by JULIET WATERS

In Julie & Julia, a memoir of Julie Powell’s year as a celebrity blogger, she retells this anecdote about the eccentric cooking guru Julia Child. One day while cooking cannelloni for her husband in their circa-1950 Paris kitchen, Child reached into boiling water, pulled out the pasta and yelped, “Wow! These damn things are as hot as a stiff cock.”

The notoriously masochistic, quirky and slightly perverse Child only started cooking at 37 when she enrolled in a Cordon Bleu cooking class. Depending on where you stand on the history of feminism and cooking, she either liberated women from bland soulless casseroles, or damned them to a lifestyle of trying to replicate complex, archaic recipes possible only for people with way too much time on their hands.

For two decades, Mastering the Art of French Cooking was the standard tome in American kitchens, but when Powell picked it up it was chock full of classic recipes that no one ever cooks anymore. Bored out of her mind from her job as a secretary for the government agency in charge of coming up with a memorial for Ground Zero, the 29-year-old New Yorker set a blog challenge for herself. Despite the confines of her terrible New York City apartment kitchen, and the demands of her terrible New York City job, she would cook her way through the book in a year and write about it.

On the surface this seems like a bizarre project, but if you stop to think about it there’s a weirdly subversive charm to it. Keep in mind that she started this at a time when the country’s obsession with obesity was matched only with its obsession with the consequences of its disastrous foreign policy. Then remember that the central ingredients in Mastering the Art of French Cooking are butter, white flour and potatoes, and that the book celebrates the culture of a country with such contempt for the U.S. at the time, and this seems like a recipe for nutritional, if not cultural terrorism. And this from a girl whose family still lives in Texas.

Not much in Julie & Julia hints that this was anything Powell was conscious of. All she knew is that she was in a dark time in her life. She was in a career rut, and her doctor was putting pressure on her to have a baby because of hormonal challenges discovered a few years ago when she donated eggs to pay off a credit card bill. All she knew is that from her first potage à parmier (potato and leek soup) she was hooked.

If something mysterious about Julia Child’s book spoke to her, something mysterious about Julie Powell’s blog spoke to other people. Before the year was up Powell had invited a CBS camera crew into what was supposed to be a high-security job, cooked for them while they watched the last episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, had a cake plate stolen by three CNN anchorwomen and cooked in her hopelessly grungy kitchen for the New York Times senior food critic.

While her memoir of that year probably doesn’t capture the spontaneous frustration and rage, and only hints at Powell’s tendency to swear like she’s working on an oilrig, it does capture what it is about Julie Powell that hooked people into her life. She’s just one of those people who, in doing many things wrong, somehow manages to get most things right. Marrying your high school sweetheart in this day and age is probably not the wisest thing to do, but the resulting life is something like crossing Friends with The Dick Van Dyke Show, as Julie entertains/horrifies her lovely husband, her wacky, slutty friends with dishes ranging from a simple and delicious potato soup to a disastrous and impossible week of aspic made from boiled calf hoofs. She’s taken a very old recipe for life and made it truly her own, and for that alone the book’s a pleasure to consume.

Julie & Julia by Julie Powell, Little, Brown, hc, 309pp, $23.95