Backstage with Julia Read Online Free PDF Page A

never made a caramel dome, I knew the process involved swirling hot caramel with a spoon into a webbed pattern on the exterior of a bowl and, when it cooled, lifting it in one piece off the bowl.
    "How so?" I asked, wondering what problems she had encountered.
    "It kept breaking when we lifted it off the bowl. We tried different bowls, more butter, layers of plastic wrap. In the end, we found the difference was chilling the bowl beforehand."
    It was obvious from her animated discussion that not only had she researched the releasing qualities of caramel with scientific precision, but she had thoroughly enjoyed the research process. It had been thirty-one years since Julia took her first cooking class at the Cordon Bleu, and yet there she was enthusing about learning a technique with the same passion of a first-year culinary student. Her enthusiasm was infectious.
    That evening, at the patrons' gala dinner, I met Julia's assistants, Marian Morash and Sara Moulton. My copy of Marian's The Victory Garden Cookbook , the landmark, definitive work on vegetables, was as worn and stained as my copies of Julia's books. I had watched her on her own television show, The Victory Garden , but I didn't know that she is married to Russ Morash, the director responsible for Julia's successful burst into the television world. Sara, who would go on to become the star of her own shows on the Food Network, is a petite dynamo. I like to call Sara "petite." Since I am only five feet two inches, it's elevating working with someone who's even shorter. Sara looked like a teenager, but I knew she had to be older than that, because it took a lot longer than nineteen years to accumulate her degree of culinary expertise. Since both Marian and Sara had worked with Julia for a number of years and knew her routine well, I expected they would hardly need me for anything more than managing the dishwashing station.

    Liz seated and me getting to know Sara and Marian, while patron Nancy Taylor of Providence looks on.
    The next morning, I stood back and waited for directions.
    "Where should we begin?" Marian asked me. "You're in charge." How generous is that? Marian and Sara intended for me to be the onstage assistant to Julia during the shows, and their instant acceptance of me immediately endeared both women to me.
    Julia's demonstration that afternoon was to be devoted to fast puff pastry, a quicker but no less buttery version of the classically made, multilayered flaky pastry known in French as pâte feuilletée . The classic version calls for spreading masses of butter over a large sheet of pastry dough, pâte brisée , and then folding the two into a package. The butter and pastry package is then rolled and folded, rerolled, and folded again for a total of six times called "turns," with chilling necessary after each turn. Its success depends in great part on the cook's ability to handle the butter so that it maintains the ideal temperature to spread properly through the layers of dough: too cold and shards of it can pierce the dough, too warm and it can ooze out the sides, sticking the dough together and preventing it from separating into flaky layers.

    Julia's recipe for the inevitable bits of uncooked vol-au-vent dough.
    In 1980, we couldn't buy puff pastry in the market, so if we wanted it, we had to make our own. Julia did not invent the faster method, which she called "pâte feuilletée express ," but she heralded its use to her audiences so that they would not miss the joys of the layered pastry because they found the classic method daunting. With quick puff pastry, instead of a large sheet of butter spread on top of the pastry, diced pieces are added and blended directly into the flour and water in the bowl of a stand mixer. The dough is then ready for the traditional six turns and folds.
    Julia would then demonstrate a number of delicious and inventive dishes you could cook up once you had rapidly made the dough. She would demonstrate two