Julie and Julia, and the tomato surprise

I’m always behind with films.  This explains why I have only just watched Julie and Julia, which came out last year.  For those even further behind than me it is the story of a young American woman, Julie Powell, blogging about a task she has set herself to complete in a year: to cook her way through the entire canon of recipes published by the food writer Julia Child in her first book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Child and her colleagues Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle co-wrote this landmark work, which popularised French cooking in 1960s America, after living in France during the 1950s and becoming professional chefs.  Elizabeth David did something similar in the UK.

The film encouraged me to return to a book I had gleaned from my mother’s bookshelves 20 years ago.  Be Your Own Chef was published in 1948 and written by the unknown Lucie Marion, a Frenchwoman married to an Englishman and with no culinary training other than her own critical palate.  Like Child, Marion belongs to that generation of women brought up with cooks but who, in adulthood and because of the societal changes brought about by World War II, had to manage without one.  As Julie Powell wrote: “Nobody here but us servantless [American] cooks…”

Be Your Own Chef made my husband and I laugh when we first found it.  My mother had never been an enthusiastic cook, though she might have tried to be in the first flush of her short-lived marriage to my father.  The book is frighteningly bossy and prescriptive and its recipes rely on a phenomenon that has long since died out – that of women who give up their jobs upon marriage in order to concentrate on their husbands.

Only in such circumstances, surely, could anyone dish up crême dubarry (cauliflower soup), matelote normande (a fish dish), rosemary brochettes (a liver dish) with paille potatoes, onion salad followed by chocolate mousse, just as an example, on a daily basis.  Be Your Own Chef presents a cycle of menus for the first week of every month of the year.  Among them, I cannot see any that my mother, a full-time translator, would have had the time to attempt.

Inspired by the film, I flicked through the pages and did find a simple recipe which I share here.  It is called Tomato Surprise and would make a light lunch or dinner starter.  Per person, take one large tomato and one egg.  Cut a lid off the tomatoes and scoop out the pips with a curved grapefruit knife.  Into each tomato sprinkle a little salt, place a small knob of butter and break an egg.  Add a bit more butter and salt on top, replace the lid, cover with greased paper and bake in a hot oven (preheated M7) for 15 minutes.

I was amazed how good this tasted, the tomato’s sharpness contrasting with the egg whose yolk was still just runny.  Try it – the surprise might be on you.

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