Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, by Julie Powell. Little, Brown & Company, 2005

I never thought I’d have any interest in this book or movie, but one day it was on TV and I watched it and really liked it. So when I found the book, I figured, well, the book is always better than the movie, I grabbed it. Sadly, my presumption turned out to be wrong. I did not like the book better. I liked it considerably less.



In the movie, I much preferred the sections on Julia Child, who was considerably more interesting that I would have ever thought from just watching her TV show a few times. A lot of time was given to her story. In the book, Julie, quite naturally, gives more time to her own story- that she would undertake making every single recipe in Julia’s foundational cookbook in the space of one year. She starts a blog to tell the world about this project, and it becomes a huge hit. A book deal appears, and it’s optioned for a movie. This book isn’t just a collection of her blog entries; she’s looking back from the end of the project and going through the memories.



I should have liked it. She can be witty, with the kind of self-deprecating humor that grabs me. She swears almost as much as I do. I get obsessed with food at times. But I disliked her continual complaining about the same things over and over again (note to self: stop doing that! I’m sure NO one likes that!), given that she was living a fairly privileged life. The things she says and thinks about her perfectly good, supportive husband are nasty. Her story telling is not linear in the least. I just got tired of her, and wanted the book to end.

The Flavor Thesaurus: Pairings, Recipes and Ideas for the Creative Cook, by Niki Segnit. Bloomsbury, 2010

This is a book about food, and has recipes in it, but it’s not a cookbook as one usually thinks of it. The author set out to classify all the possible flavor elements, describe them, and list the foods that contained them. She lists flavors such as roasted, meaty, mustardy, green & grassy, spicy, woodland, fresh fruity, citrusy, floral fruity, marine, and sulfurous- there are a huge number of possible flavors. Some I already knew; a few surprised me- I would have never guessed ginger root went under ‘citrusy’! The recipes are right in the thesaurus, put down as one would tell a friend how to create the dish rather than as a list of ingredients & quantities followed by instructions. The book includes an extensive bibliography, recipe index, ingredient index, and a regular index, so you can find anything easily. I wouldn’t recommend reading it straight through like I did (I was getting a bit restless by the ‘T’s, but what can I say, it was a library book) but rather to keep around for inspiration when faced with an ingredient and no ideas. It’s a fun read, though- it’s like listening to a friend describe what she’s eaten in places and how those things were made.