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August 25, 2009

STEPHANIE SALTER: Even in tough times, two words ring true: ‘Bon appetit!’

By Stephanie Salter

TERRE HAUTE — After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s relatives.

— Oscar Wilde

These days, I know there are many more “important” things to discuss than Nora Ephron’s new film, “Julie & Julia.” More important things than Julia Child herself, or than the difference between cooking as a task and cooking as an art.

When my appetite for such discussion — arguments, really — returns, I promise to serve up a big, debatable helping for all of us to gnaw and chew and, ultimately, spit out on one another’s shoes.

Until then, however, I plan to stay in the world of “Julie & Julia,” where no one is in a hurry to do anything if it involves food. There is no drive-through line in this world, no microwave minute meals, no mayonnaise that squirts from little foil pouches, no instant ramen noodles and no substitutes for butter.

It’s been a week since I saw “Julie & Julia” at the ShowPlace cineplex near Honey Creek Mall. My refusal to leave the sensual realm recreated in Ephron’s movie can be explained only partly by the increasing number of meals I consume each week at the office computer keyboard.

Long attracted to the international Slow Food movement, I ache for an existence in which one meal a day, preferably dinner, is prepared as a craft and eaten with appropriate patience and appreciation. Several times a year, just because it’s Saturday night or a full moon or the lamb chops in the meat case looked especially good, that preparation should reach for the level of art, and it should be admired — with knife, fork and spoon — by as many happy souls as a person can cram ’round her table.



No mean woman can cook well. It calls for a generous spirit, a light hand, and a large heart.

— Paul Gaugin



“Julie & Julia” is based on two nonfiction books: Julia Child’s memoir, “My Life in France,” and Julie Powell’s “Julie & Julia,” the account of a young woman who found her writer’s voice by cooking all 524 recipes in Child’s seminal “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” — in a single year.

Meryl Streep plays Child, Amy Adams plays Powell. Various boned ducks, aspics, lobster thermidores and pots of boeuf bourguignon play themselves. Beautifully.

Ephron, who co-wrote and solo directed “Sleepless In Seattle,” among other hits, is an accomplished cook and enthusiastic eater, in her own right. Maybe another filmmaker could have presented the parallel women-and-food stories as lovingly (and lustily) as she, but I have my doubts.

Except for a funny scene in which Child — enrolled in Paris’ famed Cordon Bleu culinary academy — out-machos all her male chef classmates in onion chopping, “Julie and Julia” is devoid of the gladiator-like cooking competitions we see on television or, worse, the nasty, totalitarian genre of celebrity chef-tyrants.

Julie and her husband fight, but it’s over deadlines and self-imposed pressures, not the food. Food brings pleasure in “Julie & Julia,” particularly to Streep’s Julia, who in real life never seemed to lose her wonder at how fabulous meat, fish, vegetables, fruits and the sauces that adorn them can be made to taste.



One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

— Virginia Woolf



Julia Child died at the age of 91 — so much for all that unhealthy butter — a gourmand to the end. Her husband, Paul, who shared in thousands of meals over the decades, died at 92. With her PBS TV show, “The French Chef,” Julia attracted a whole new generation of her fellow Americans to artful, European cooking. (Dan Aykroyd’s imitation of Child on “Saturday Night Live” introduced her to yet another generation.)

Now, Julie Powell and Nora Ephron have set off a third Child renaissance.

According to a story in the New York Times earlier this week, the 48-year-old “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” has, at last, become a Times best-seller. In its 39th printing, it has sold 22,000 copies in a week as the movie has moved out across the country. Powell’s book has benefited, too, being reprinted 13 times this year, alone.

Meanwhile, Ephron’s film — with no car chases, no nudity (unless you count plucked poulet) and barely a handful of curse words — is among the top five box office successes in the country.

Obviously, I am not alone in my desire to dwell in the great-smelling, sizzling, bubbling, slow-roasting world of “Julie & Julia.”

True, given these angry and scary political and economic times, the film surely is Hollywood escapism. But it reminds me of the kind of shimmery, light-hearted escapism the movies offered during the Great Depression — the breezy “Thin Man” mysteries with the martini-drinking married detectives, Nick and Nora Charles; the flawless (and plotless) dance musicals of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

People wanted to stay in those movies, whether it meant seeing them again and again or locking the images in their head to take home. That’s how I feel about the cooking and eating in “Julie & Julia” — especially when I am dining out of a take-away box, dropping crumbs on my keyboard. It won’t always be like this, I think, some day …



The gentle art of gastronomy is a friendly one. It hurdles the language barrier, makes friends among civilized people, and warms the heart.

— Samuel Chamberlain



Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

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