I came out of the movie "Julie & Julia" anxious to cook. This surprised me. I do not think of myself as someone who gets swept away by a movie. A good book, yes. A great play on the football field, you betcha! But I get steely when it comes to letting films motivate me.
Yet there I was in the kitchen on a recent afternoon, making mushroom duxelles, stuffing them inside a raw chicken, and following Julia Child's explicit instructions of how to give carrots a stylish "bourgeois" cut.
I knew that by running to the kitchen after watching "Julie & Julia," I was joining the herd. The movie is a box office success. It chronicles Julia Child's efforts while living in France to get "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" published in 1961 and also the attempts of Julie Powell, a New York secretary turned food blogger, to cook all 524 recipes of that cookbook in 2002.
The movie had spurred sales of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," as well as other books associated with the film. Shirley Fergenson of The Ivy Bookshop Shop on Falls Road told me that both " My Life in France," written by Child's nephew Alex Prud'homme, and Powell's book "Julie & Julia," used by Nora Ephron in the film's screenplay, have become top sellers.
"My Life in France" was the No. 1 seller for nonfiction paperback, and "Julie & Julia" ranked third in the same category for the week of Sept. 3rd, according to the Indie Bestseller List, a report of sales from independent booksellers across America.
Fergenson said that since the movie opened in Baltimore last month, the small bookshop has sold 86 copies of the Prud'homme paperback, 45 copies of Powell's book, and 33 copies of the cookbook.
"It is a bit of a happening," Fergenson said. "People come in looking for the cookbook saying they want to make beef Bourguignon. Then they see the quantities of butter that it calls for and they roll their eyes. But they still take it home."
Try as I might not to be trendy, I couldn't resist joining the crowd and trying to imitate the kitchen acrobatics seen in "Julie & Julia."
One reason the movie worked is that it made viewers feel that we already knew Julia. Meryl Streep's portrayal of her was so spot on, everything from her intonation to her body language, that to me the film seemed like a reincarnation of the exuberant, funny woman we saw having fun on "The French Chef," her television show.
