Mastering the Art of the Process: The Truth About the Dry Bird

Amidst the hype and the muck surrounding the release of Julie & Julia, and the chatter about whether or not Julia actually didn’t find Julie Powell to be a serious cook (I recant all I’ve said; Russ Parson’s wonderful article about this fact ends all conjecture), the questions about the infamous Julie/Julia roast chicken episode that bubbled to the surface are:

Is it about the fact that the roast chicken was dry and probably didn’t really need to be trussed, which might be a waste of time if you’ve got other things to do, or if you have in hand Sandra Lee’s quick ‘n simple version which the kids seem to love anyway, so what the hell;

or 

 Is it about understanding the concept of why you would quasi-bard a lean bird with butter after tightly trussing it, and then force upon it an environment that replicates the rotational turns of a spit 

so that it cooks evenly? 

Add in the issues of context, and beat, rapidly: 

Well, that depends. It took her approximately eight years of collaborative work to complete Mastering the Art of French Cooking (which, I have to tell you is a long, long time in cookbook–or any book–land, and guaranteed to make you, editor or author, pretty much want to tear your face off), a good part of which was spent in France, where the chickens are not American chickens as we know them. For one thing, they’re a bit smaller, and if you happen to be anywhere near Bresse and testing roast chicken recipes for a year or so, you’re going to wind up with something quite different then the bird that might be contractually provided to you by Safeway Stores for on-air use, when they sponsor your television show a few years later. 

Well, that depends. It took her approximately eight years of collaborative work to complete Mastering the Art of French Cooking (which, I have to tell you is a long, long time in cookbook–or any book–land, and guaranteed to make you, editor or author, pretty much want to tear your face off), a good part of which was spent in France, where it’s anybody’s guess how hot or cold her stove ran. We do know that Paul installed a Garland in the Cambridge house, and that Garland only makes restaurant stoves; these are not pro-style ranges. They are meant for the professional kitchen. So again, odds are your stove and Julia’s stove are going to be two very different birds, so to speak, depending upon where you live and what year it is. 

But what if it doesn’t matter, at all? 

What if the fact of the dry chicken, or the stove, or the type of bird isn’t the issue, and that instead, it’s all about knowing how (and why) to truss a bird, so that if you decide to cook the stuffing in the turkey next November, you can actually manage to do it while keeping it moist and in the bird at the same time? Or understanding why it was necessary, at that time and in that place and under those certain conditions, to massage a bird with the most flavorful fat available before proceeding with the roasting process, so that if you ever find yourself staring at the (notoriously lean) fowl at the co-op in Arezzo, you’ll know exactly what to do to help it along?

It’s true: a great recipe should produce great results. But indeed, context will never guarantee that what comes out of your oven will be the same thing that came out of Julia’s, nor will it ever guarantee that it will taste the same, or look the same. This is my bone of contention with the Food Network, Top Chef, and most of the cooks on television today, with the exception of Lidia Bastianich and Jacques Pepin: the average home cook, with little time on their hands and even less patience and far less skill, winds up trying to create vertically-plated meals by watching pros and semi-pros (they know who they are) do it in exactly 20 minutes, with a staff of ten, not including food stylists. What’s missing here is the plain and simple Why. Why is it necessary to reserve pasta water to add to the sauce as its cooking? Why is it preferable to roast a chicken on its breast for at least part of its cooking time? Why should butter always be cold when you’re making pie crust? Why should you not crowd the pan when you’re browning the beef? 

And this, I think, is what Julia was all about: the fearless learning, the understanding, the importance of comprehension, and the sense of personal responsibility that would compel her to figure out what went wrong (when it did, and in eight years, it surely did), and to keep at it until she got it right. When she told Russ Parsons that she didn’t think that Julie Powell was a serious cook, and in a fit of professional human pride wondered how she could have problems with the recipes, perhaps she was also wondering why Julie didn’t go back and try to figure out what went wrong along the way. And to take at least part of the responsibility for it. 

When something goes wrong, it’s up to us to go back and figure out what it was that we — yes, we — did or didn’t do to wind up with the result we got; it’s about learning, understanding, and getting our brains around the process. My attempt at Julia’s roast chicken was dry because it roasted too long in a blast furnace; my oven is at least 15 degrees hotter than it should be, and I should have compensated for that, but I didn’t. The skin tore on one of the rotations, probably because I hadn’t sufficiently basted the bird well enough with the oil/butter mixture, the butterfat caramelized in the pan, and the skin stuck. I think.

I read yesterday that Julia’s publisher of record, Alfred Knopf, was going back to press to reprint another 75,000 copies of MAFC. That’s no small beans–not in the publishing world. What does this mean, then, for the cooks among us? It means that mastering the art of the process may be back with a vengeance, and for that fact alone, I think Julia would have been thrilled.