Whatever your hand finds

If you find yourself whisking up some homemade mayonnaise or rolling out croissant dough or lifting the lid on a pot of boeuf bourguignon, you may just have been infected with a little Julie and Julia fever. Household cooks all over the country, whose only culinary accomplishments, previous to viewing the movie included the deft opening of Totino's pizza boxes and the procurement of prewashed salad greens, are now flocking to Williams-Sonoma to drool over copper sauté pans, kitchen shears, and flavored sugars.

Why is a movie about cooking, of all things, so popular?

I submit my humble opinion: Because those of us who cut our teeth on Salad Shooters and Cuisinarts are enthralled, and a bit enchanted, by the idea of a person (or in this case, two persons) spending a disproportionate amount of time reveling in one of the most dreaded of housewifely chores: Making dinner. With a Chinese kitchen just two blocks away, curries in the frozen food aisle, and hot wings just a phone call away, why bother?

Julia Child, in her attempt to produce a "foolproof" French cookbook ("a primer on cuisine bourgeoise") for servantless Americans, grew frustrated with our propensity for domestic laziness. An editor told her, "Americans don't want an encyclopedia; they want to cook something quick, with a mix." To which Child responded that, indeed, "the trend in the U.S.A. was toward speed and the elimination of work. . . ." What is a woman, who spends two years and 284 pounds of flour in her attempts to produce the perfect loaf French bread, to think? Child wrote, "Our dinners did not appeal to the TV-dinner-and-cake-mix set. . . . [American] editors [seem] to consider the French preoccupation with detail a waste of time, if not a form of insanity." U.S. visitors to France loved the food, but somehow believed that such fine food came from some form of magic a la Français, not through Child's method, which was "hard work coupled with proper technique."

Rather than being true gastronomes, Americans, Child noted, hold fast to the idea that "TV dinners, frozen vegetables, canned mushrooms, fish sticks, Jell-O salads, marshmallows, spray-can whipped cream, and other horrible glop" was somehow "gourmet." How unpalatable this must have been to Child and her collaborator, Simca Beck, who spent over eight years testing their recipes ad infinitum, perfecting stuffed duck, risotto, and paella for their tour de force, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

All this to say, after a two-week immersion in the life of Julia Child, I have a whole new perspective on dinner. Life is busy, no doubt, and excuses for Totino's suppers abound. But perhaps we can learn a bit about quality from Julia Child. Sometimes we just need coq au vin and buttery croissants and tarte aux pommes. Sometimes we need to shop for three hours for one meal and eat on the Lenox and spend hours talking and laughing at the table and more hours scouring the deglazing sauces out of our pans. Sometimes we need to zest a lemon and press the garlic and make a roux and whip the cream by hand and forget the shortcuts and the take out and the Happy Meals. Sometimes we just need to do something really, really well.

"Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might. . . ." (Ecclesiastes 9:10).

Bon appétit!