Flirting with French Cuisine

When Julia Child died in 2004, I was already a blogger, I had blogger friends and because there weren’t a lot of food blogs around the world (mine was the first food blog in this country although a lot of people insist on taking that credit), food bloggers kinda knew each other by blog name.

There was a buzz in blogs that Julia Child had died. And I went, “Julia Who?” It might have sounded sacrilegous but I really hadn’t heard of her. But I knew Nora Daza, Stephen Yan and Biba Caggiano because I watched their TV shows a decade or so earlier. I Googled, saw some videos of Child’s old TV show (in black and white) and filed the information in a folder in my head labeled “For Future Use”.

What I did not drop into that folder was a blog called The Julie/Julia Project by Julie Powell which, of course, became a book and, later, a movie with Meryl Streep playing Julia Child. I dove into that blog almost as soon as I discovered it. It was in Julie’s blog where I learned that Julia Child was a proponent of French cooking.

Over the years, I would learn to cook a few French dishes decently but my default has always been Asian. It wasn’t until our younger daughter, Alex, went to culinary school and learned classical French cooking that French food started to pop up in home conversations more and more often.

Bechamel sauce had been in my cooking repertoire for decades. Hollandaise was something I picked up when my daughters where already in high school. But it was Alex who introduced us to demi-glace and I knew it’s something I will not labor over at home.

Among the five mother sauces in French cuisine, Bechamel sauce is the one most often used in our home cooking. But Hollandaise sauce is my favorite. It’s the butter, you see.

Alex makes Hollandaise sauce beautifully.