Slow, Hard Food (That Sounds Kind Of Dirty...)

The publicity for the new movie Julie and Julia reached fever pitch this month, and as I was listening to an interview with director Nora Ephron on The Splendid Table yesterday, something suddenly clicked. "Mastering the Art of French Cooking"? Wait a minute...didn't my mom and I get that book for Adam this summer?

Recalling the dusty old book we'd found at a secondhand store and bought for my husband the enthusiastic cook, I raced to the bookshelf, and sure enough— unbeknownst to us, we actually already own a copy of this important cooking volume. I've been listening to these interviews and movie reviews for weeks now and wondering what it would be like to cook these recipes— and it turns out that Julia Child's book has been here under my nose this whole time!

Now, I'm not planning to do what Julie does in the movie— there's no way I'm cooking every single recipe here. For one thing, I just don't like every kind of food explored in the book, and for another, any type of cuisine gets monotonous after a time. But I'd certainly like to explore the book, and maybe pick out a few recipes to try eventually.

Of course, Regina Schrambling (is that really her name?) over at Slate doesn't think I can do it. She seems to believe that her sloth is everyone's sloth, her short attention span is everyone's short attention span, and her refusal to try new things is representative of everyone else's feelings on the subject. "Julia's recipes were written for a rigorous cook with endless patience for serious detail," she writes; "Snobs like me may also be amazed that more than a few recipes suggest using frozen or canned vegetables and canned salmon, a nod to the era in which the book was written and edited, when farmers markets were not even gleams in the most forward-thinking cook's eyes, before farmed salmon became the new Chicken of the Sea. Seasonality, another new watchword for smart cooking, is clearly a non-issue, or no one would be making beef stew in August in homage to the masterpiece."

Because, y'know, there is no possible way to substitute fresh veggies for canned ones. No way.

Why does everyone writing about food today assume that we're all lazy and impatient and uncreative? From Rachael Ray, whose thirty-minute meals save us time by annoyingly abbreviating all the ingredients to mindless acronyms ("EVOO," anyone?), to the idea of a "60-minute gourmet" as advanced by Pierre Franey, food people seem to think we're all ramen-noodle slurping college kids. "Everything in the tome looks complicated," moans Schrambling, "which of course guarantees the results will work but also makes cooking feel like brain surgery. Even simple sautéed veal scallops with mushrooms involve 18 ingredients and implements and two pages of instruction. If after 26 years of cooking for a living, I am worn out just reading those recipes, I can only imagine how a newbie who can barely identify a whisk will do, let alone how someone who has never seen Dover sole in his supermarket could cook à la meunière..."

Oh, no— difficult cooking? Horrors! Everyone knows that the only reason we cook is because we have to feed ourselves, right? There couldn't possibly be other reasons, reasons related to culture or community or family (cooking with Adam is a bonding experience) or even just a good old-fashioned enjoyment of food.

The other day, having coffee with my friend Allison, I brought up the tiny postage stamp that is my kitchen. Allison, it seems, has had the same trouble; looking at apartments in New York, she would find places that were open and spacious and beautiful, and then the kitchen was a strip of linoleum with a sink on the side of the bedroom. When she told one woman renting the apartment that she had expected a real KITCHEN (after all, she had asked beforehand whether there was a kitchen there, because, like us, she cooks all the time), she was told: "Oh, well, no one really cooks in New York."

I don't care if no one cooks in New York. I cook in New York. And when I cook, I expect to really cook, not just heat crap up in a microwave. Cooking is important to me. Sure, I occasionally just want a can of soup or a sandwich for lunch; sometimes that sounds good to me, and sometimes I'm stressed and don't want to deal with the whole oven/stove/countertop deal. But most of the time, I accept that a decent meal means spending a little bit of time and energy, and I'm okay with that, because it seems like a fair trade. And I refuse to believe I'm the only one who thinks this.

Do you have a particular recipe or food that takes awhile to make, or is a little complicated, but always seems totally worth it? (Mine is homemade granola!)