Julie Powell - Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously

Copyright 2005 by Julie Powell

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Little, Brown and Company

Hachette Book Group, USA

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First eBook Edition: September 2005

ISBN: 978-0-7595-1457-7

For Julia, without whom I could not have done this,

and for Eric, without whom I could not do at all

For the sake of discretion, many identifying details, individuals, and events throughout this book have been altered. Only myself, my husband, and certain widely known public figures, including Julia and Paul Child, are identified by real names.

Also, sometimes I just made stuff up.

Case in point: the scenes from the lives of Paul Child and Julia McWilliams Child depicted throughout are purely works of imagination, inspired by events described in the journals and letters of Paul Child, the letters of Julia McWilliams, and the biography of Julia Child, Appetite for Life, by Nol Riley Fitch. I thank Ms. Riley Fitch for her fine work, and the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University for generously making Mrs. Childs archives available to the public.

Julie Powell

Thursday, October 6, 1949

Paris

At seven oclock on a dreary evening in the Left Bank, Julia began roasting pigeons for the second time in her life.

Shed roasted them the first time that morning during her first-ever cooking lesson, in a cramped basement kitchen at the Cordon Bleu cooking school at 129, rue du Faubourg St.-Honor. Now she was roasting some more in the rented flat she shared with her husband, Paul, in the kitchen at the top of a narrow stairway in what used to be the servant quarters before the old house got divided up into apartments. The stove and counters were too short for her, like everything else in the world. Even so, she liked her kitchen at the top of the stairs better than the one at schoolliked the light and air up there, liked the dumbwaiter that would carry her birds down to the dining room, liked that she could cook while her husband sat beside her at the kitchen table, keeping her company. She supposed she would get used to the counters soon enoughwhen you go through life as a six-foot-two-inch-tall woman, you get used to getting used to things.

Paul was there now, snapping pictures of his wife from time to time, and finishing up a letter to his brother, Charlie. If you could see Julie stuffing pepper and lard up the asshole of a dead pigeon, he wrote, youd realize how profoundly affected shes been already.

But he hadnt seen anything yet. His wife, Julia Child, had decided to learn to cook. She was thirty-seven years old.

The Road to Hell Is Paved with Leeks and Potatoes

A s far as I know, the only evidence supporting the theory that Julia Child first made Potage Parmentier during a bad bout of ennui is her own recipe for it. She writes that Potage Parmentierwhich is just a Frenchie way of saying potato soupsmells good, tastes good, and is simplicity itself to make. It is the first recipe in the first book she ever wrote. She concedes that you can add carrots or broccoli or green beans if you want, but that seems beside the point, if what youre looking for is simplicity itself.

Simplicity itself. It sounds like poetry, doesnt it? It sounds like just what the doctor ordered.

It wasnt what my doctor ordered, though. My doctormy gynecologist, to be specificordered a baby.

There are the hormonal issues in your case, with the PCOS, you know about that already. And you are pushing thirty, after all. Look at it this waythere will never be a better time.

This was not the first time Id heard this. It had been happening for a couple of years now, ever since Id sold some of my eggs for $7,500 in order to pay off credit card debt. Actually, that was the second time Id donated a funny way of putting it, since when you wake up from the anesthesia less a few dozen ova and get dressed, theres a check for thousands of dollars with your name on it waiting at the receptionists desk. The first time was five years ago, when I was twenty-four, impecunious and fancy-free. I hadnt planned on doing it twice, but three years later I got a call from a doctor with an unidentifiable European accent who asked me if Id be interested in flying down to Florida for a second go-round, because our clients were very satisfied with the results of your initial donation. Egg donation is still a new-enough technology that our slowly evolving legal and etiquette systems have not yet quite caught up; nobody knows if egg donators are going to be getting sued for child support ten years down the line or what. So discussions on the subject tend to be knotted with imprecise pronouns and euphemisms. The upshot of this phone call, though, was that there was a little me running around Tampa or somewhere, and the little mes parents were happy enough with him or her that they wanted a matched set. The honest part of me wanted to shout, Wait, nowhen they start hitting puberty youll regret this! But $7,500 is a lot of money.

Anyway, it was not until the second harvesting (they actually call it harvesting; fertility clinics, it turns out, use a lot of vaguely apocalyptic terms) that I found out I had polycystic ovarian syndrome, which sounds absolutely terrifying, but apparently just meant that I was going to get hairy and fat and Id have to take all kinds of drugs to conceive. Which means, I guess, that I havent heard my last of crypto-religious obstetric jargon.

So. Ever since I was diagnosed with this PCOS, two years ago, doctors have been obsessing over my childbearing prospects. Ive even been given the Pushing Thirty speech by my avuncular, white-haired orthopedist (what kind of twenty-nine-year-old has a herniated disk, I ask you?).

At least my gynecologist had some kind of business in my private parts. Maybe thats why I heroically did not start bawling immediately when he said this, as he was wiping off his speculum. Once he left, however, I did fling one of my navy faille pumps at the place where his head had been just a moment before. The heel hit the door with a thud, leaving a black scuff mark, then dropped onto the counter, where it knocked over a glass jar of cotton swabs. I scooped up all the Q-tips from the counter and the floor and started to stuff them back into the jar before realizing Id probably gotten them all contaminated, so then I shoved them into a pile next to an apothecary jar full of fresh needles and squeezed myself back into the vintage forties suit Id been so proud of that morning when Nate from work told me it made my waist look small while subtly eyeing my cleavage, but which on the ride from lower Manhattan to the Upper East Side on an un-air-conditioned 6 train had gotten sweatstained and rumpled. Then I slunk out of the room, fifteen-buck co-pay already in hand, the better to make my escape before anyone discovered Id trashed the place.

As soon as I got belowground, I knew there was a problem. Even before I reached the turnstiles, I heard a low, subterranean rumble echoing off the tiled walls, and noticed more than the usual number of aimless-looking people milling about. A tangy whiff of disgruntlement wafted on the fetid air. Every once in a great while the announcement system would come on and announce something, but none of these spatterings of word salad resulted in the arrival of a train, not for a long, long time. Along with everyone else, I leaned out over the platform edge, hoping to see the pale yellow of a trains headlight glinting off the track, but the tunnel was black. I smelled like a rained-upon, nervous sheep. My feet, in their navy heels with the bows on the toe, were killing me, as was my back, and the platform was so crammed with people that before long I began to worry someone was going to fall off the edge onto the trackspossibly me, or maybe the person I was going to push during my imminent psychotic break.