Julie & Julia was released today on DVD ($9.99 at Amazon) and Blu-ray ($25.99 at Amazon). Please to note! The standard DVD skimps on the features, only including a commentary track and a behind-the-scenes featurette. The Blu-ray disc, however, contains a bevy of features, including the featurette “Julia’s Kitchen” that chronicles how the Smithsonian Museum acquired Child’s kitchen; cooking lessons from Julia Child, Jacques Pépin, and Suzanne Goin; and the featurette "Family and Friends Remember Julia Child." Also, recipes that you can email while you're watching the film? Fancy!

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Letterman: Have you ever cooked something that just turned out awful? What do you do then?
Child: Oh, I give it to my husband.

The video »

While fall truly belongs to the cookbooks, there's still a large selection on deck for the food lovers who are less than kitchen inclined. Along with anthologies from The New York Times (Eat, Memory) and The New Yorker (Secret Ingredients) finally arriving in paperback form, there are numerous reissues of old greats, doorstopper tomes perfect for that impossible-to-please food snob, and plenty of "the food system is killing us" doom and gloom. Our books editor Helen Rosner picks out the ones most worth paying attention to. On with the show.

Culinary Giants, Repackaged

Larousse Gastronomique: The World's Greatest Culinary Encyclopedia, Completely Revised and Updated
(Clarkson Potter, October 13; preorder on Amazon)
A complete overhaul of the indispensable 1938 volume, now including such au courant topics like sous vide cooking, molecular gastronomy, and biographic entries on stars like Ferran Adrià, Daniel Boulud, Alice Waters, Thomas Keller, and Julia Child.

The Physiology of Taste: or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, translated by M.F.K. Fisher
(Everyman's Library, October 6; preorder on Amazon)
The seminal meditation on gastronomy, sensualism, and happiness. Initially written in 1885 and now issued in beautiful edition by the collectible Everyman's Library in a high-quality hardcover.

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Here's a charming video of Julia Child cooking up a batch of primordial soup that played in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's "Life in The Universe" gallery from 1976 until the gallery closed. By turning her kitchen into a "biochemical laboratory," she explains how simple ingredients produce amino acids, also known as the building blocks of life. Science!

Impressive that even though she's reading off of cue cards, she can rattle on for almost ten minutes — with complete authority — about a subject she probably knows little about. Also, she uses a eight-inch chef's knife as a pointer.

Close to the end she talks about the implications: "Just think what this means! Starting with water and perfectly ordinary chemicals and minerals like table salt, not only scientists, but anyone, you and I, can go into a chemical laboratory and make primordial soup and chemical building blocks. Of course, the next step is how to put these chemical building blocks together. Can we make life? Is this the way life began on this Earth?" She hoots, "Whooo knooowws?"

The video »

Julia & Julia may have gotten trounced by G.I. Joe almost three to one at the box office, but one side effect of the film and its media frenzy is a massive renewed interest in cookbooks by Julia Child. Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1 (buy at Amazon) is currently Amazon's overall number one bestseller (her memoir My Life in France is #10 overall). Julia Child's books also occupy six of the top eight slots in the cooking category (the other two slots belong to Julie Powell's Julie and Julia).

Mastering the Art of French Cooking may be a 48 year-old cookbook (released in 1961), but according to Paul Bogaards, director of publicity at Alfred A. Knopf, sales are up "300% so far this year over all of last year." And Mastering was not published without difficulty: Judith Jones, Child's editor and confidante, in the introductory essay "The Story of 'Mastering' at Knopf" in the 40th Anniversary Edition, recalled, "Alfred Knopf, when I told him the title we had settled on, said if anyone would buy a book by that title, he would eat his hat."

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"She was a pioneer with the first television cooking show and I'm honored that people are saying I am a 'daughter' of Julia's," Lee says, taking it as a form of endorsement, when it really was meant more as "sign-of-the-times" statement, or worse, a thinly-veiled insult. But who said that?

Michael Pollan of course, who's recently been on some mission to talk trash about the Food Network. Following up his NYT Magazine piece from last week, in a radio interview he said, "You've got Rachael Ray and Sandra Lee—mostly women—and in a way, they're very much the children of Julia." Pollan, who's probably never watched their shows more than once (if at all), is being a casually elitist doofus who clearly can't tell the difference between the two.

Rachael Ray, when reached for comment, (with reason!) totally dismisses being put in the same category as Sandra Lee:

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Well, the reviews are in: The general consensus, as expected: Meryl Streep is great, the Julia Child half is great, the Julie Powell half: not so much. Overall, it's not tracking well: As of this writing, it has a 64% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a score of 60 on Metacritic. On with the show:

Food Media & Blogs

Laura Shapiro for Gourmet:

The idea of Powell as a contemporary heir to this personal and culinary epic is absurd. Nothing in her relation to the kitchen offers the slightest hint that she has learned anything at all from her heroine... Bring a book and a penlight for the Powell half of this movie. But the Julia half? Vaut le voyage, and I can’t wait to go back a third time.

Josh Friedland, The Food Section:

Like many others have already asserted, the Julia Child portion of the film ends up the stronger part of the story and shows her life may even deserve its own exclusive biopic. And, the stronger her half gets, the more the Julie Powell half suffers from the comparison.

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Photo via iloveupstate on Flickr

The conversation surrounding the release of Julie & Julia has fluttered around plenty of topics: this is a movie about old media versus new; this is a movie about women being strong in the kitchen; this is a movie about the transformative power of cooking; this is a movie about Julia Child and Julie Powell — no no no, it's all wrong. Furthermore, the movie is not, as its tagline so cloyingly notes, "based on two true stories." It's is one story, one thread, unbroken: This is a movie about a book.

In a certain sense, that's a trivial observation — of course this is a movie about a book. Child wrote it, Powell cooked from it. But I mean this in a much deeper sense: the thing that ties these two women's lives together is the story of the book, how it came to be and what it wound up doing with itself. One without the other is like a coming of age tale without an epilogue, or a superhero without a backstory, and the complete picture is so much greater than either half alone: both the fact of the book's importance (on which Powell's story hinges) and the why of it (Child's story — or is it vice versa?) reinforces the other's authority.

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I remember Julia Child like an old, tipsy, happy relative who cooked gourmet French meals laden with enough butter to kill a small donkey. She was my Saturday mornings. Watching her now is like watching an old friend and her cookbooks are like family heirlooms. In the spirit of celebration that's surrounded the imminent release of the Julie & Julia movie, we present this homage to the library of this great lady of the kitchen, the gentle giant of French cooking: a bibliography of texts by and about the one and only Julia Child, arranged wholly idiosyncratically in order of my own thoughts on their importance.

Books By Julia Herself

Mastering the Art of French Cooking Volumes I & II by Julia Child and Simone Beck (Vol. I on Amazon / Vol. II on Amazon)
Following the philosophy that "Anyone can cook in the French manner anywhere with the right instruction," this book has a place in any home cook's library. Less a recipe book and more a written lesson, it has been teaching Americans the basics of French cooking for forty years now. Everything from how to buy raw ingredients to the final dish is explained in detail – and the intentionally vague measurements (pinches, dashes, and whatnot) will lead to real confidence in the kitchen.

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Without epic celebrity deaths to cover, TMZ is back to its regular celebrity grind (fisticuffs, nudity, DWIs, what have you), but when they post a "this person looks like that person" — saying that British fameball Susan Boyle looks like Julia Child "back in the day" — you know they're just hurting for content. The caption? A zinger! "One of them cooked up a career."

Comments on TMZ are normally of the YouTube variety, but amidst all the one word comments like "balls" and "ugly" comes this gem: "So TMZ... What exactly is it about talented, kind, middle-aged, un-reconstructed women that offends and frightens you so much?"

Jones says Child did not approve of Powell’s cook-every-recipe-in-one-year project. The editor and author read Powell’s blog together (Julie and Julia was published a year after Child’s 2004 death). “Julia said, ‘I don’t think she’s a serious cook.’ ” Jones thinks there was a generational difference between Powell and Child. “Flinging around four-letter words when cooking isn’t attractive, to me or Julia. She didn’t want to endorse it. What came through on the blog was somebody who was doing it almost for the sake of a stunt. She would never really describe the end results, how delicious it was, and what she learned. Julia didn’t like what she called ‘the flimsies.’ She didn’t suffer fools, if you know what I mean.”

Also, we can't help but call out the hideous modification of wraparound on the cover of Mastering The Art of French Cooking (buy at Amazon) to promote the film Julie & Julia — is nothing sacred?

Update: Matt in the comments informs us that it's just "a wraparound band on the cover promoting the movie. Take it off and it's just 'Mastering The Art Of French Cooking'." That's not so bad then.

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Julie & Julia — and here we're talking about the book (buy at Amazon) — has gone from a classy design to, in its new tie-in form, basically a poster for the movie. In fact, the redesigned book cover looks exactly like the poster for the movie. At least they didn't use the silly egg-tastic teaser poster as inspiration. (Both posters are after the jump.)

It's a little misleading for the book to rebrand itself as the story of the movie. Anyone looking for narrative time-shifts to 1940s and 1950s-era France will be sorely disappointed. And why kill the adorably numeric subhead?

The movie poster »

We've had a couple of days to digest the trailer for Julie & Julia, the movie based on the book based on the blog based on Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and we've decided that we're not happy.

Let's be blunt: Julie Powell's Julie & Julia was not a thrilling, uproarious read. To give the movie version a bit more of a narrative thrust than just an endearingly downtrodden blogger-type cooking her way through the book (with enough cameos by New York food gliterrati to make all the bloggers swoon), the filmmakers have made the decision to splice Julie's story together with Julia's. Half of the film is based on Child's memoir My Life in France, the other half on Julie Powell's book. From the looks of it, it's two movies, all intertwined, where (if we've learned anything from multi-chronological women-oriented dramedies) somehow they'll all tie together in some climactic, thematic, and endearing way.

So that's what makes us sad. From the looks of the trailer, the Julia Child part of the story, set in France in the 1950s, looks like a wonderful movie. Child's life is a great story — she was an "international spy"! She was a groundbreaking cookbook author! She was one of the first culinary television stars! She was endearingly goofy! — and we honestly think that her biography warrants its own film. Her legacy deserves more than being the other half to a Nora Ephron-penned romcom about a "lowly cubicle worker" who blogs and struggles and cries and gets a book deal.

Even worse, we suspect that because of Julie & Julia, we'll never actually get a well-made Julia Child film. Maybe we'll get a nice documentary someday, but it'll never be the film that we were supposed to get.

The trailer for Julie & Julia »

We came across this weird job listing: working as an undercover spy in a restaurant at LaGuardia Airport. Get underpaid to do two jobs at once!

They don't give a lot of information — who are you spying on? What for? Are you chasing down the guy who brings steaks home? Or is it a matter of national security? Either way, you get to live out your Julia Child fantasy, working as an undercover operative while working with food.

The job description »

Sony Pictures released new stills from Julie & Julia, set to be released August 2009. The film, directed and written by Nora Ephron, is an adaption of the Julie and Julia, the blog-turned book by Julie Powell, and My Life in France, the memoir by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme. Amy Adams is playing Powell, and Meryl Streep is playing Child.

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