JULIA CHILD’S GUIDE TO COOKING TERRIBLY

JULIA CHILD’S GUIDE TO COOKING TERRIBLY
Kinfolk by Gail O'Hara

“Try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless and above all have fun.” These words started a culinary coup in the kitchen where, for the first time, we were encouraged to make a mess as well as dinner.

The American cooking revolution came in the form of a six-foot-two college basketball player, WWII vet and cookbook author named Julia Child. With a plate of boeuf bourguignon on her 1960s television show The French Chef, she brought fine cuisine into our homes in the age of TV dinners. Stripping away the pretense of fancy dining with her breezy style, she always had a one-liner ready in her trademark singsong voice: “I enjoy cooking with wine—sometimes I even put it in the food!”

More importantly, Julia wasn’t afraid to screw up like the best of us do, and she certainly wasn’t afraid to do it on live TV. Unlike the picture-perfect, competitive nature of today’s food television, which can intimidate more than encourage, she pushed millions to experiment with coq au vin and Grand Marnier soufflé, promising that we’d have dinner on the table instead of a delivery pizza, no matter what.

Julia celebrated the imperfections of home cooking and didn’t believe in so-called failures: If you muck something up, then you should change tack or cover it with a tasty sauce. She once noted that “one of the secrets—and pleasures—of cooking is to learn to correct something if it goes awry, and one of the lessons is to grin and bear it if it cannot be fixed.” The latter point allows for the serendipity that marks great home cooking—the delicious density of a fallen soufflé, lasagna with a crispy mottling of blackened cheese or the range of flavor in a leg of lamb that’s part rare and part well-done. Maybe you actually prefer under-baked cookies, burned toast smothered in butter or swollen overcooked pasta—al dente be damned!

After all, we admire the random lumps of an heirloom tomato and rustic burgers that poke their way out of the bun. Processed and fast food companies have begun engineering their foodstuffs to mimic “homey” imperfections: Kraft turkey slices molded as uneven slabs, meandering McDonald’s egg whites, craggy-edged “artisan” pizzas from Domino’s. So why obsess over a piecrust crimp when you can shove the crust into a fruit filling and call it a pandowdy? Pasta cut or broken into random ribbons even has a fancy name: maltagliati.

On The French Chef, Julia once flubbed a potato pancake flip, quickly transferred it to a baking dish and then added cheese and cream, turning it into an invented recipe that was no doubt replicated in kitchens around the country. “You should never apologize at the table… in cooking you’ve got to have a what-the-hell attitude,” she said—and she always practiced what she preached. For another example, look up her famous 1987 Letterman appearance when a burner failed and she transformed raw hamburger meat and some cheese into a blowtorched beef tartare gratiné instead (“It’s very chic, David,” she insisted).

Julia’s kitchen wisdom can also be applied to life. Ultimately, at the same time she was imploring us to have fun with our foibles and not beat ourselves up, she was a psychologist as much as our cooking teacher. “Maybe the cat has fallen into the stew or the lettuce has frozen or the cake has collapsed—eh bien, tant pis!” she said. “Usually one’s cooking is better than one thinks it is.”

Nils Bernstein works by day as a music publicist. His writing has appeared in Bon Appétit, Men’s Journal and Wine Enthusiast. He lives in New York but escapes to Mexico City every chance he gets.

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