Meryl Streep Whets the Appetite for Julia Child

Julie and Julia Written and Directed by Nora Ephron

Aug 2, 2009

Maryl Streep, Nora Ephron and Julie Powell collaborate to fold together their lives with the one whom Time Magazine called "Our Lady of the Ladel": Julia Child.

Copies of Mastering the Art of French Cooking may be in short supply when Julie and Julia opens in theaters August 9. Meryl Streep’s portrayal of America’s queen of French cuisine is already drawing raves from those who have previewed the movie.

A Year of Cooking Dangerously

In 2002, Julie Powell set out to cook each of Julia Child’s 524 recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking. First Julie blogged her daily experiences and then turned it into a book, the paperback version now titled Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously.

In what may be the first movie based on a blog, Nora Ephron blended Julie Powell’s account with Julia Child’s memoir, My Life in France, which Julia wrote with her grandnephew Alex Prud’homme.

USA Today reported that, even before Nora Ephron had started on the script, she told Meryl Streep about it when they ran into each other at New York’s Shakespeare in the Park. Meryl launched into ten minutes imitating Julia Child’s famous voice. Ephron says she thought, “Okay, look to further.”

A Life-Changing Lunch

The movie starts with Julia and husband Paul’s move to Paris in 1948. The couple had met in Ceylon (present day Sri Lanka) where both were posted during World War II, she with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), he with the State Department. Just off the boat in Rouen they drove to a restaurant called La Couronne, for their first meal on French soil.

Paul ordered sole meunière, the quintessentially simple French preparation of fresh fish, lightly floured, quickly sautéed in butter and finished with lemon and parsley. As Julia later said, "The whole experience was an opening up of the soul and spirit for me… I was hooked, and for life, as it turned out."

Julia enrolled in Paris’ famed Cordon Bleu. She took French language lessons so she could talk to the fishmongers and bakers and all the other vendors in the open-air markets. As she recounted in My Life in France “I fell in love with French food—the tastes, the processes, the history, the endless variations, the rigorous discipline, the creativity, the wonderful people, the equipment, the rituals.”

The Desire not just to Learn, but to Teach

Julia set out to develop enough foolproof recipes so she could teach cooking herself. With two women she met in Paris, Simone “Simca” Beck and Louisette Bertholle, she founded L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes, where they conducted twice weekly classes for American women who wanted to learn French cooking.

The three of them also started writing the book that would become Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Publishers repeatedly rejected the manuscript until Judith Jones, a young editor at a new publisher, Alfred Knopf, saw promise. As Jones says, “I felt very related to her because we were both released from very traditional, middle-class American values. And it was France that released us. She wanted to bring this message to America—that we were still steeped in the Puritan attitude towards food.”

Launching a New Television Genre: The Cooking Show

Mastering the Art of French Cooking was finally published in 1961. Julia managed to get an interview on a public television program, “I’ve Been Reading,” produced by WGBH in Boston. She arrived for the show armed with a copper bowl, eggs, mushrooms, a hot plate and a giant balloon whisk. She made a French omelette. Viewers said, more please.

What followed was ten years of “The French Chef.” Mastering is now in 47th printing largely due to audiences for Julia’s Emmy-winning television shows carried by 96 PBS stations. When she moved to California, her famous kitchen in Cambridge was dismantled and reconstructed where it is now displayed at the Smithsonian Institution.

Common Sense and Uncommon Scents

Harvard University granted Julia an honorary doctorate in 1993. Her citation read "A Harvard friend and neighbor who has filled the air with common sense and uncommon scents. Long may her soufflés rise."

Just two days shy of turning 92, Julia Child died on August 13, 2004. The meal that turned out to be her last, before she went to sleep and never woke up, was the recipe from Mastering for French onion soup.

Go here for a slightly easier version of Julia's Boeuf Bourguignon. (Julia would substitute pearl onions for chopped onions.)

The copyright of the article Meryl Streep Whets the Appetite for Julia Child in French Cuisine is owned by Larry Ervin. Permission to republish Meryl Streep Whets the Appetite for Julia Child in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.