Sunday, November 20, 2011

Being Julia



Julia Child had something special, some quality that captured American audiences, and made them think "sure, French cooking in the home kitchen, that's doable." Maybe it was her height, her cooing accent, her boisterous laugh, or her ability to make boning a chicken look like an easy task. Or maybe it was her determined, willful personality; I'm not at all surprised that she was a Smithie. After the movie Julie & Julia came out, women all around the country, myself included, went through a Julia Child craze: whipping out the boeuf bourguignon, trying to poach an egg, and saying things like "you can never have tooo much buttaaah!!"

My favorite Julia story goes like this: It was my eighteenth birthday, and my mother spiritedly presented her special gift to me, a first edition of Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." It was worn and a bit stained, and had a solid feeling to it, like maybe Julia's magic was bestowed in those pages, waiting to be unleashed. There is a special wisdom that cookbooks hold, in their grease-spotted pages; they've been there with you through the good times and the bad, watched your culinary dreams soar and plunge. It's something that try thought they may, internet recipes can't live up to.

After reading through its pages over and over again, my mother and I decided to start with something simple: Crêpes Suzette. My mom knows how to make a killer crêpe, but I wanted to try it Julia's way, just to see. Despite my mother's protests, I insisted that we separate the yolks from the whites, like the recipe called for. Julia's word was law. It felt as if any alteration to the recipe would be disservice to her memory. However, my resolve started to slip when I realized some of the astringent details in Julia's recipe e.g. let the crêpe batter sit in the fridge for at least 2 hours.

The end product was a rich, buttery plate that we couldn't keep ourselves from gobbling down right away, so we didn't set them on fire, kind of defeating the whole purpose, since that is one of the defining features of Crêpe Suzette. But we were hungry, and when it comes to recipes, unless you want to tear your hair out, most of the time you just need to treat them like guidelines. Order them in a restaurant to get the kind of flair that setting them on fire provides, yes, but doing it at home on a Sunday morning? No. We de-thawed some of summer's frozen strawberries to finish the dish off, and whalla! Even though our end product probably didn't resemble too closely Julia's, it was she who brought us together in experimenting over a new dish. Otherwise it would have just been my mom whipping up her usual (delicious) crêpes, rather than the two of us fussing over how to do it right, then laughing about how silly the whole process was while we licked our orangey-buttery fingers.

Here follows the recipe: try at your own risk!

crêpes:
3/4 cup milk
3/4 cup water
3 egg yolks
1 Tbs. granulated sugar
3 Tbs. orange liquer, rum or brandy
1 cup of flour
5 Tbs. melted butter

Place ingredients in a food processor in the order they are listed. Cover and blend at top speed for 1 minute. If bits of flour adhere to sides of jar, dislodge with a rubber scraper and blend 3 seconds more. Cover and refrigerate for at least 2 hours or overnight (ha!).

orange butter:
1/2 cup sugar
peel of one orange
2 sticks (1/2 pound) butter
1/2 cup orange juice
3 Tbs. orange liquer
(be warned, this recipe makes enough butter to last you a very, very long time)

Blend together, until creamy. Put it in a chafing dish, and heat until bubbling. Proceed to cook your crêpes and then dip both sides in the orange butter. Fold and sprinkle with sugar. Next comes the fire part: Pour more liquer over them and then avert your face while you ignite the liqeur with a lighted match. Shake the chafing dish gently back and forth while spooning the flaming liqeur over the crepes until the fire dies down... or you could just stop with the sprinkling of sugar (powdered if its going to be decorative). Add fresh fruit if desired.

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