Sometimes Food Feeds More Than Your Stomach

“…there is no such thing as wasted time in the kitchen—rather that is where we are able to recover lost time.”  —Laura Esquivel

“Nothing is too much trouble if it turns out the way it should.” —Julia Child

I love food and I love to cook, especially when I have the time to really ponder and concentrate on each slice, each stir, each taste and smell.  I have not yet seen Julie and Julia, but I happened to see the movie trailer a few weeks ago, just before I headed to the library.  Inspired, perhaps, by the preview, I came home with these three books.  

Between Two Fires: Intimate Writings on Life, Love, Food, and Flavor by Laura Esquivel

Esquivel’s little book reflects some of the values and conflict recognizable from Like Water for Chocolate.  This small volume collects a handful of speeches and book prefaces written by Esquivel at different times and purposes that nevertheless cohere around themes of the kitchen and of food and love.  Feminism and cultural identity figure prominently.  She even throws in a few recipes written for Vogue Mexico.  I read it quickly but the flavors of the book stayed with me, gently prodding my own internal conflict between the love of my ‘woman’s work’ and the potential oppressiveness of that work.  Esquivel’s tidbits evoke a cozy kitchen where anything can happen, good or bad, and yet we always feel at home.  

Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom: Essential Techniques and Recipes from a Lifetime of Cooking by Julia Child

Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom, a cookbook, is the odd-book-out here.  I admit to not spending much time over this book.  I browsed through the recipes, hoping something would jump out at me, begging to be made.  As I turned each page, I realized that I could make many of the dishes without a recipe.  In that way it was affirming of my knowledge in the kitchen, but also disappointing because I wanted something new and inspiring.  It felt like Mastering the Art-Lite.  I do love that even in providing the description of a dish or a suggestion on technique, Julia Child’s particular idiom shines through.  So though I did not cook anything from the little book, I did feel good about the art of cooking and of savoring every bite.  

My Life in France by Julia Child, with Alex Prud’Homme

Created with her nephew, Alex Prud’Homme, Julia Child died before this book was finished.  My Life in France represents Julia Child’s final reflections on how she became an icon without the sense that she herself changed along the way.  This book begins the day Julia and Paul Child, newlyweds, move to France for a diplomatic assignment, and ends when Julia closes up their seasonal house in Provence many years later, when Paul is unable to travel there anymore.  The Childs did not live continuously in France during that entire period, but their life in the United States and elsewhere is glossed over in favor of providing detail about the settings, friendships, and experiences of France.  Child seems to want to communicate to us just exactly why and how she loved France in spite of attitudes toward the French in America at the time.  Her own father provides the (oft-painful) counterpoint to her love of France at many turns.  This book tells part of the story of the Paul and Julia’s life together, the story of how Julia came to cooking, and the story of how Mastering the Art of French Cooking was created.  Child is neither boastful nor self-deprecating, and readily points out differences in the way she was viewed in the United States and elsewhere as she experienced it.  

Julia Child changed the way Americans viewed the kitchen and paved the way for many television chefs to come.  She had many opportunities and made the best of each one while they lasted, then let them go when they were done.  She is often blunt in her assessments of people and situations, but the book is without bitterness or complaint, and communicates a sense of strident pragmatism characteristic of Child.