Title: Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously
Author: Julie Powell
Publication Date: 2006
Length: 307 pages
Genre: Memoir, Food/Cooking

It seems fitting to start up my new write-ups with this book. Sometimes it takes reading about a change in someone else’s life to make a change in your own, I think.

Not that my own project is anything like the changes that Julie Powell made to hers when she undertook the project of cooking (in the span of one year) every recipe in the first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking– and blogging about it. This book is all about the many misadventures that befell her along the way, blackouts, calf-hoof aspic, lobster murder, and all.

It’s also one of the easiest ways to get a taste of that year, as the blog is now defunct- available only through some searching utilizing the wayback machine*. Oh well, Julie’s prose is more developed in the book anyway- exhibiting the same low-key verbosity that’s found in her blog albeit in a less raw form. As much as I like the film version (which I saw years ago) that was one of the things that it lacked, even considering the segments that Julie narrates.

The other thing it lacked was the time-capsule quality of the book- sealing in moments from the internet’s (as we know it) toddlerhood… blogging’s infancy. Back when that world was smaller and much less visual (a food blog mostly without photos- the mind boggles) when there was another odd-ball republican president (because politicians are weird- no matter their party imo) and 9/11 was still fresh on people’s minds.

Ultimately though, my favorite part isn’t the writing style necessarily, or the nostalgia factor, that makes me like this book so much. No, it’s the shear insanity of the thought ‘I’m gonna pull out this insanely hard cookbook and do it all!’ Having read the whole book I’m still find myself asking the question that Julie was plagued with at the beginning of (and throughout) her project.

Why?

To which I find myself answering back ‘why not?’

Julie had her reasons, which she talks about in the book- but really, sometimes I think the big undertakings don’t necessarily always have to be completely sensical.

After all is said and done, it’s the holy-cow-what-a-decision-ness that keeps me reading, and I suppose what got so much attention in the first place. Sometimes you just need to read about someone taking a chance on the seemingly impossible.

*try https://web.archive.org/web/20040815082608/http://blogs.salon.com/0001399/  – and go backwards – there’s an annoying little missing link hopping from November to December.