Game 82: An Interview with Julie Powell of "Julie & Julia"
A little over a year ago, Anthony Davis was traded to the Lakers. It was on that day that I decided to commit to an idea I had floating around my head ever since I bought the World Champion Lakers Are Cookin’ Family Cookbook on eBay. I would cook 82 dishes from the cookbook and write 82 pieces about the people who contributed the recipes. All of this in an attempt to better understand Lakers fandom and L.A. history by writing and cooking my way through a cookbook that, as I quickly found out, had as many good recipes as A.C. Green had sexual partners.
My project was inspired by the book Julie & Julia and its 2009 film adaptation. If you’ve never seen it despite Netflix’s insistence that you do so immediately after watching a 10 part serial killer documentary, it ends with blogger Julie Powell getting a phone call. The person on the other end of the line tells her that Julia Child, whose cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking was the inspiration for Julie’s goal of cooking all of its 524 recipes in 365, found out about her project. Turns out, Julia hated it. She thought that the blog wasn’t serious and that Julie wasn’t a serious cook. I didn’t want to risk annoying Julie with a ripoff/homage, so I reached out to her in October before I started. While she admitted to knowing nothing about basketball, she gave me her blessing. And now here I am with Game #82, four months later than planned because of the NBA’s Covid-19 shutdown. The Lakers aren’t playing 82 regular season games this year, so in a way, I worked much harder than LeBron and company this season. Guarding Lou Williams is nothing. I’d like to see Kentavious Caldwell-Pope pass two kidney stones while writing a thrice-weekly food blog.
So here we are: Game #82. And what better way to end it than with an interview with the person without whom this project would never have existed: The Julie of Julie & Julia herself, JULIE POWELL! We talked about how she managed to cook 524 recipes in 365 days while working a fulltime job, her thoughts on her many critics in the food blogosphere, why Julie & Julia had a brief resurgence in the early days of the Covid-19 quarantine, the weirdest Julie & Julia inspired blogs she’s seen online, what she thinks about Julia Child’s dismissive comments, her role in keeping the late chef’s legacy alive, and how far she thinks the Lakers go in the 2020 NBA Covid-19 Orlando Bubble Playoffs.
-----------------
PABLO: My schedule was 82 recipes and blog posts for 82 Laker games. That added up to 3-4 posts a week. And because I work in TV production, I was "luckily" unemployed for large stretches of this project. How did you pull off 524 recipes over 365 days with a fulltime job? What was the day-to-day schedule like during that madness?
JULIE: How I managed it was in a state of panic for a year straight. I was reading your post about having lots of blogs in the can in advance. Yeah, none of that happened for me. I generally wrote in the morning before I went to work, so I'd get up at 6 am and write out my blog about what I made the night before and I would go to work by 8:30 am and do my job, which was an exhausting job. Then I usually got off by 6:30 pm and I would shop on my way home and get back to Queens and cook. Usually, I didn't get dinner on the table until 10 pm at the very earliest. And I'd be drinking the whole time just to get myself through it, so I wasn't ready to write about it after I made these heavy, rich meals. Then I'd go to bed around midnight and get up again to do the same thing. That was pretty much the routine for that year because I had to cook pretty much every day. If I gave myself a break, it meant I had to make more recipes the next day.
It was tight but I was younger so I was able to. And I've always been a person who thrives on panic. I can pull out something if I can convince myself that it has to be done. And I had convinced myself that I had to do this. That it was a moral imperative. And part of it too is the early days of blogging where you'd get ten comments on a blog post and go "Oh my god, the world is watching! I must fulfill my duties as a food blogger." So I let peer pressure and fan pressure drive me forward, which was very helpful.
In those early days before you were noticed in The New York Times, was saying "fuck it" and quitting ever on your mind?
Very rarely because once I start something, I feel maniacally determined to finish it. So I didn't have a ton of moments of "Screw it." I do remember one specific moment and it was the dumbest thing. I was probably two-thirds of the way through and I was trying to mash cauliflower in a food mill and it wouldn't work and I didn't know how to use the food mill and it was falling apart and spraying cauliflower on the floor. So I just burst into tears and my husband came in and was upset that I was having this meltdown over something ridiculous. And he says, “You know what? We can't do this anymore. You can't do this anymore. You've got to stop."
So I'm sitting on the floor sobbing and for a moment I was like, “Huh, that's true. I absolutely could just not do this anymore.” And I thought about it for a couple of minutes and then I realized that, yes, I don't have to do this. Nobody is forcing me to do this. I chose to do this. And somehow that made it easier to pick myself up. And we ordered pizza that night and I took the day off and got back in the saddle and felt okay about it after that. Also at that point, you could sorta see the light at the end of the tunnel, so I was able to brush myself off and get back in the saddle.
Amy Adams in Julie & Julia (2009)
During the early weeks of the quarantine, like mid-March through April, I noticed a flood of tweets about Julie & Julia. The book, the movie, or just being inspired by it all to cook. What do you think it was about the project that hit a chord during those first scary weeks?
I think it's a similar impulse that made my blog popular in the weeks and months after 9/11. It’s that there was a similar kind of fear and uncertainty. There was a whole explosion of knitting and at-home crafts after 9/11 and I think the same thing was happening here. So for a lot of people, Julie & Julia is a very comforting movie and it was a comforting blog at the time because it allows you to sink into something you love and can do in your own home and is safe and creative and distracting and keeps you from falling apart. And of course everyone has been doing the sourdough starter and baking bread. Cooking has become a major way for people to sustain themselves physically and emotionally and that's where the book and the blog at that time struck people because it's comfort food. And it's showing two women who were overcoming various adversities through this one art that they loved. And I think that people are looking for that, they're looking for that relief. Everybody's stuck at home and everybody's worried about everybody else but you can still make a beef bourguignon. And you have the time now, so you might as well! I've been getting a lot of tweets and people sliding into my DMs saying they've watched the movie three times since March and it's the thing they go to when they’re stressed out.
I've never looked at Mastering the Art of French Cooking before. What's the one recipe I should cook from it and why?
My classic answer is always the beef bourguignon. The thing with Julia's recipes is that it's not so much that the techniques are terribly difficult. It's just that she's very specific, one might say finicky, about how the steps should be done. So when you make beef bourguignon, you have to brown each of the vegetables separately and put them aside. You've got the onions over here and the mushrooms over here and the beef over there. So it takes a while but it's such a beautifully written recipe that it's almost like... this sounds pretentious but to me it's like, and I'm not a religious person, but it's like reading Bible verses over and over. If you open and read a psalm every night, something about the repetition and finding new things in it every time. The comfort of it always being there. A lot of Julia’s recipes are like that. Because they're so well written and structured, there's a pleasure and calmness about going through the steps. For me it's very soothing. But there's lot of recipes in the book that I love. I also liked the baked cucumbers just because who would ever think of baking cucumbers and that it would actually turn out well? And easy. Though you do bake them for an hour which seems impossible.
What do you put on them?
Butter. Mostly a lot of butter.
No surprise. What do you like to cook these days?
We cook every night pretty much. I am one of the many people who does Alison Roman's shallot pasta all the time. So I have some regulars I turn out and Eric has regulars he turns out. A least a few times a week, I try to make something entirely new, which I'm going to be doing tonight.
What are you making?
It's a recipe my mom sent me. It's called ground beef stroganoff. It's kind of a cheater recipe. It's not Family Circle but it's not far off. But it's no something I've tried before.
Growing up in Austin, what's the biggest difference you've noticed in Texan cuisine from your childhood to now?
There's always been great food in Austin but it's leagues more sophisticated now as it's become a really great eating city. It's just expanded. Austin, you used to be able to get good BBQ, Mexican food, Vietnamese food if you went out of your way. And then regular old steakhouse stuff. And now there's everything you can think of. It's just exploded. It's one of the nice sides of Austin's explosion. There are a lot of bad sides as well but the cuisine has certainly gone through a revolution.
I know I'm not the first copycat to start a Julie & Julia inspired blog. What are some of your favorite or weirdest versions you've come across?
By far the weirdest one was the guy who decided to watch the movie 365 times in 365 days. That was bizarre. I don't know if he made it. He might have driven himself crazy. I knew I would've gone crazy. It's not something I could do in a million years. A lot of them are pretty straight ahead, people picking other cookbooks, which I think in a time like this is probably pretty tempting. I could see doing something that was a project until Election Day just to have something to do to quell the constant screaming. But there's something about marking the days, especially in a time where the days are getting really hard to get through, that helps. So oddly, I started my project at a time when I was very stressed out and very unhappy so I chose this thing that anyone could say "Well that's just going to make everything worse" and sometimes on a day to day basis it did. But it gave me some purpose at a time when I really didn't feel I had one. I definitely get the appeal. And of course people think I did it because I wanted to write a book. The thing is I did not understand the internet or blogging in a way that I could possibly foresee such a thing. Now of course that's part of the game. But at that time it was purely just this personal, whimsical notion. I did want to start writing again because I had been very frustrated as a writer and it helped me tremendously with that. But that's all I was thinking and nowadays everyone is looking for an angle and I don't think the 365 blank in 365 days is necessarily quite the concept that people once thought it was. But I do get it on a personal level for sure.
So mine wasn't the weirdest?
No! I've been really enjoying it. And I say this as a person who's the opposite of a sports fan. I am essentially sportsphobic so for me to get really interested in something you're writing every day was cool because I love how you incorporate not just the players but a history of L.A. and its politics. I really thought that was fantastic and I admire the amount of research and what you had to put into each post, I mean besides all the cooking. I've really been enjoying it.
In going back and researching you at the height of your Julie & Julia fame, I found the venom towards you to be really shocking. Was it jealousy? Was it the Gawker era snark of the time? What was behind the animosity?
During the blog, I got criticism but I also had this rabid fanbase that would attack anyone who went after me. So that was nice, my own pack of wolves. Little middle aged lady wolves. And then when the movie came out there was a resurgence. During the second surge, my second book was also coming out so I got a whole lot of venom for that second book. Which a lot of people didn't like, which is fair. But I think it was just snarky-ness, especially the first time. I don't believe in cancel culture, I think it's a silly thing. But I do think there is a bit of a Tall Poppy situation where if it looked like someone got something too easily or if they thought I was being manipulative or exploitative of Julia's legacy, then of course people, especially people who were close to Julia, would be angry. And I understand that. I wish they had understood that this really came from a place of admiration and devotion towards her. I'm not trying to ride her coattails, I'm just trying to give her tribute. I think people misinterpreted that. I'm sorry that they did but I get it. I understand especially if you're in her inner circle. People are very protective of her legacy. She was very protective of her legacy. And so I think they circled the wagons a bit when the blog ended and the book came out. People were very angry at what they thought was an exploitative move on my part. And I get that. It's not how I feel about what I did but I understand why they would feel that way.
When I DM’d you last year to get your blessing, I mentioned that this was going to be a wild NBA season. I said that not knowing that Kobe Bryant would die or that an NBA player contracting Covid-19 would be the pivotal event that caused America to finally shut down or that the NBA would try to restart in a “bubble” in the middle of a second surge of the virus. I know you’re not an NBA fan but did any of those events permeate into your life?
Oh sure. Well of course for Kobe it came to me on Twitter. It kind of came from the other side from a lot of people saying "Don't forget he has this sexual assault in his past" and that he was a predator. So that's just what popped up in my feed. And so I was going back and forth reading and then I got a little deeper and I got to read about Kobe, everything about him, so it definitely was in my consciousness. And of course, for his family, it was just awful. For the player who contracted Covid, I remember looking at my Twitter and going "Oh great, they played a basketball game and now this guy's got Covid." And that really got my husband, who is not sportsphobic, going "Oh no, it's all going to go to hell now" That definitely was a milestone in how seriously I was taking this. I think I really switched gears right about then. That was the day I said, "I gotta go to the grocery store right now." So I did this huge shopping trip and I felt kind of embarrassed. And the next week I went back and it was everybody. Masks were in place. Everybody was doing crazy shopping. And of course we were starting to get New York issues. It was a real sharp turn.
I sent you my disastrous attempt at making Cool Jello, which, even if it set properly, tasted horrible. This was a big throughline in Goldstein and Gasol because this book had mostly recipes from moms back in the ‘50s. A lot of Middle America stuff. Have you ever made anything like a classic Jell-O mold? And where do you think I went wrong in my attempt?
I am very, very bad at anything that needs to be set. I've never done a classic Jell-O mold, but the equivalent in Mastering the Art are aspics which are essentially Jell-O molds. And she has them for days, there are so many of them. And they're awful. The first time I tried to do it the classic French way and I managed to get like cow hooves and pig hooves and all kinds of gelatinous stuff and boil it down. And it smelled awful and it did not set. And it was just a complete mess. And then the things she puts in aspics are just distressing. Like there's a soft boiled egg in aspic, chicken in aspic, which isn't disturbing but gross. All kinds of unappealing things. After the first aspic, I stopped making it the old fashioned way and started using gelatin. They would set okay but I never got it to really set and I could never eat it at all. It was gross. And I've always had an aversion to the American version of Jell-O molds and salads. I've never been tempted to make that but if I did a project like yours I'd be tempted.
I recently went back through all 82 recipes I cooked and, not counting desserts, there was a grand total of six things I would cook again. Which is really sad.
Well it's just a different world. I have collected a few junior league or church lady cookbooks made on Xerox machines printed with the spiral binding. And they're always quaint and there's never really anything you'd ever want to cook out of them. My mom will keep one that has one recipe. I'm like "Mom, you can take out the page" and keep the book. But you know, they're nostalgic and it's a nice way to look at what people used to cook. Actually, Nora Ephron, when they finished filming the movie, her gift to the cast and crew was exactly that kind of cookbook. A little thin Julie & Julia cookbook that had recipes from cast and crew in it. And this was in 2008, so it's a recent cookbook. And you look back through and it's still the same kind of cooking. The stuff they inherited from their moms. It's better, there's more food in it that you'd want to eat. But a lot of it is still cream of mushroom soup and all that good stuff. It's interesting how that sort of cooking and that level of cooking style does persist. It's still around, I assume largely in the Midwest. But in Texas too. I have relatives who cook that way. And I still make my queso with Rotell and Velveeta.
If The Julie/Julia Project existed in a vacuum, if it never got written about in The New York Times and got made into a book and movie, what do you think you would’ve done with your life?
That's a very good question. Well, of course the attention allowed me to quit my job. And that’s something that would not happen now. It just hit at this time when publishing still had money and no one knew what a blog was or how they were gonna monetize that. So I was able to get a book deal really easily because everyone was like "What is this weird new thing called blogs?" So my timing was extraordinarily good. But I did know because of the attention I got, it gave me a definite shot in the arm. And I'd like to think it would've helped me. I don't know if I would've started another project or just kept blogging about something or other. At the time I didn't want to but I wonder if I would've changed my mind about that if I hadn't had other opportunities just to keep the writing going. Because by the end of that year I felt much more confident as a writer to create and push through and do the work that needed doing. And so I'd like to think I would've kept plugging away but I don't know. I was just extremely lucky and I hope I wouldn't still be working at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. I don't think they're open anymore. It could've happened. It's the Peter Principle, right? I got the job at this agency as a temp and they liked me enough to offer a permanent job and the more responsibility I got and moved up the ladder, the more I hated it. And I'm not very good at it. The drudgery. I'm very glad I did not do that.
Before her death in 2004, Julia Child had some unkind words to say about your project. But I’d argue that most people of my generation and younger who know about Julia Child, mainly know so because of your project. How do you square having such a large role in keeping her legacy alive?
I'm thrilled and proud that I had a role in bringing her back to the conversation and introducing her to a younger generation. Because I admire her not just as a cook but as a writer and as an example for people who feel lost and managed to find a way for themselves. That's really what I was writing about the whole time, is how to find that passion and confidence to move forward despite seemingly impossible obstacles. And that's what she did with her life. And yeah, she had a life of privilege for sure. But she also didn't start cooking until her late thirties and her whole life before then was interesting but she never felt that she had a place or a thing to do that was hers.
So for me, that's what inspired me about her and I hope it can be what inspires other people, especially now as things are so uncertain. The job market's in the tank and nobody knows what anyone is going to do moving forward, especially young people. So I'm thrilled if I had a role in bringing her to the attention of more people and a different generation of people. And I know that she had great sales of Mastering the Art of French Cooking after my book came out. And you know what? I would be lying if I said it didn't give me a certain amount of... I wouldn't say vindictive pleasure but seeing her editors telling me I was a useless guttersnipe and meanwhile their book is selling better than it has in twenty five years... I get a little bit of pleasure out of that. But I'm also very grateful that it is because it is a wonderful book. And I think it's a good time for people to start analyzing what they need to be doing for themselves and wanting to do for themselves. Whether that's a career or personally and that's what Julia always did: Figure it out. So I'm absolutely proud of that.
I just have one more question and it's really the question all my readers are dying to hear. What's your prediction for the Lakers in this year's playoffs?
Oh. Uh... you're going to win it all! I dunno. Sure.
—————————————
Cool Jello
3-ounce package lime Jello
8 ounces small curd cottage cheese
8 ounces Cool Whip
8 ounces crushed pineapple
11 ounces Mandarin oranges.
Dissolve Jello in 1 cup (1 cup only) of hot water. Put in refrigerator and let set until syrupy. Remove from refrigerator and beat with electric mixer, in deep bottom bowl, at high speed, until fluffy (approximately 7 to 8 minutes).
Fold in cottage cheese, Cool Whip, and drained, crushed pineapple. Put mixture in serving dish and into refrigerator to gel firmly.
For appearance, arrange mandarin oranges on top.
Great to make the day before.
This is easily the most vile looking thing I made in my season long journey through the 1985 World Champion Los Angeles Lakers Are Cookin’ Family Cookbook. Lime jello, cottage cheese, Cool Whip, and pineapples. For some ungodly reason, all these items were put into a bowl and mixed together. It looked like a Shamrock Shake. It smelled like laughing gas. After 81 mostly mediocre-to-awful recipes, it was fitting that there was a slight whiff of death -- like improperly prepared fugu -- with the last dish. Only this was cooked to Eulene Rowell’s exact specifications. Who was Eulene Rowell? I don’t know. Other than having a name that rhymes with Julie Powell, I couldn’t find anything about him. Or her. I’ve never heard someone named Eulene before. Maybe it was a typo. If I contributed this recipe to the World Champion Lakers Are Cookin’ Family Cookbook, I would want my name misspelled to the point of never being identified.
You can probably guess how it tasted. First, I had to freeze the gunk. 24 hours in my fridge did nothing to set the Jell-O mix. Two hours later, I plopped it out on a plate, decorated it with mandarin oranges, and took a bite. I threw the Cool Jello straight into the trash. It had to end like this. If the culinary half of this project ended with me cooking a mouthwatering pork chop recipe or a delicious slow cooked bolognese sauce, it just wouldn’t be a Goldstein and Gasol dish. It had to look terrible, smell awful, and taste like something that was not meant to be placed into human bodies. Thank you, Eulene, for helping me end the project in a fitting manner. And thank you, Julie, for everything else.
