Posts tagged ‘julia child’

Although it came out in 2006, The United States of Arugula: The Sun Dried, Cold Pressed, Dark Roasted, Extra Virgin Story of the American Food Revolution by David Kamp is an absolute must read for anyone interested in contemporary food culture and food politics. It spans nearly a century and highlights the pivotal figures and movements that brought French cooking to America, goat cheese and mesclun salad to your table, and sushi to your grocery store.

The book starts by introducing us to Henri Soule, a restaurant manager from France who operated a French restaurant at the 1939-40 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadow, Queens and established French cuisine and service as the standard for excellence. We meet a young Julia Child as she learns how to cook in Paris as well as James Beard on a bumbling path toward food fame. We get to know Craig Claiborne, the writer who took food writing from small newspaper advice columns written for bored or busy housewives to the New York Times where he became a highly influential critic.

The processed 50s gives way to the counter culture 60s and Kamp takes us to California to the opening night of Chez Panisse. The reader then goes on a romp through the rise of Alice Waters, Nieman Ranch, and Ben & Jerry’s. The book ends with the rise of celebrity chefs like Mario Batali and Emeril Lagasse and the growing customer demand for “responsible” food companies like Whole Foods and Starbucks.

While this book is a detailed history (and chock-full of footnotes) it also reads like a fast-paced novel where I was turning the page to find out what happened next. Kamp is also careful not to ignore the fact that establishments like Taco Bell were growing their empires at the same time that sophisticated urbanites were falling in love with goat cheese. This book is as much a cultural exploration as it is a chronicle of food trends. All the big names are in here: Rick Bayless, Thomas Keller, Rachael Ray, Dean and Deluca, Nobu Matsuhisa, Charlie Trotter…the list goes on and on. The United States of Arugula manages to be both a beach read and an important reference that has definitely earned a spot on my bookshelf.

The only thing that Kamp doesn’t address is the rise of food bloggers. I look forward to the follow-up!

I graduated college in 1999, but didn’t get my first “real” job, the kind with benefits, until January of 2000. Essentially, I’ve lived my entire “grown-up life” in the aughts and as I ponder the jobs I’ve had, all the traveling I did, friends and lovers come and gone, and a world with many sharp shifts, I also think about what I was eating. It has been both a hungry and fulfilling decade.

My friend C.C. and I like to refer to the very early aughts as “The Sex and the City” era. We were both working and playing hard at a dot com way downtown, accruing stock options in lieu of 401ks, and drinking a lot of cocktails. Though I was always a dirty martini girl, the drink du jour was the Cosmo. Then came apple martinis, espresso martinis, a resurgence of Manhattans, and pomegranate martinis. With our 10-dollar drinks, we also scarfed down huge amounts of sushi. Sushi was everywhere, even the grocery store, and I was able to convince my Dad, a meat-and-baked-ziti kind of guy, to try a tuna avocado roll. Dudes in banker blue button-down shirts were eating steak like it was going out of style. Any man who hadn’t sunk his incisors into a wedge of Kobe beef hadn’t yet really arrived.

The stock market had a mini-crash, the dot coms started folding, and I lost my job. I stopped swilling martinis and started doing a lot of daytime reading on Cedar Hill in Central Park. One book passed on to me was The Botany of Desire. “Have you ever heard of Michael Pollan? He writes for the Times,” asked my friend Christina, whose cooking prowess increased as the relationship with her boyfriend grew more serious. “I never thought I would be interested in botany, but this guy really opens your eyes.”

>> Read on for details on the rest of the decade in food >>

On Wednesday, my favorite Russian emigre and I packed a lovely dinner courtesy of tbsp. (and our favorite Bandit single-serving boxed wine from Bottlerocket) and snuck it into the Chelsea cinemas for our overdue viewing of Julie & Julia.

Confession: I went to the movie not for Julia Child but for Julie Powell.

Yes, everyone agrees that Julia was a domestic goddess, that she fundamentally altered the way we cook and think about cooking, ad infinitum, but Julie had a pretty profound effect on a certain food-obsessed writer as well.

While toiling away as a young, unhappy, low-level women’s magazine editor in the wilds of northern New Jersey, I read through the original Julie/Julia Project blog in 2003-2004 as JP was writing it.

Although a few years behind Julie, I was already grappling with many of the issues — career ambivalence, the grind of New York, and the search for a purpose-driven life — that she was cooking through on the blog. It was gutsy, ambitious (and yes, foul-mouthed), and it struck a deep chord.

The book, with its print format-imposed narrative structure, diluted some of the blog’s raw spark, and that’s true for most of the movie as well — especially the the Julia Child moments filmed in the dreamlike environments of post-war France. Red-banquette bistros in Marseille and charming ancient fishmongers don’t lend themselves very well to bile, but there’s also a gloss to the modern New York scenes that manages to polish even a subway commute. You know you’re in a Nora Ephron movie when even Long Island City gets a glamorous sparkle.

But despite the sanitized Hollywood treatment of both journeys, the movie powerfully clarified one fundamental truth. We all want Julia Child’s life, but even though most of us end up with a version that falls closer to Julie Powell’s, we can still revel in the transformative impact of food.

For those of us who can answer Paul Child’s question to his wife, “What is it you really like to do?” with the same answer as Julia: “Eat!”, the sense of purpose and fulfillment that comes through cooking and sharing food with an appreciative audience can truly change a life.

As Jeffrey Steingarten noted in his August Vogue column, “This is precisely where the true stories of Julia and Julie intersect most closely. For both women, different as they are, cooking — even an obsession with cooking — lifted them out of a sense of uselessness, of dilettantism.”

Yes, the movie is a fantasy that smudges away a lot of difficult moments, but it’s also a validation of our most basic happinesses. When I stand at my kitchen counter slowly stirring a risotto, painstakingly icing mini veggie cakes, or working my way through the millionth step of a Thomas Keller recipe, the whole world falls away. There is nothing more important in that particular moment than the task in front of me and nothing more pleasurable. And absolutely nothing wrong with that.