Birth of a genre as printed blogs vie for Blooker Prize

Net Results: In 2002, shortly after I had set up my weblog (or "blog") Techno-culture, I wrote an entry about a book that has always fascinated me, writes Karlin Lillington

It began like this: "This is a book for the servantless American cook who can be unconcerned on occasion with budgets, waistlines, time schedules, children's meals, the parent-chauffeur-den-mother syndrome, or anything else which might interfere with the enjoyment of producing something wonderful to eat."

That's the opening sentence of my mother's 1964 edition of the classic cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking, by Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle, and the formidable and fabulous Julia Child.

As a small girl, I found it the most intimidating cookbook on my mother's shelf - heavy, and full of long and involved recipes with French titles in italics beneath the English.

There are those marvellous explanations that have become a Child trademark - the section on Goose (or Oie) begins: "Goose, like duck, can only be considered gastronomically interesting when it is under six months old . . ."

The section for making cassoulet, the classic French sausage, meats and bean dish, runs to four pages and has a prefatory "note on the order of battle" (again, classic Julia!) for attacking the ingredients.

That - and the rest of the post - elicited an e-mail from a reader who asked if I had ever seen the "Julie/Julia" weblog, begun a short time earlier by a woman (named Julie) in New York, who had decided to cook her way through this seminal Julia Child tome. (For those unfamiliar with Child, the six-foot-tall, often-intimidating, dry-humoured woman was one of the first TV chefs and America adored her.)

I hadn't, but in the coming months I would check in and out of the Julie/Julia blog, which was whimsical, amusing, and a delightful read. She was amused and exasperated by just the things that I loved about the book, its time-warp quality that still presumed you had hours to prepare elaborate dishes; and kitchen cupboards in which you kept handy tools of the trade like meat grinders and an endless array of "heavy-bottomed, enamelled saucepans" .

The New York Julie was undaunted and inventive when faced with ingredient lists that included brains and sweetbreads, rendered ham fat (whatever that might be), endless cupfuls of heavy cream, madeira, cognac, vermouth or port, "a quart of clam juice" (something I am sure we all keep in the larder), or "one or two diced, canned truffles".

You didn't need to enjoy or even remotely care about cooking to get great pleasure from the Julie/Julia blog (which you can still view here: http://tinyurl.com/amyys).

It was quite simply, an excellent read by a clearly talented writer. And it did not stand alone - while initially many blogs had functioned as diary sites allowing personal commentary on news events, many were evolving into extraordinary examples of a new sort of writing that co-opted the blog format of a progression of entries.

Time and an episodic format thus became a central feature of the writing - perhaps for the first time since the long-ago era of epistolary novels.

And it was only a matter of time before some of these worthy efforts, including Julie/Julia, began to make their way into the old-fashioned format of print.

A steady though tiny stream of such "blooks" has emerged in the past two or three years. Julie Powell of Julie/Julia scored a particularly high-profile deal, with mainstream publisher Penguin bringing out her blook, entitled Julie & Julia.

The growth in this infant genre has been such that one online publisher decided the time was ripe for an annual prize for the best of the blooks. Hence the - oh, yes - Blooker Prize was born, sponsored by Lulu, a publisher that will print to order your own manuscript (www.lulublookerprize.com).

Geeks may be interested to learn that Lulu, which has been around since 2002, was established by Bob Young, the co-founder of Linux distributor Red Hat.

I was delighted to see that Julie & Julia took the overall Blooker Prize this week (there are awards in a number of categories). Subtitled "365 days, 524 recipes, one tiny apartment kitchen", Julie & Julia is going to the top of my reading list just as soon as I can snag a copy from my local bookstore.

Lulu argues that this emergent form is proof that there's plenty of life in the print book yet. I certainly enjoy the fact that the Blooker comes from an internet publisher that creates print books, and is awarded to a print book that emerges from an online format.

What a delightful circle that makes. Personally, I know which Irish blogger I'd like to see making the move to print - the extraordinary Dervala, at dervala.net.

In my, er, book, this ex-pat Irishwoman is firm proof that the blog is indeed a literary format, whether or not it makes the jump to paper. But it would be nice to have a portable version of Dervala. Think blook, Dervala, think blook.

weblog:http://weblog.techno-culture.com