Imagine a book club where you don't need to come prepared to discuss the book. You just need to be prepared to eat.
Such a club exists at The Stocked Pot cooking school on Jonestown Road. Lately, Don McMillan has been holding classes based on food-related books.
This summer, McMillan and a lot of other food lovers are talking about the new movie Julie and Julia.
The movie, which stars Meryl Streep and Amy Adams, opens Friday. It is based on two books, My Life in France by Julia Child and Alex Prud'homme, and Julie & Julia by Julie Powell. The latter was based on Powell's blog, chronicling her adventures cooking all 524 recipes in Child's classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume One, in one year. My Life in France is the late Child's memoir of her formative years in France, when she learned to cook and started her impressive career as a cookbook author, television host and all-around expert for Americans hungry for gourmet cooking.
A show and then dinner
The Stocked Pot's cooking class based on Julie & Julia was Thursday night. Two weeks before, McMillan gave away 20 free tickets to a sneak preview of the movie to people who had signed up for the class.
The movie weaves the culinary awakening of the two women, going back and forth between Child's discovery of her vocation starting in 1949 and Powell's discovery of her path as a food-loving writer in Queens, N.Y., in 2002.
I didn't find the movie all that entertaining. But I was in the minority Thursday. People in the class called the movie wonderful, funny, and hunger-inducing.
I think the books and Powell's blog (linked through www.juliepowell.blogspot.com) are more interesting. But Streep was an inspired choice to play Child, even though the 5-foot-6–inch Streep lacks the stature of the 6-foot-2-inch Child. I won't say she does a perfect imitation, but she has the voice down.
Fans of Child will eat it up
The movie is worth seeing for any fan of Child. And The Stocked Pot was full of them. Thirty-two women and one teenage boy attended the class. McMillan said that this was only the second class to sell out, the other being one on knife skills.
McMillan started things out with a bruschetta of onions, peppers and mushrooms similar to one that Powell makes in her first scene of the movie. Messy stuff, but oh so good.
After that, it was all Julia, as McMillan worked through three of Child's recipes: boeuf bourguignon, potage Parmentier and Queen of Sheba cake.
The potage, or soup, is a puree of potato and leek. It is about as simple as the recipes get in Mastering. The beef stew is complicated because Child calls for first cooking almost all of the components separately. "It really takes two days to do it right," McMillan said.
The cake is a rich, nearly flourless chocolate cake. Using their hands, it is memorably devoured by Powell and friends in the movie -- one of several satisfying scenes of food glamour shots and appreciative eaters.
McMillan decorated the cake with ganache icing and toasted almonds -- a real treat to end the night.
Though I wasn't thrilled by the movie, I think it does illustrate how French cooking inspired Child, and how Child inspired Powell -- and millions of others who never got a book or movie deal.
The movie also reinforces one of the biggest lessons that Child taught: Don't worry about making mistakes.
On Thursday, McMillan got busy talking and realized too late that he had put one egg too many in his cake batter.
"It's all right," he said with a shrug. "Julia wouldn't mind."
■ Michael Hastings, the Journal's Food editor, can be contacted by phone at 727-7394, e-mail at imhastings@wsjournal.comi, or mail at c/o Winston-Salem Journal, P.O. 3159, Winston-Salem, NC 27102. His most recent columns can be read on our Web site at www.journalnow.com.
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