Cooking With Julia Child

This last weekend, I made my first Julia Child recipe. It sounds almost sacrilegious, loving to cook and not using Julia Child until now. But I can tell you, it was worth the wait.

As you may know from reading my blog, my grandmothers are my muses in the kitchen. Both my dad's mom and my mom's mom were excellent cooks, very different in style but experts in their styles nonetheless. As a result, a lot of the food at mealtimes was and is heavily influenced by Scandinavian and Mediterranean fare. I grew up loving good food thanks to them. My grandmothers are always with me in the kitchen. But on Sunday, I added another great lady to my cooking muses. Julia Child--a woman revered by cooks all over--has gotten another devotee. No, I'm not going to erect a statue or a shrine for her, but she has a lot to teach me about cooking and I am ready to learn.

As I recently posted, my aunt passed on her Mastering the Art of French Cooking book to me. It's an older printing of the title and dates back to 1965. It's not a first version, but it's an early version. The pages have tanned over time, and I found an old newspaper clipping about one of Julia Child's recipes hidden among the pages. The words, even in the recipes, read almost like a story. And I suppose one could say that cooking is like telling a story, as well as an art. It's a story of the cook's journey, and for me it has become a very personal journey because of my cooking as a tribute to my grandmothers. But it's a journey that I'm happy to share, especially since it's much more fun to share good food than eat it alone!

So which of Julia's recipes did I choose to try? No, it was not the beef bourguignon. I decided on the coq au vin. This is actually a dish I made a long time ago in high school (though not from Julia Child's recipe). It was a rather failed experiment. I was not a good cook back then, although I liked being in the kitchen. I was in the French Club, and for our end-of-the-year event, we had a dinner at the school. We watched a really bad (read cheesy) 1980s French movie ("La Boum") and ate French food. The main course was coq au vin, and to this day I don't know what happened. Perhaps we were dancing too much in the kitchen and not paying enough attention to the food. Long story short, while it was edible the coq au vin did not taste even close to how it should.

Fast forward to this last Sunday. With a few years of good cooking under my sleeve, I felt compelled to try again. So Scooter and I bought what ingredients we didn't already have. I pulled out my wonderful dutch oven--a perfect cooking vessel for coq au vin--and started cooking. A couple of hours later, Scooter and I sat down and took the first bite. It was culinary bliss. I didn't even try to improve on the recipe; it didn't need it. It was perfect as it was.

And since I'm not improving on the recipe or changing anything about it, I am not going to post it here. But you can find Julia's coq au vin recipe all over the Internet. A quick Google search will give you many variations. The recipe on WGBH's website and on What's Cooking America are almost identical to the 1965 version I was working off of (apparently Julia kept modifying and improving her own recipes). Give it a try and taste for yourself the work of a master.

Bon appétit!