August 2020: WELCOME AND JULIA CHILD’S GREATEST DISHES, VOLUME I
Welcome to the inaugural launch of The Kitchen Scholar, a food website for gourmands, cookbook collectors, food intellectuals, and kitchen explorers! As The Kitchen Scholar, my objectives are to tell stories through food and cooking and to promote the legacy of culinary traditions and cookbook authors by adapting recipes from my cookbook library to the modern kitchen. The breadth of these stories can range from personal narratives of cooking to the academic fields of history, science, art, culture, politics, linguistics, geography, literature, and travel, and even to perspectives in popular culture, all of which I have learned from years of reading, traveling, cooking, and eating. However, there may be occasional instances of dishes where the expressions of their stories are not verbal because the photograph conveys itself to the reader. The only consensus among all published recipes is that they come with WATERMARKED photographs that reflect or represent their identity to prevent any risk of copyright infringement.
ON JULIA CHILD AND THE TRIBUTE EXPERIENCE
The August 2020 debut of The Kitchen Scholar could not have come at a better time due to two interconnected events that are both personally and symbolically important for me and the conception of this website. First, the late Julia Child, my kitchen idol and the inspiration for this website, entered and left this world on August 15, 1912 and August 13, 2004, respectively. Second, the 23rd of this month marks the 10th Anniversary of “My Julia Child Experience”, a personal Facebook project, which details my kitchen adventures in the form of different dishes from my cookbook collection. Therefore, setting the theme of this month’s food entries to an initial compilation of Julia Child’s greatest dishes is both a fitting tribute to her untarnishable legacy and a personal letter of gratitude and love from a fan whose life she has transformed even from beyond the grave.
World War II spy. Shark repellant inventor. Loving wife. Gastronome. Cookbook author. Culinary teacher. Food writer. Cooking show doyenne. Public television trailblazer. Women’s movement activist. Breast cancer survivor. Moderation advocate. Bon vivant. Meryl Streep role. Julia Carolyn Child (née McWilliams) needs no introduction to anybody in the food world or anyone who has followed her career. Because the public domain has a plethora of general information on Julia’s remarkable life and contributions to humankind, I will no longer repeat what has already been documented, which my readers are encouraged to check out themselves. Instead, I will focus on an unknown Julia Child fact, which I have encountered from my research and experiments of her recipes. After all, humanizing Julia is what makes her one of the greats even if any fact about her may come across as surface-level criticisms.
The most common misconception on Julia Child is her staunch apologetics of fat, particularly butter and cream, in food and cooking, which nutritionists and some food critics have unfairly and hyperbolically vilified her for. Although Julia did love butter and cream and used a lot of them in her shows and called the fear of such as “the death of gastronomy”, the fact remains that she still directed her readers and viewers to remove excess fat from the dish before serving. For instance, if you read between the lines of her famous Boeuf Bourguignon from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I, you will find Julia instructing the reader to skim off the fat from the sauce (p. 317). Take The Way to Cook home video series and The French Chef episodes as other examples, where she also does the same step with sautéed poultry and oven roasts as a precedent to deglazing. In her defense, fat does give food its flavor, and humans still need to consume fat for nutritional reasons. As her motto goes, “Everything in moderation, including moderation”, and that also applies to fat consumption during cooking and eating.
Having lived in the Philippines for the first 20 years of my life, I had never heard of Julia Child until I read her obituary from Time Magazine five months after I graduated from college. For the next four years, Julia’s latent influence was on my subconscious radar. The time ripened in 2008 when I purchased the two paperback volumes of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” both co-authored by Julia Child and Simone Beck with Louisette Bertholle as a contributor of the first volume. These two books were the first cookbooks I ever bought and owned personally, and the first dish I learned was the Queen of Sheba Cake (Gâteau la Reine de Saba). Since then, both books have become an indispensable cookery reference for me even as I continue to expand my cookbook library and enhance my batterie de cuisine.
My adoration and love for Julia Child peaked in 2009, after watching the semi-biopic, Julie and Julia, and has remained that way since. Meryl Streep’s spot-on portrayal kept me in awe of such a remarkable person. 2009 was also around the same time that Facebook catapulted itself into dominating the social media platform. Inspired by the film a year later and channeling the spirit of Julia’s life philosophies and teachings, I decided to post food photos, all of which I cooked and photographed myself, over Facebook to relieve myself from the stress brought by three years of graduate school in the United States, and named the compilation as My Julia Child Experience. For the next ten years of improving my kitchen and photography skills without formal training in both fields, my side project has garnered positive responses from Julia’s collaborators and contemporaries who have become my idols later on as I branched out to their works. These food luminaries include Jacques Pépin, Paula Wolfert, Lidia Bastianich, and the late Marcella Hazan (through her husband, Victor).
With Julia’s profound, unparallelled, and foundational influence, I hope the readers and visitors of The Kitchen Scholar will not just find the time and delight into turning these elegant recipes into reality by replication as what I have demonstrated in the accompanying photos but will also continue to support the site after this debut. Paraphrasing some of Julia’s quotes into a single statement, be fearless and have fun as there is no limit to imagination and to exploring the infinite pleasures of the table.
