For the love of cooking, and Julie Powell

As someone who had to cook everyday while holding down a full-time job, but minus a supportive and indulgent husband, I found comfort in Julie. She was so much like me: Perennially broke, late and disorganised; had PCOD and a predilection for ribald humour (Who thinks bone marrow tastes like really good sex? Julie Powell, it seems); was impulsive, only a whisker away from a full-blown mental breakdown; and brazenly open about her life. I was always all those things but Julie convinced me that it was okay to be all those things.

She taught me it was okay to not be normal, that it was okay to not have it all together. That it was okay to not know there is a “drip pan under the fridge” that needs to be regularly emptied out, that sometimes you have to choose between a “slice of truffle” and rent, that “in the physical act of cooking… dwelled unsuspected reservoirs of arousal – both gastronomic and sexual”. She described food in a way that no one could and helped me find words for the immeasurable joy I felt when cooking.

She was clumsy and unapologetic about it. And in being so, she convinced me that I could be unapologetically clumsy too. She taught me that it didn’t matter where and how you cooked, what mattered was the end product. And even if you screw up there, it was still okay. You could swear and curse and punch the air, and start over.

The circumstances of my life have undergone a sea change since when I first read Julie Powell: I can afford a cook now, for example. Plus my now-retired mother is here for most part of the year and is forever eager to rustle up a meal at any hour. I still love cooking, but I also love vegetating on my bed watching Instagram reels and memorising memes. I barely have the motivation, or the need, to enter the kitchen these days.

But the other day, the day Julie left this world, I felt the irrepressible urge to cook. I decided to go with Chinese, a far cry from Julie’s elaborate French cooking. I took my own sweet time cutting the vegetables, taking in the sensuality that only a fresh, plump capsicum can offer, artfully slicing bright orange carrots into wafer-thin ribbons. As the wok hissed and whooshed, I felt like a music conductor in my own little concert. I ladled the final product into a pasta bowl and offered the first bite to my mother. “Good,” she said, and then raised her eyebrow at the hot mess that I had turned the kitchen into. But before she could say anything, I went: “It’s okay, mom. Julie would approve.”