Julie and julia which cookbook

Return to Book Page. Preview — Julie and Julia by Julie Powell. She needs something to break the monoton With the humor of Bridget Jones and the vitality of Augusten Burroughs, Julie Powell recounts how she conquered every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and saved her soul!

She needs something to break the monotony of her life, and she invents a deranged assignment. She will take her mother's dog-eared copy of Julia Child's classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and she will cook all recipes.

In the span of one year. At first she thinks it will be easy. She sends her husband on late-night runs for yet more butter and rarely serves dinner before midnight. She discovers how to mold the perfect Orange Bavarian, the trick to extracting marrow from bone, and the intense pleasure of eating liver. And somewhere along the line she realizes she has turned her kitchen into a miracle of creation and cuisine.

Get A Copy. Hardcover , pages. Published September 1st by Little Brown and Company. More Details Original Title. Other Editions 1. Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Julie and Julia , please sign up. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Jun 21, devra rated it it was ok Shelves: foodlit.

View all 22 comments. I can see how this book was a successful blog. It's more a series of snacks than a grand a la carte meal in a French restaurant. The author's endless repetition of her hatred for Republicans, her job as a secretary and the use of her favourite words fuck and suck, neither of them used sexually, probably give you the flavour of this slight one-note book.

A snarky, sarky, endlessly-whining personality that is amusing to read on a daily blog, gets a bit much in a full-length book. Reading it is a b I can see how this book was a successful blog. Reading it is a bit like having to eat all your meals at McDonalds every day from Sunday for a week. By Wednesday, you'd long for a salad and maybe a refreshing sorbet, but it would be yet another flabby burger with underdone and slightly wilted fries. Julia Child is, for non-Americans, not much more than a name than some people might recognise but the imagined episodes of her life in the book are teasing and delicious.

She was a very unusual woman, far more interesting than the author herself but the author wrote about her well. Therein lies hope. If Julie Powell can write this well when not writing about herself, then maybe there will be other, non-autobiographical books in the future. An addendum. I used to belong to a private group on GR of women trying to lose weight.

They were all American. They wanted the author punished and no one to stock her books and everyone to 1-star her. What was her crime? She was a Democrat. Anyway they threw me out and all of them banned me!

One later wrote in an IM to the mod of a private group that I was a whore who had lived with two men at the same time. The mod thought it was funny. It was true, except I'm not a whore, and the men, my first and later my second husband, were in different countries and knew about each other. Indeed my first husband was at the birth of my baby in London and the baby father in the Caribbean phoned and thanked him. Now strangely, not long after this I was friendly and in a secret group with another set of Americans.

All Democrats. There were problems over the same book. They all wanted me to agree that Republicans were the devil's spawn. The only man in the group took me to task about defending evil Republicans. They threw me out too. I wasn't respectful enough to the guy apparently. There you go. These two events hurt me so much that I had to console myself with several bars of chocolate and a whole evening of Masterchef. And rereading and editing this review again, I am still so distraught that I am going to have to finish the bottle of chocolate Baileys and hope I feel better then.

Kind of rewritten 4 Jan View all 54 comments. Author Julia Powell is a mix of many people. From page one, when she tells us she sold her own eggs to pay off credit debt, she is much like the dreaded person seated next to you on a long-haul flight that proceeds to tell you their life story in a matter of minutes.

She is also the TMI girl that we all know, whose narrative describes the smell of her burps and piss, bitches incessantly about her job and Republicans, describes smelly cocks, drinks too many cocktails, tells us she sleeps with her Author Julia Powell is a mix of many people.

She is also the TMI girl that we all know, whose narrative describes the smell of her burps and piss, bitches incessantly about her job and Republicans, describes smelly cocks, drinks too many cocktails, tells us she sleeps with her face on her husband's ass, says fuck every other word and undoubtedly finds herself witty and funny while being oblivious to the gaping jaws and cringes of those around her.

She smacks and insults her loving and patient husband while contemplating cheating on him and living vicariously through her slutty friends, both single and married. I smell a divorce cooking. In short, she is the loud girl we all wish would shut the fuck up. She proceeds to alter and screw up recipes, partly due to their difficulty, partly due to her bad planning, and mostly due to her own stupidity: i.

We are, of course, supposed to laugh at this and find it all funny. As she embarked on this culinary journey, I couldn't help but remember that she'd mentioned having three cats and a python, and being disgusted that this was the environment in which she'd be cooking.

But no worries. She will of course tell us about the cat hair in the kitchen and in the food, along with the dead mice for her snake shoved in the same bag as her cooking ingredients. And the vegetables falling on the rotted out kitchen floor, which she naturally picks up and throws into the pot. And the flies in her kitchen. That lead her to find the maggots. In her kitchen. An ignorant reader like myself gains a new appreciation for the complexity of Julia Child's recipes and something like but not quite admiration for the author actually going through with cooking every recipe in the book.

This will not go on my "sucked" shelf, as is certainly didn't suck. I give it one star for being very readable and for being a somewhat touching story of how one nobody became somebody all by herself. I simply didn't like her tone. I just couldn't take it. I hear she has a sequel coming out next month, this time about being a butcher. Would I read it? Not because I want to read about her mutilating dead animals and describing even more bodily functions we don't need to know about.

Really, I'm dying to know if she divorces that kind husband who was by her side the whole time. I'm betting she did. View all 44 comments. Mar 31, Madeline rated it did not like it Shelves: the-movie-is-better , memoir , ugh.

In the immortal words of Michael Bluth: "I don't know what I expected. It is a well-documented fact that Julie Powell is a delusional asshole if you need a good laugh, look at the reviews for Cleaving , her second book - they all essentially boil down to "Wow, so turns out Julie Powell is horrible" , and even if I hadn't been aware of this, there's the fact that whenever I watch the movie adaptation of Julie and Julia , I skip the Julie part In the immortal words of Michael Bluth: "I don't know what I expected.

It is a well-documented fact that Julie Powell is a delusional asshole if you need a good laugh, look at the reviews for Cleaving , her second book - they all essentially boil down to "Wow, so turns out Julie Powell is horrible" , and even if I hadn't been aware of this, there's the fact that whenever I watch the movie adaptation of Julie and Julia , I skip the Julie parts because even Amy Adams, who is literal human sunshine, cannot make that woman appealing in any sense of the word.

Actually, the whole reason I decided to get this book from the library is because the movie was on TV the other day, and I got morbidly curious about Julie Powell's side of the story. I had already read Julia Child's My Life in France , which was the inspiration for the Julia parts of the movie, so I decided that it only made sense to complete the experience and read Powell's book.

Powell wastes no time letting her readers know exactly what kind of monster she is. On page eight Eight! We're not even into the double-digit pages yet!

Basically, Powell is waiting in the subway one day and witnesses: " The loon started smacking her forehead with the heel of her palm. It was only once I was in the car, squeezed in shoulder to shoulder, the lot of us hanging by one hand from the overhead bar like slaughtered cows on the trundling train, that it came to me - as if some omnipotent God of City Dwellers were whispering the truth in my ear - that the only two reasons I hadn't joined right in with the loon with the gray crew cut, beating my head and screaming 'Fuck!

Performance anxiety and a dry-cleaning bill; those were the only things keeping me from stark raving lunacy. How much of a selfish, raging narcissist do you have to become in order to watch what is clearly a mentally ill person having a disturbing episode, and your first response is, "Ugh, same "?! And then you record the scene in your memoir and frame it as some kind of profound breakthrough moment for you? Gee, I'm so glad that person had a mental breakdown and seriously injured themselves so you could have an epiphany, Julie Powell.

I read the damn book and I couldn't even tell you. So anyway, Powell starts working her way through Julia Child's cookbook, keeping a blog about her progress.

This means we get a delightfully dated scene where Powell's husband suggests she start a blog, and Julie's like, what the hell is a blog? As many reviewers have pointed out, the blog-to-memoir transition was done pretty clumsily, with scenes happening out of sequence and a nonsensical structure - Powell will start a chapter about some recipe she was working on, and then break for a lengthy flashback that has almost no relation to the beginning of the chapter.

It's very difficult to follow the progress she's making through the cookbook, and all the flashbacks and timeline-skipping meant that I never had any clear idea of where I was in the project, unless Powell directly referenced the date. Along with the messy structure, another big issue with the book is that Powell is She's clearly trying to be self-depreciating, and make us think that she's rolling her eyes right along with us whenever we read a scene of her throwing a tantrum about mayonnaise - but the problem is that I wasn't shaking my head and smiling in bemusement, like Powell wants me to.

I was just thinking, "you are horrible, and telling me that you know you're being horrible doesn't help. Try this excerpt on for size, and see if it makes any goddamn sense to you on the first reading: "My mother is a clean freak, my father a dirty bird, semi-reformed.

Between them, they have managed to raise one child who by all accounts could not care less about basic cleanliness, but whose environs and person are always somehow above reproach, and another child who sees as irrevocable humiliation any imputation of less than impeccable housekeeping or hygiene, and yet, regardless of near-constant near-hysteria on the subject, is almost always an utter mess.

It made me long for the effortless, evocative writing Julia Child presented in My Life in France - her description of the proper technique for scrambling eggs is practically poetry. Her project, and every recipe she describes, are never presented as anything other than a chore she has to get through. There is no joy in Powell's book, no love for the dishes she prepares. And frankly, a lot of Powell's book is pretty gross.

Her kitchen is always a disaster scene, with dirty surfaces and piles of unwashed dishes. Which, fine - you're working a full-time job and cooking gourmet meals every night, obviously you're going to slack off on cleaning again. But then Powell discovers that there are maggots living under her dish rack, and I was fucking done. I cut my bacon into pieces, as close as I could get to lardons without having a chunk of bacon to work with.

I instead purchased the thickest cut bacon I could find and made do with that. Then, I cut my meat into approximate 2-inch chunks, patted each piece dry, and using tongs, placed a few in the hot fat in my pan to brown on all sides.

Once all of the meat was well-browned, I set them with the bacon and browned my vegetables in the same fat. I seasoned with salt and pepper and tossed with 2 tablespoons of flour. I put it in the oven for 4 minutes, stirred it, and returned it for another 4 minutes of browning.

To that, I added tomato paste, garlic, thyme and bay leaf. I brought the whole less-than-appetizing-looking mixture to a simmer on the stove. Then, I covered it and put it in the oven for 2 and a half hours.

I did relax for about an hour before I needed to jump back in to make the accompanying onions and mushrooms. In that time, our house began to smell truly amazing. I started with the onions, since I would be baking them, which takes nearly an hour. I first had to peel the tiny onions which was honestly the most annoying part of the entire cooking process that day before adding them to melted butter and oil in a skillet. After 10 minutes, when they were browned on almost all sides, I poured them into a small casserole with their cooking fat and added some beef stock and an herb bouquet.

Like the onions, I added them to a skillet of heated oil and butter, making sure not to crowd them. I set them aside until the beef bourguignon was ready. I opted to do this in the sink to mitigate disaster. I poured the sauce over the meat and veggies, now with the mushrooms and onions in on the action. I brought it to a simmer for a few minutes, until it was ready to serve.

It smelled divine and looked quite delicious in the pan. Julia recommends eating the stew with boiled potatoes, noodles or rice, and we ate it alongside parslied sweet potatoes, which added lovely color to the plate. This post contains affiliate links. This does not increase the price you pay, but I may receive a small commission for any products you choose to buy. Purchases made through affiliate links help to cover my blogging costs.

Thank you for helping to support The Hungry Bookworm! Full disclosure here. I read the book shortly after it came out and expected to absolute love it because the concept is so amazing but like you I felt the book lacked charm. I am looking forward to watching the movie though. Somehow I still haven't made that happen. This sounds like quite the ordeal! I tested recipes for a French cookbook that all took ages and piles of ingredients and the results were always a bit meh so I'm a bit wary of trying another lengthy French recipe but I might risk this one.

So maybe I won't cook my way through those. It does make me want to pick up a proper cookbook and cook all the way through it, though. If you were going to do it, which book would you choose? Julie and Julia: cooking the book. If you had to pick up a recipe book and cook your way through every recipe, which one would you choose? Video: Julie Powell demonstrates how to debone a chicken.

According to the museum: "Julia introduced a French tool, the whisk, to a public that had heretofore only known various versions of "egg beaters. Topics Food Word of Mouth blog Chicken blogposts. Reuse this content. I think you'd love it. As a food blogger, I've been aware of Powell's success in the past few years and have been enjoying the foodie frenzy from the sidelines, but I hadn't quite made up my mind.

Mention the name Powell among the blogging community, particularly foodies, and you're bound to get some very heated responses. Some love her and some love to hate her. Virginia Willis , a professionally-trained chef and best-selling cookbook author, grew up watching Child, played by Meryl Streep in the film, and spent a lot of time with her in the mids as a burgeoning chef in France.

Willis used to follow Powell's blog in its early days until she was so turned off she stopped. Her "beef" with Powell is her lack of respect for Child. I had an immense respect for Julia and it just sort of turned me off and I quit following it. That the movie had to be padded out with scenes from another book about Julia speaks volumes When I read Julie's blog there was a huge lack of respect for Julia, and it seemed to me it was about celebrity, doing something to be noticed and not for the soul of la belle cuisine!

Ivonne Mellozzi, author of the blog Cream Puffs in Venice, said she has been an avid fan of Child since watching her TV show as a little girl in her grandmother's living room -- a common theme among those dubious of Powell -- and she never had any desire to read Powell's book.

Judith Jones, senior editor and vice president at Alfred A. Knopf, and Child's editor and friend, shared Child's sentiments with Publisher's Weekly:.