as you think it would be. Sometimes the mentors you try to take on are boring, or uninspiring, or just downright snide.
Take my experience. Long before I even heard of this book I'd tried something similar: cooking my way through a cookbook to better understand food and teach myself how to be a chef at the same time. It was a very ambitious New Year's Eve resolution, one that was born out of reading a fun little blog post by
Sally Swift. I would learn a cuisine in 2009!
Oh how I planned. Oh how I dreamed. Oh how I delusioned.
I scrutinized over what book to pick. Mexican was out, as I would be condemning my family to eating that all year- and my father would probably throw a coup de etat if I tried that. Same thing about vegetarian. Italian? Well, I already knew how to mostly do that. Pastry? My thighs protested. Nothing to weird or funky, like Jamaican or Indian, since I didn't want to be blowing my paycheck on finding particular ingredients.
Finally it dawned on me. New American! Chic New American cuisine...Oh how classy I would be. And as for a cookbook, why not go back to the start? Sally Swift was plugging her new book...
The Splendid Table's How to Eat Supper. That was perfect. I'd try the recipe she recommended right in her blog post: Refried Beans with Cinnamon and Clove.
It was perfect, I told myself. Sally told it to me too.
You will learn how to be a New American Cook, she said, and I could hear the capitalization.
By 2010 you will be the greatest hobbyist chef ever.
Sally lied to me.
It started out well. I bought all the ingredients, and Sally congratulated me on not picking anything "weird." After all, what was more New American than refried beans?
And then I put cinnamon in it. All of a sudden I was inundated with the strange combination of spice with cinnamon.
Sally:
Don't worry, the recipe hasn't finished yet. It will simmer together and be beautiful and you will be awesome.Me: *chops peppers*
Sally:
We'll work on technique later.My mother walked in later, and made the weirdest face I could imagine.
Mom: Is that..cinnamon?
Now would be the time to mention my family was still recovering from a Very Bad Food Experiment, where my brother had coated several T-bone steaks with pepper and cinnamon. The thought of savory cinnamon again was enough to turn everyone's stomach.
Me: It will work! It will come together beautifully!
Sally:
She knows nothing!By the end, we tasted the beans......and let's just say my delusions of New American were suddenly replaced with Ew American.
Me: You
lied!Sally: ...
Sally abandoned me. It was with a suddenly cynical eye I looked through her cookbook and realized...ew. A lot of these recipes looked gross. (The bean recipe is in her blog post, I'm not reposting it here.) Sally, sadly, suddenly, was no Julia. My mentor had fled my mind and left me with a pot of weird purple cinnamon jalapeno bean jam.
Betrayed!
It's strange how you can make mentors or build people up in your head. Really, it's puffing yourself up- I mean, I'm sure Sally Swift is a very nice person in real life... but her recipes sure hated me. In the end, I'm going to stick with my favorite cooking mentors that I really know: my grandmother and my great-grandmother, who have given me so many recipes they're scrawled in post its and on the backs of Christmas cards, rather than bound up in some glossy-pretentious book with gleaming food photos.
(And in the end, we threw away the beans.)
