I've never watched Julia Child's shows all the way through, so I've never really paid close attention to her methods. There's a dude on YouTube who goes by the moniker ANTI-CHEF, and he's made it his mission to work through the cookbooks and methodologies of several famous people, including Julia Child. His efforts parallel the efforts of Julie Powell, whose attempt to cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the space of a single year was first chronicled in a blog, then turned into the 2009 movie "Julie & Julia." ANTI-CHEF subtitles his Julia Child videos as "Jamie & Julia."* Each video takes us step by step through Julia Child's procedures, and the video below shows his attempt at making Child's boeuf bourguignon. Having made my own boeuf bourguignon many times by now, I found myself curious to see just how Child did it.
I'll save you the suspense: while the boeuf in the video came out well despite the host's various efforts at self-sabotage, I ended up thinking that Child's methodology was way, way too overthought. The absolutely simple recipe that I use (see this photo from this post), which has barely 5 or 6 steps, is absurdly easy to follow if you have any common sense. You probably don't even have to read French to follow it. If the above is a typical example of how Julia Child thinks her way through French cooking, I'll stick to my above-linked Simplissime book and to The Joy of Cooking, thanks. To paraphrase Mr. Scott: The more you overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.
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*He says "Jamie & Julia," but on his YouTube About page, his email says "josh.cohen@authenticm.com." So is he "Jamie," or is he "Josh"? I don't know, and I find it annoying when people bandy about different names. Pick one and stick with it, dammit. I knew a rebellious girl in church, back in the day, who was named Karen. I found out years later that she had forsaken the name her parents had given her, and she was now to be known as Kaylin. Whatever.
More people here know me as "Gwapo" than John, but I can't help being handsome...
ReplyDeleteJulia Child's recipes always struck me as over-fussy, to be honest, so this isn't a surprise. I suspect that part of it was an attempt to maintain a mystique around "French cooking."
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