Living Through Better Cooking

摘要

Though julia child was a cooking teacher, what she really taught was how to be alive. She lived until she was 91, mocking Atkins, Ornish and anyone else who believed that a slice of French bread or a pat of butter would kill you. It was her intensity that made me love her long before I liked to cook. As so many cowardly loves do, mine started under the pretense of camp—that I was at least half mocking her, as Dan Aykroyd did on Saturday Night Live. The first time I saw her, the TV must have been on PBS when my dad left the room. There she was, a 6-ft. 2-in. matronly woman with a warbling New England-inflected accent that Katharine Hepburn would have found snobby. And yet, even to my teenage brain, she was clearly a badass. She explained sides of beef by pointing to her own body. She tore at suckling-pig ribs with her giant bare hands. She never edited out any of her mistakes, showing you how to fix them, live with them or bluff. She dropped stuff on the floor, wiped it off and said, "Remember, you're all alone in the kitchen, and no one can see you." She was the Lee Marvin of cooking.