Recipe for success

The food blogging community seems very insular. Are there any other blogs that you follow closely or admire?

I'm a terrible blogger and a terrible citizen of the blogosphere. I'm going to get in a lot of trouble, but the truth is, I actually find most food blogs really boring. I try to look at other people's blogs and they have pretty pictures and they're so proud -- but really, I just don't care. I don't know anything about that person, and I don't know why it's important to them. Food in itself becomes just a mass of prejudices and snobbery and everyone looks like a prat when they write about food. For me, what I became more interested in was how my life began to inform my cooking and what I came into the kitchen with from my day. I don't know if I would have ever come to that realization if I hadn't been keeping a blog. If I'd just written in a journal, I'm not sure I would have finished, because the communal nature of the blog definitely kept me going.

I read not long ago that in the past four years, enrollment in culinary schools has increased almost 40 percent, and that the average age of the students has risen from 20 to 27. The explanation seems to be that young professionals are dropping out of careers in law and business and embracing lives in the kitchen.

There is a trendiness about food, which I guess is born out of greater access to all different cuisines and ingredients -- like being able to buy sushi at the Stop & Shop. And the more our work is about sitting in front of a computer all day and feeling isolated -- which, really, pretty much all work is these days -- the less desirable it seems to hole yourself up in front of a typewriter or computer alone to write a book. Whereas food is a really physical thing, it engages all of your senses, and you have to move and stand up and your back hurts. There is the idea that food is community building. I cook for very selfish reasons. It just gives me pleasure. You could see it in my descriptions while I was writing the blog; when I made liver, I said it tasted like sex, like "the silky soul of steak."

I find that cooking is actually therapeutic in the same way that sex is therapeutic, in that you've gotten so into your body and into your senses, that you can't worry about the rest of the crap. You just have to let go of all that brainwork. And I think so many people, as we're approaching 30 and don't know where we're going and have so many choices and we don't know which path to take, your brain just starts to do this spin cycle and it feels like it never stops. For me, cooking made it still for a while.

With "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," you seem to have zeroed in on a text that made you slow down in the extreme, partly because it is from a very different era.

One of the reasons "Mastering the Art" appealed to me was that it wasn't a part of that trendy Food Network world where you always have to use the right ingredient. Instead, it's elemental, it's simple. It wasn't about a trendy new cuisine. There was a lack of topicality to it, a timelessness. I had gotten sick of going to Whole Foods to get wasabi-whatever. At first I imagined I would just go to Key Foods and get some chicken and some Morton salt, and I'd be fine with those simple ingredients. [Laughs] Of course, that turned out to be wrong, but I do like the message the book brings to its audience of women, which is: This is not about shopping. It's about taking foodstuff and making it beautiful and enjoyable.

Looking back I think one of the reasons the book really spoke to me at a gut level was that there was something about the prose. Yes, the recipes are amazing and you read them and think, "Oh my god, she says to use two sticks of butter!" -- but aside from that, in the prose there is an enthusiasm that shines through, without being super-chatty. It is much more formal than that, but buried under that there was this person saying, "Look what I can do, and you can do it too, and this is so exciting." To me it just seemed like incredible generosity. There was some reason that it was always on my shelf and I'd look at it as I was sitting around making my London broil and drinking gimlets, depressed. I would touch it and it gave me some kind of comfort.

Something that was not central to your blog but that you focus on in the book is the idea that the personal awakening that cooking stirred in you was actually parallel to one that Julia Child experienced.

My perception that there were these parallels really made me have a deep gut feeling of connection as I learned her story. Julia Child didn't learn to cook, or even eat well, until she was older than me -- she didn't take her first cooking class until she was 36 or 37. And there is an appreciation that comes out of that. When you meet some hotshot young chef from California who was raised by hyper-conscious parents and now has opened restaurants in New York and Hollywood, even though he might be a great chef and know a ton about food, it always sounds to me as though he's talking in sound bites.

That's also why, though obviously the food was a big deal to me, in the end I've come to understand that the project and the book weren't really about food. It could have been anything; you know, my husband is training for a marathon now, which I find to be the most excruciatingly boring thing in the world, but that comes out of a similar place. He didn't run, he didn't exercise, but one day he just said, "You know, I really need to do this."

Next Page: My mother kept saying, " You're making yourself crazy, you're getting fat. You should quit!"

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