Julie Powell
Julie Powell is the author of Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. The book, which has been retitled Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, is based on her blog The Julie/Julia Project, a chronicle of Powell’s efforts to cook all the recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a single year. Powell's second book, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession, will be published in December.
From the master herself, this is the book that put Julia Child on the map, or, more appropriately, in the kitchen.
Mastering the Art of French Cooking: It’s the cookbook that changed the world. All Americans who take cooking and eating seriously have Julia Child to thank for the bountiful culinary world we live in today. She is the anti-Sandra Lee, the woman who very nearly single-handedly dragged Americans away from cans of cream-of-mushroom soup and marshmallow fluff and got them up to their elbows in real, delicious, buttery food. Within these pages, you’ll find a fine, rigorous, comprehensive book of French cooking, but it is also a hearty exhortation—to leap in, work hard, commit—to dare to attempt the daunting, even the seemingly impossible.
Julia’s take on sautéed calf’s liver is definitely not child’s play—one bite and you’ll know this is the real deal.
Julia is most famous for her long-cooking boeuf bourguignon and her amazing, terrifying, 10-page French bread recipe, but she did every now and then produce meals as quick as they were voluptuous. Julia’s calf’s liver recipe, well prepared, is on my short list for sexiest foods ever, and Julia knows just how it should be done: rapidly and without frippery over a high flame, so the meat retains its pink blush and creamy texture. If this unapologetic liver dish is too rich for your blood, the mustard sauce variation provides a nice contrasting bite.
There’s a time and a place to splurge on supper, and in New York City that place is Prune.
I’m one of those rare birds, a New Yorker who eats in more than she eats out. Nine times out of 10, when I throw down a few hundred bucks on three courses and a $50 bottle of wine I could have picked up for $12 at my local wine store, I wind up thinking I’d have been better off with a good roast chicken at home. Prune is the exception I make to the rule. For a decade, Chef Gabrielle Hamilton has been serving up gutsy and ebullient haute-homestyle cuisine—whether it's sardines on Triscuits, roasted marrow bones, or some mind-bogglingly runny cheese that looks like it was smuggled in from Italy in someone’s luggage, everything that comes out of Prune’s tiny kitchen is both thoughtful and passionate. And deeply, deeply delicious.
Food Destination
Watch out Manhattan—there’s a new queen of Chinese cuisine in town: Flushing, Queens, that is.
In the movie of Julie & Julia, we are treated to the sight of Julia Child having the time of her life exploring the food markets and restaurants of Paris. What the film doesn’t get into is Julia’s other great culinary love—Chinese food. She and Paul fell in love while serving in the OSS together in Kunming, and one of their great mutual loves became the cuisines they experienced there together. So I like to think Julia would adore the bustle, the smells, the crowds and the tastes of Flushing, Queens, which is home to an enormous and vital Chinese community. Fruit, meat and spice markets, dim sum palaces, noodle shops, all redolent, jam-packed, and full of opportunities for excitement and experience. Flushing is to your average mall Chinese joint as Julia Child’s boeuf bourguignon is to Chef Boyardee.
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