Boil the Milk, Make-a the sauce...

Jennifer, Davin and I watched Julie and Julia the other day, just before Christmas. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a sweet movie about a woman who decides to spend a year cooking her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

The film is about her self-discovery as she blogged her experiences cooking all these recipes, interleaved with biographical sections of how Julia Child wrote the cookbook during the 10 or so years she lived in France. It’s a neat movie, especially if you’re into food. Which I am.

I made the comment to Jennifer that I’d never really experienced Julia Child firsthand, either on television or via her books, so I didn’t know much about her. I knew she was a big deal TV chef, probably the first one ever, and that she had a big, high voice, but that was about it.

Well, Jenn went and bought me the cookbook for Christmas. Here’s my first status report:

I cooked a ham on Christmas day, on Christmas day, on Christmas day…and lo, there were leftovers. Apparently, I tip my head to the side when glazing ham. This was the best of the 4 pictures Jennifer took, and all of them had me in the same gnarled position. I’ll have to work on my technique. (I'm actually on the phone...)

So we wanted to do scalloped potatoes, since that’s a favorite leftover ham dish in our family. Sometimes I think we should skip the massive joint of meat and go straight to the leftovers….that’s another whole blog post, but you can read more in The Supper of the Lamb by Robert Farrar Capon.

He describes leftovers as ‘ferial’, or ordinary cooking, and proceeds to build an ethos around enjoying the everyday pleasures of God’s world all the time, as a matter of worship. I received it for Christmas last year, and I recommend it enthusiastically. But I digress…

Scalloped potatoes require white sauce. White sauce is basically fat and flour mixed in about a 2/3 ratio over heat until it bubbles.

This is called a roux ( pronounced ‘roo’…it’s french, naturally ) and is the basis for a number of saucy things, from country gravy to gumbo. You add liquid to the roux, and it becomes one thing or another, and then you eat it. Yum.

I’ve made white sauce before, and have had wise women from both sides of my family and Jennifer’s talk about roux, gravy, and all things lumpy. It has been my process to add liquid to the roux in small amounts to avoid causing lumps, which doesn’t always work.

Here’s where Julia Child comes in. In her chapter on sauces, she gives a recipe for white sauce, grandly titled Bechamel sauce, but it’s just roux and milk.

Julia says ( imagine finger pointed in the air, pronounced ‘JOOOO-leea says’ ) to boil the liquid while you’re prepping the roux, and then add it all at once, once the roux is ready. I hadn’t heard that one before, so I was interested to see how it worked.

Jenn was looking on as I grabbed the pan of milk, said ‘here goes nothing’ and dumped it all in. I expected lumps galore, cause when you add that much liquid to a roux, that’s what you get…but it came out perfect.

It’s hard to describe my child-like glee – HOLY MOLY! IT WORKED! ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I was grinning like an idiot over a suspension of flour, butter and milk. I was practically dancing around the kitchen. ( I know. I KNOW…It’s just gravy, man. Get a grip already… )

Anyway, it came out great, and now I can see why people push up their glasses, wave their index fingers in the air, and say ‘Julia says…’

There’s probably a lesson in that last sentence about the relationship between experience, trust, and faith…I’ll let you ponder or sermonize at your leisure…