My dear friend, Jan, is undoubtedly the most talented artist I know. I’m fortunate that she has been involved in pretty much every literary endeavour I’ve embarked on – she is behind the adorable wise-old owl on my website. Her love of visual art is evident in everything she does – how she furnishes a room, how she sets a table, how she shares her garden. How she stirs up a miracle each time she enters a kitchen, whether it’s to put together a few tapas to go with the wine or to prepare a full banquet.
She was pretty sure my inability to meet with cooking success came down to a lack of interest, so she decided to host a full cooking experience with me. She had always displayed Julia Child’s infamous cookbook ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking’ on her counter, and had even attempted a few of the simpler recipes like the chilled leek and potato soup. But we were going all out for our little soiree, apparently, with the no holds barred Child-challenging Boeuf Bourguignon.
It’s deceiving, this classic Julia Child dish, because at its base it’s just a beef stew. But in reality, it’s a multiple page spread of complexities and emotions that takes at least six hours to prepare. Remember the movie Julie & Julia, where the blogger works her way through the cookbook and has panic attacks at this one? That was an apt portrayal of what it feels like to face this recipe head-on. I don’t know what she was thinking – by ‘she’ I mean both Julia and Jan. But this full day in the making recipe is a culinary cult-classic and has also been heralded as the best tasting beef dish known to man. Certainly seemed worth the risk.
But Jan wasn’t only planning to cook the fancy stew, we were to make a sort of theatre of it. We wore simple skirts and button-down short sleeved blouses with a string of pearls and name tags. Just like Julia, we were. It was a sunny early spring morning when I had arrived, clutching my pearls and a chilled bottle of white. By 11:00 that morning, Jan had led us through only the first three steps of a 15-step recipe and was showing a small bead of sweat along her upper lip. I had cracked open the wine.
By 2:00 in the afternoon, I was searching for a second bottle and serenading Jan with some of my masterful French singing. She was becoming slightly unglued and it’s the closest I’ve seen her to being annoyed. I was relegated to a chair at the table with a cutting board in front of me, on which I was to cut a small X into the bottom of many, many pearl onions. Fine, that quieted me down.
By 4:00 we had stopped several times, debating whether to simply skip a few of the upcoming steps. But in the end we coaxed one another onward, given how far we had already come in the quest. By 6:00, the annoyance was filling both of us. The kitchen was a mess, the fresh flowers that had been placed at the table settings had wilted in the course of the long steam-filled day. Finally, finally Jan ladled heaping spoonfuls from the pot into our lovely ceramic bowls, while I poured each of us a glass from the bottle she had finally unearthed.
We sat, huffily and exhausted, in front of our bowls of stew. But… then we took a bite! And understood completely.