Maura Stanton
The Art of French Cooking
Julia Child is dead. Now younger cooks
discuss her on the evening news, admiring
her passion for teaching us all how to sauté,
baste, blanch, deglaze, poach, puree,
fold in the egg whites, unmold soufflés
add dashes of
But—yes—they all agree—she was old-fashioned.
Who has the time to follow all those steps
in our millennium? Who braises turnips?
Makes their own stock? Coats beef with aspic?
I pull the two volumes off my kitchen shelf,
remembering how I once longed to own them
back in graduate school. But the borzoi
hardbacks,
evenly speckled with red or blue fleur-de-lys,
cost too much. A friend gave them to me
in
and I used to pour over them on snowy nights,
dreaming of dishes I’d make when I had time
to shape a pastry crust, and enough money
for heavy saucepans, casseroles and food mills.
Sleet pinged against the windows. I’d
doze off
then wake to stacks of freshman compositions,
lectures to write, piles of required reading,
and pour myself a bowl of Cheerios,
then trudge to class, returning to a TV dinner.
Now I leaf through the two unyellowed volumes
moved cross country from kitchen to kitchen.
What did I really cook out of these cookbooks?
There’s a light pencil mark on the onion soup,
and a grease stain by the tarragon chicken.
But opening Volume Two, I find a wild flower
pressed between pages, the purple color
brilliant after thirty years. And here’s
another
yellow blossom, and on page 240
a delicate stem, the pale green leaves intact,
preserved across a recipe for Tripe Nicoise.
Five flowers in all, some with tiny seeds
flattened between the pages, a forgotten meadow
hidden among the bouillabaisse and quiche
that brings back no real memory, only a guess
that I must have loved the spring that cold year
and needed to keep it in my heaviest book.
But who was I back then, reading about pork,
wrapped in my fashionable rabbit skin coat?
I haven’t eaten meat for twenty years,
last opened Volume One for help with broccoli.
I touch a silky leaf, wondering where I stooped
to pick this flower, and notice the recipe
for frozen chocolate mousse molded in meringues.
It’s called Le Saint-Cyr, Glace, and I read
on
delighted and distracted by Julia’s joy,
imagining how I might unmold this tall dessert
for mythical guests. Then I close the book
on both wild flowers and crème
putting it back on the shelf for the someone else
I’ll be in ten years (if I’m still alive)
to pull down and marvel over, or better yet
for strangers at my estate sale to discover:
Look! A first edition Julia Child!
Amazing, these wildflowers—they’re extinct!
from Lasting (Pima Press, 2005).