News-Letter

Julia Child taught generations how to command the kitchen with flair. (courtesy of http://www.beyondgourmet.com/) [Click to enlarge]

America is left without one culinary aesthete as she awaits jail sentence, but we have been permanently deprived of another, more important culinary prophet: Julia Child. Every kitchen in America is a little more empty after her passing this August, but her memory lives on. Julia Child's memory lives on in every American citizen that grabs butter instead of margarine, that herbs her omelet, that throws fabulous dinner parties and plays around in the kitchen.

But there's something very sad about a college student's cabinet. The mac "n' cheese boxes are stacking up. The instant mashed potatoes are lurking in the back, but inevitably they'll coagulate into a grainy "meal." The canned tomato sauce is waiting to be plopped onto some dry pasta and called Italian.

Could America really have progressed from the culinary dark ages, when a 6-foot-2-inch woman with a booming voice came in and singlehandedly changed the American cuisine? Yes. But we, the collegiate masses, have not.

In honor of the operatic Californian, but more importantly, in a celebration of your life, of appreciating eating as both a necessity and a pleasure, go gourmet. The Julia Child that most of us remember is as an octogenarian that used to come before Sesame Street in the afternoons. What she really was is a revolutionary, a visionary and an artist, and our generation has sadly forgotten her.

Child's show, debuted in 1954, taught the masses that you can make a french baguette in an American oven, and that it's okay to make a few mistakes in the kitchen. As my mother infamously quotes Julia, "Remember, you're alone in the kitchen, and no one's watching."

While Child was rumored to have spent up to 19 hours preparing for each show, she was no sickening display of perfection a la Martha. When Julia messed up a crepe, she threw it on the floor, like everyone secretly craves.

Even crepes, those cute thin pancakes they brought to Spring Fair, seem commonplace and au courant -- something that you can whip together with a few eggs and flour and milk, and maybe some liqueur. However, when our poor grandmothers were in our position, French food was reserved for the upper class. American food in the '50s focused on the quick and satisfying and fake. Riding the technological post-war era, cuisine suffered our economic advances.

Today, we are prisoners of The Carb. As one friend put it, "If President Bush had told America that we were going to Iraq to destroy his stockpiles of carbs and carb-related facilities, that there wouldn't be all this controversy that we have today."

We are stuck between choosing butter or bread, but it hurts somewhere inside if we have either. If every diet had it right, we'd eat yogurt and a chicken breast, and want to kill ourselves.

Now is the time to embrace Julia Child, and not get fat, but finally eat well.

Eating well is about understanding what goes into your food, about knowing intimately every taste on your plate and knowing what to do if you have an onion and a few eggs and some flour in your kitchen. Do not go to Uni Mini and eat a turkey sandwich in the white plastic chairs outside the store. Cook thee up a quiche, invite a few friends over, and you'll be happier and more fulfilled. It's sexy, it's easy, and it's an art form that so many people underestimate.

There are no compromises you have to make for cooking and eating well, either. You do not have to gain weight. It does not have to take six hours every day. Besides, everything Julia Child has in her cookbook tastes better than it feels to weigh 100 pounds.

Now, let me specify why one should go Julia Child, and not Rachel Ray. Rachel Ray makes cute, little "30 Minute Meals," and I have to give the proper credit to the Cooking Channel for mass distributing a love of cooking shows (and affirming my belief that PBS has always been a decade or so ahead of the rest of America). But shows like "Food 9-11" do not teach you how to have life-affirming experiences. When you make a proper meal, and most especially when you get to share it with others, it's a cross between childbirth and falling in love. Anything else is just a one-night stand with nourishment.

Let yourself loose, and set yourself free from the chains of Lean Cuisine. Grab that stick of butter and your Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I or II, and get ready for the rest of your culinary life. As Julia put it, "I was 32 when I started cooking. Before then I just ate."

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