Another recall of meat, this time 17,000 pounds of salamis and other processed meats from Daniele.  (“Proudly made in the USA” is its slogan.)

Virtually every week the USDA, understaffed and not very motivated about recalls anyway, is obliged to deal with US meat tainted in its processing.  It’s a pretty terrible commentary on this highly developed country.  In a way, it’s also amusing.

I was in London a couple of weeks ago.  I walked through the food halls of Harrods looking enviously at the huge selection of cured meats – from Italy and Germany, Spain and France, none of which I was permitted to bring to bring home with me.

How can this be?  Our meat supply is more at risk than that of any other developed country in the world.  Wouldn’t it be more sensible for us to allow importation of other countries’ meat while banning the sale of the meats produced in America?

I never throw away books; its wrong to do so.  My way of avoiding it is to cart to Baltimore  books I don’t want any longer and donate them to The Book Thing, a wonderful organization everyone should know about.

I bought a copy of Julie and Julia in 2007 when it was published.  I read a few chapters and got so angry I threw the book away.  I didn’t want anyone else to read it.

So it shocked me when Nora Ephron bought the book for a film and I was surprised even more when so many people told me how much they liked the film.   I decided, even after reading reviews that panned the Julie parts of the movie, that I would go to see it and at least enjoy Meryl Streep’s performance.

On Saturday afternoon I saw the film and it, like the book, made me so angry that I am determined to throw it out of mind as I threw the book out of my apartment.

What could account for such a lapse of judgment?  How can Ms. Ephron justify devoting half of a movie about so inspirational a woman to a whiny, inconsequential little girl?  Did Ms. Ephron have a message.  Did she mean, for example,  to suggest that in our shallow society,  a leachy blog is comparable to a groundbreaking book?  Did she mean to compare the “achievements” of Julie Powell (“Is anyone reading me????”) with the achievements of someone whose work affected so much the way we think about food in this country.

If Julie had been left out of the film, perhaps we could have been treated to more about live in Paris after the War.  Perhaps Ms. Efron could have shown us Marsailles of which there is not one frame in her vapid film.  Perhaps and most important, the story could have been continued and we could have been treated to the wonderful, frantic early months of the television series.   Perhaps there could have been some anecdotes about how people who bought the book desperately tried to find ingredients not commonly available, how assiduously people tried to follow Julia’s instructions, how much time we all devoted to replicating her recipes.

I for one remember being invited to a dinner party in South Hadley, Massachusetts — it must have been 1965 — for which the hostess worked for two days to cook Julia’s coq au vin.  She invited us into the kitchen to witness the final preparation.  She carefully removed from the sauce the pieces of chicken that had been cooked in it for hours.  She meticulously picked out the mushrooms and the onions putting them on the platter.  And then she poured the sauce into her sink.

Probably everyone of my age interested in food has memories of the early years of Julia.  She was a mentor to us all – and unlike the predatory Julie we didn’t obsess about the way Julia felt about us.

I just don’t understand.  I suspect that Ms. Ephron found Julie charming.  But I found the book vulgar and ugly (the “f word” on practically every page) and felt the same way about the Julie of the movie.  I find it hard to understand why Julie might have been surprised to learn that Julia Child who was not without ego would have found annoying the self-centered, self-aggrandizing Julie.

I know that Nora Ephron specializes in feel-good movies but this movie did not make me feel good in the least.

In 1989 just before Marvelous Market was to open I went to Paris to visit bakers whose breads I admired.

Basile Kamir was one.  He had been a pop music record promoter whose company was housed in a stunning former bakery on the rue Suffren.  The owner of the building had decided to tear it down and Basile learned that French (or perhaps Parisian) law forbade destruction of buildings housing bakeries.  Because he loved the building, he invoked the protections of the law by returning the bakery to its real use.  He opened Le Moulin de la Vierge and became one of the new bakers reviving old traditions.

I visited Jean-Luc Poujauran in his fashionable shop.  I walked to the Boulevard Hausmanne to Le Pain Bien Cuit.  The great leader of the French bakery revival, Raymond Calvel, took me to meet Michel Cousin who baked in a wood fired oven in the rear of his little shop near  Nation.  I stood in the line on the Rue du Cherche Midi to buy Pain Poilâne.  I visited his brother, Max too.  Many, many bakers; I had a long list.

Most of these bakers were making pain au levain, sourdough bread.  Many of them were using a flour not then available in the US and were baking in wood-fired ovens.

Early one morning I took the Metro to the decidedly unfashionable 20th Arrondisement to visit Bernard Ganachaud who, it was said, baked the best baguette in Paris.  Although the baguette was and still is not my favorite bread, it is certainly the quintessential bread of France, so much so that many people outside France refer to the baguette as “French bread.”  It is the most recognizable of all breads.

It was a pretty winter day when I walked from the Metro stop on the Rue des Pyrenne up the Rue Menilmontant to the Ganachaud’s little shop.  I stopped outside to watch  through a window baguettes being hand-shaped by two very young men.  And then I went in and bought a baguette to take away.

As I walked slowly down the hill I could smell the freshly made bread.  I stopped to look at it.  I pressed the bread with a finger and broke through the crisp, thin crust.  The color of the crumb was not white; it was creamy.  I broke the bread and saw random holes inside, some large, some small.  I took a bite and had for the first time the experience of a real baguette: toasty, nutty, faintly sweet, a slightly milky flavor, chewy, fresh – like no bread I had ever tasted.  The shards of crust in my mouth felt distinctly different from the moist, fragile crumb that had many different textures.
I was so excited.  I had never tasted a bread like that.  There was a telephone booth next to me, all of its glass was broken.  Feeling foolish, I stepped through the frame and used my phone card to call my home in Washington and woke up my son, Francois.  I told him with such excitement about the experience I was having.

I was crazy.  I knew it.  He certainly knew it.  I was calling my son at perhaps 2 a.m. to tell him that I was tasting a baguette for the first time – and that for the first time, after all those baguettes from Vie de France in Washington in the 70s and Au Bon Pain in Boston in the 80s – for the first time I understood a baguette.

For the past 20 years I have made baguettes professionally – I can’t imagine how many.  I’ve made lots of other breads too.  I make a good sourdough miche (round) and a very good traditional pumpernickel.  My Palladin bread, named for Jean Louis Palladin, is made by Bouchon bakery and is known in New York and Napa Valley; it is served In Washington, D.C. at Citronelle.  It’s a good bread. I have made good breads and hope to continue doing so.  But I have never made a baguette that satisfied me.

A few weeks ago I said that to Eric Kayser, one of the most successful bakers and teachers in France.  He looked at me a little oddly, I thought, and I told him that just once I would like to make a perfect baguette.

“Come to Paris,” he said, “I’ll show you how to make a perfect baguette.”  That was a promise I could not resist and I am now in  Paris to spend a week with Eric Kayser.