Not Just a Movie: We're Cookin' Now!
PART 3 IN AN 8-PART SERIES
"Your book is going to change the world."
—Paul Child, in Julie & Julia
Heidi Isaac has never been afraid of the kitchen. As a kid, she fried potatoes for her mother. As a teen, she’d cook meals for her boyfriends. In the 1990s, as a radio talk-show producer in Chicago, she met some of the day’s hippest chefs. She even received a postcard from cooking legend Julia Child herself—signed in the gourmand’s own hand.
But even though she flings around terms like bouillabaisse and clafoutis with practiced ease, she was largely unfamiliar with the classic tome that launched Child’s career, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
That is, until she and her husband (my editor, Steven Isaac) went to see Julie & Julia, a film based on Child’s life and influence.
Two days later, Heidi went to the library to check out French Cooking—all 752 pages of it.
She had to wait for it, of course. She wasn’t the only one who had developed a sudden craving. But once she got a copy in her kitchen, she started cranking out French cuisine like Hostess churns out Twinkies. She’s chopped and diced and braised and sautéed her way through nearly a dozen recipes. (And the Poulet En Cocotte is now a family favorite.)
Oh, and she wants a copy of her very own: It’s at the top of her Christmas wish list.
"The movie itself was fine," she says. "But just the concept of seeing Julia Child in action" was what really spurred Heidi to check out the chef’s best-known book.
"She was just this American woman in France who loved to eat," she says. "That would be so me."
Preheat to 752 Pages
Heidi has company. Meryl Streep’s turn as the larger-than-life Child has inspired a legion of would-be chefs to pick up her book and cook. Mere weeks after the film premiered, the cookbook hit the top of The New York Times’ best-seller list—the first time in had done so in its nearly 50-year lifespan.
"This was a secret dream that the movie would sell a lot of books," Nora Ephron, Julie & Julia’s writer and director, told the Times. "I’m completely delighted that people are walking out of the multiplex and into the bookstore."
Child, who died in 2004, would’ve surely been delighted as well. After all, she didn’t just have a passion for cooking, she had a passion to make cooking accessible to everyone. Part of Child’s appeal, according to Heidi, was to communicate the joy of making (and eating) good food. In an age where gelatin desserts and beginner-level Betty Crocker recipes were all the rage, Child dared to tell an increasingly harried society that cooking, and cooking well, is worth the effort.
Child’s career arc is a study in influential media. Her 1961 book led to a 1963 television show (The French Chef) which, in turn, transformed her from an enthusiastic gourmand to America’s first real cooking celebrity—and a harbinger, in many ways, of today’s phalanx of telegenic reality show experts. The French Chef and her other subsequent shows were so influential, in fact, that they inspired a young writer named Julie Powell to work through all 500-plus recipes in French Cooking in 365 days—blogging about it as she went. The blog, of course, later became a book itself and the basis for the movie. It’s a lineage worthy of a passage from Genesis: Book begat television show. TV show begat blog. Blog begat book. Book begat film.
And along the way, all these media outlets spawned countless Child-inspired chefs, from Julie Powell to Heidi Isaac to Vikram Doctor, an economics columnist who lives in India.
"Meryl Streep’s comic portrayal is fun, but it risks undermining the real reasons for Child’s fame," Doctor writes. "To understand that, the only thing to do is to come home from the film, open the book and start cooking."
Will It Be Hamburger Helper or Croque Monsieur?
She speaks the truth. Julia Child’s genius wasn’t in her frizzled hair or warbly voice: It was in her food. And everything connected with her legacy—book, TV, movie, blog—led new generations of foodies to discover its joys.
That’s no mean feat these days. If Betty Crocker was Child’s primary nemesis back in the day, McDonald’s would be her bane now. We live in an era of drive-thru windows and microwave ovens, where home cooking means, for many families, a pan of Hamburger Helper or a pot of Kraft Mac & Cheese.
"Too many people don’t get in there and cook," Heidi says. "It’s so rewarding to cook a meal for your family or your husband. It’s so rewarding to sit down and eat it. Yes, it takes time. Yes, there’s going to be some extra effort. But I’d rather spend an extra hour in the kitchen than [serve up] hamburgers and call it a day.
"Cooking is about making mealtime something special," she added.
Going to the movies didn’t trigger Heidi’s initial appetite for the heat of the kitchen, of course. But one of them did enhance it. And there’s a nourishing lesson in that for all of us: The entertainment we consume does become part of who we are. We are what we eat, right? How much more are we what we watch?
In Part 4 of "Not Just a Movie," heroes are again the thing. We all have them. And we’re amazed by how many of them come from the movies.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8