Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch -- Must Read

[no_hypocrisy]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/magazine/02cooking-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=magazine

1. JULIA’S CHILDREN

I was only 8 when “The French Chef” first appeared on American television in 1963, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that this Julia Child had improved the quality of life around our house. My mother began cooking dishes she’d watched Julia cook on TV: boeuf bourguignon (the subject of the show’s first episode), French onion soup gratinée, duck à l’orange, coq au vin, mousse au chocolat. Some of the more ambitious dishes, like the duck or the mousse, were pointed toward weekend company, but my mother would usually test these out on me and my sisters earlier in the week, and a few of the others — including the boeuf bourguignon, which I especially loved — actually made it into heavy weeknight rotation. So whenever people talk about how Julia Child upgraded the culture of food in America, I nod appreciatively. I owe her. Not that I didn’t also owe Swanson, because we also ate TV dinners, and those were pretty good, too.

Every so often I would watch “The French Chef” with my mother in the den. On WNET in New York, it came on late in the afternoon, after school, and because we had only one television back then, if Mom wanted to watch her program, you watched it, too. The show felt less like TV than like hanging around the kitchen, which is to say, not terribly exciting to a kid (except when Child dropped something on the floor, which my mother promised would happen if we stuck around long enough) but comforting in its familiarity: the clanking of pots and pans, the squeal of an oven door in need of WD-40, all the kitchen-chemistry-set spectacles of transformation. The show was taped live and broadcast uncut and unedited, so it had a vérité feel completely unlike anything you might see today on the Food Network, with its A.D.H.D. editing and hyperkinetic soundtracks of rock music and clashing knives. While Julia waited for the butter foam to subside in the sauté pan, you waited, too, precisely as long, listening to Julia’s improvised patter over the hiss of her pan, as she filled the desultory minutes with kitchen tips and lore. It all felt more like life than TV, though Julia’s voice was like nothing I ever heard before or would hear again until Monty Python came to America: vaguely European, breathy and singsongy, and weirdly suggestive of a man doing a falsetto impression of a woman. The BBC supposedly took “The French Chef” off the air because viewers wrote in complaining that Julia Child seemed either drunk or demented.

[april]

1. Last night PBS had Julia's old shows on ...it was Great!

[Warpy]

2. Watching Julia Child gave me a distinct aversion

to open floor plan kitchens. Cooking is messy, especially when I do it, and if I drop something on the floor before it's cooked, like Julia I don't want anybody to know about it.

I've been stuck with open floor plan kitchens twice and loathed them both times. Give me a room with a door, thanks, although a pass through is tolerable.

Dining with a full view of a sink stacked high with dirty pots and pans is uncomfortable, and coffee and cakes in the living area is pointless if you can smell the fish or cabbage there as strongly as you can in the kitchen.

Julia was right. It's best when they never know.

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

4. Quite an interesting point about open floor plan kitchens

Very true that in the past, the kitchen was screened off and you didn't see the mess created while cooking. I wonder if the open plan that is so favored now makes people keep their kitchens tidier?

I think the perfect kitchen design of the future will feature something along the lines of a laundry shoot where you can just jettison the dirty pots and pans into a waiting vat of industrial detergent which will soak and then drain them and then put them on a conveyor belt to a dumbwaiter which is how they return to the kitchen for just a final light wipe down.

[beac]

3. I just finished reading "Julie & Julia" and somehow had no idea it was also coming out as

a movie this summer-- though the two-week wait for a copy at the library should have tipped me off that something was up.

I remember Julia Child on the TV and even went through my own french cooking phase, though I never could stomach savory "jellies" or organ meats.

Being a vegetarian now, I got a little ooky reading about all the various ways Ms. Child prepared offal, vivid "de-boning" instructions and meat dishes left to "marinate" outside the fridge overnight. But it did bring back fond memories of black & white TV, childhood and especially my grandmother who always loved a good aspic.