When re-watching the 2009 movie Julie & Julia, I wanted to cook up a storm.
Nora Ephron’s film is about two women, Julie Powell and Julia Child. Julie (played by Amy Adams) is an almost 30-year-old living in Queens with her husband and working for a government agency dealing with the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Julia Child, played by Meryl Streep who won a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for the role, is a middle-aged woman whose love of food leads her to enroll in a culinary program at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris while her husband Paul works as a diplomat in France.
The film tells both their stories simultaneously, but at different moments in time. It follows Child’s journey from culinary school to publishing her first cookbook in 1961. Forty one years later, Powell cooks her way through Child’s cookbook while writing a blog about it. She sets her mind to cooking all 524 recipes in 365 days, from poaching an egg to deboning a duck. Mind you, she’s never even eaten an egg in her life! Now she makes a hollandaise by “whipping butter with egg yolks until it’s died and gone to heaven.”
Child and Powell go through their own struggles. Child lives a seemingly harmonious life in her beloved Paris with her loving husband. When thinking about what to do with her free time while her husband is working at the embassy, all she can think of is food. So she joins an advanced all-male class at Le Cordon Bleu despite the unfavorable look from the director. She cooks lunch for Paul every day and practices her newly gained French cooking skills at home. “So much butter it almost stops your heart,” she exhales. (I know this first-hand. I work at Sur la Table and our culinary class fridge doesn’t have more of anything than butter.)
Child joins two French women in writing a cookbook for American audience, which is denied by a publishing house. Despite a disagreement with her coauthors and rejection from a publisher, Child manages to catch the eye of an editor who tests her recipes. With a “yum” over her Boeuf Bourguignon, she announces they would be proud to publish Child’s book, with a new title “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.”
Just like that, one woman’s dream comes true. Child becomes a culinary celebrity whose book inspires home cooks to this day. People like Julie Powell, a self-proclaimed OCD sufferer who has never finished anything in her life.
Powell loves to cook but she’s insecure. “I’m not a real cook like Julia Child or Mario Batali,” she says. By taking “The Julie/Julia Project” online, she intends to attract readers who would hold her accountable and help her accomplish her goal of cooking her way through Child’s cookbook in one year. She goes through a major breakdown, a marriage crisis, cooks for a New York Times critic, and ends up getting multiple offers from agents and publishers proposing cookbooks and movies. Too bad that Powell and Child have never met.
Meryl Streep and Amy Adams portray two different successful personalities that are inspiring in many ways. It reminded me of the 2014 film The Hundred-Foot Journey, which introduced another talented cook who earned recognition in the culinary world by self-education, hard work and perseverance. While that movie is not based on a true story, it also showcases how those personal qualities go a long way.
In Julie & Julia, Julia Child said that her father was horrified that she didn’t hire a cook. At a recent seminar, Julia Moskin of the New York Times mentioned that being a chef wasn’t always a glamorous job. (Moskin also mentioned she was named after Julia Child!) I couldn’t agree more. In the Czech Republic, where I grew up, going to a cooking school didn’t mean you would end up a renowned chef. The most one could hope for was to be able to get a job at a restaurant or cafe.
I love a feel-good movie. I mean, Boeuf Bourguignon was cooked three times in the film, how can you resist that? Through a heart-break or through a global pandemic, cooking can help us cope. If you add egg yolks to chocolate and sugar it will get thick. I love the comfort in that.