Julia Child, Betty and Me

Have you watched the movie Julie & Julia yet?  I honestly didn’t know if I would enjoy it because I am kind of domestically challenged.  Instead of inducing visions of sugarplums, my culinary arts created more of a Nightmare on Emerson Street. Hand me a word processor and I tear it up, but put me in front of a pot of boiling water and I break into a cold sweat.  It’s a case of PTSD, I’m sure of it.  

Oh don’t get me wrong, I owned Mastering the Art of French Cooking.  A gift from a loving friend to assist me in my homemaking challenges.  It had a revered place on my bookshelf.  I was mortally afraid of opening the darn thing.  My husband was fond of teasing me about the aftermath of my holiday baking spree, likening me to Lucille Ball more often than Julia Child.  The fact of the matter is he was more likely to be mistaken for the master of the kitchen than I was.  That was until I received an assignment to edit a cookbook.

“What?  Me?  You have got to be kidding!” I said.  “To me, a’ blanc sounds like a great name for a character in a French mystery novel.” 

I don’t enjoy writing about subjects that I don’t understand or know very little about, hence my hesitation in taking this job.  I knew I could get all the words to line up in a nice pattern and make sense, but I wasn’t “feeling” it.  I’m proud to say that I donned my big girl panties and took the assignment with the resolution I would make the recipes as I worked on the book, therefore “becoming the book” as I edited it.  

Oh my God!  Talk about a living nightmare.  The kitchen exploded in a “flour covered delirium”.  No one came near me for fear I would fling a stick of butter at them.  I found myself calling the author, Betty Lynch, on a daily basis, not to discuss the edits, but to receive instructions on how to clean petrified egg white off the ceiling. I feared she would belittle me or laugh at my mistakes, but I found that she was a warm and delightful human who never made me feel like a complete moron, although I heard her catch her breath a time or two (I mean, who could blame her).  We had such fun during those conversations that we decided to include them in the cookbook itself. 

I am sure there are thousands of women around the world who learned to cook watching and reading Julia Child.  As for me, I learned to cook from Betty Lynch, author of My Country Kitchen.  You can get to know Betty at her website www.mycountrykitchen.com