Salvation on a plate

In case you’re wondering, Julia & Julia is not some sapphic saga (although the cover image of a kitchen whisk resting on a mound of fluffy white whipped cream is oddly suggestive of such things). However, it has, theoretically at least, at its core the adoration of one woman for another. The Julie of the title, the author Julie Powell, is an averagely neurotic, averagely unsuccessful career girl (from Texas) on the brink of her thirties, living in a run-down apartment in the wrong part of New York.

She has little to show for her first three decades aside from a charming husband named Eric, assorted pets and a crush on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Julia, on the other hand, is the nonagenarian culinary icon Julia Child, America’s answer to Elizabeth David (only without all the sex and cigarette smoking). Her 1961 classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking demystified bone marrow and deglazing to America’s “home chefs”. She had her own television show on Boston’s public television station; old stills show a homely woman with sensible brown hair and a warm smile, often holding up a large trout, or an unwieldy-looking hunk of meat.

A combination of restlessness, pre-thirties ennui and raging hormones lead Julie to attempt the impossible: to cook each and every one of Child’s recipes, as set out in Mastering the Art . . . in under a year. Why? Well, to show that she could. And to drown out the ticking of her biological clock. While she was doing it, she kept a blog, and built up quite a following, not to say a degree of notoriety (she likes to swear). Julie & Julia is the result of the inevitable multiple-figure book deal.

Child and Powell never meet, and Julia dies towards the end of the book. But it doesn’t matter. This is a journey of self-discovery, and Julia the flesh-and-blood person, unlike her recipes or the ideal of perfect womanhood she represents, is little more than the saucepot equivalent of the Holy Grail — a MacGuffin, as they say in the movies (it’s a Hitchcock thing: a MacGuffin is something that an entire story is built around and yet has no real relevance, the uranium in Notorious, for example). Julie would probably protest, but I don’t mean it in a bad way. Julie & Julia is a culinary reworking of the standard quest narrative, and it’s the journey that matters, not the getting there.

I have not tasted a single one of Julia’s dishes, let alone any cooked by Julie herself, and yet I savoured each one with the same delight as the author; and I have felt for her as her sponge fingers have crumbled or her pancakes stuck. She is an intriguing combination of Nigella Lawson and Bridget Jones, only less contrived and better written. She makes a virtue of her disorganisation, turning what might have been a story of grim determination into a pleasing meander through her life.

She is an ordinary person attempting an extraordinary thing, and as such is immediately empathetic. Her quest is peppered with clever, and endlessly entertaining distractions, from observations about her work colleagues and friends to more serious passages about sex, love, theatre, politics and, naturally, food. The reader is never allowed to be bored, and even at her most self-indulgent Powell saves the day with a swift injection of self-deprecating humour or mischief.

It’s quite an achievement this, to have written about resolving a pre-midlife crisis through the medium of food without ending up looking like a pretentious ass. There are two reasons for this: her family and her husband Eric. Her family are cool: loving, supportive and fun. And her husband is even cooler. Not because he washes up after her, or makes her vodka gimlets or puts up with her neurotic girlfriends. But because he makes her — or appears to make her — happy. The irony of this book, which is supposedly about finding meaning in an otherwise barren life, is that it could never have been written, nor could the project have been undertaken, had not Powell possessed the supreme confidence that being happily married to a man such as Eric brings. If the book is to believed, they have the sort of grown-up, functional relationship that results in total confidence.

It’s not perfect. She has an annoying attitude towards rich people, which is silly since now she either is one or is on the way to becoming one. She harbours irrational dislikes of things or organisations that she feels represent idle privilege. She hates Dean & DeLuca, for example, describing it as “the Grocery of the Anti Christ”, a somewhat extreme reaction to what is, after all, only a delicatessen. And she’s a bit too in love with her own quirkiness, her thriftiness and her general impracticality, which as the book progresses feels increasingly disingenuous. After all, keeping a successful blog about cooking 524 gourmet French recipes in a year before selling the resulting book for a cool $500,000 does not seem to me like the behaviour of a harebrained flibbertigibbet. What does she think we are, stoopid?