Julia Child is not dead. Not as long as Meryl Streep inhabits her big-boned, 6-foot-2 frame; fills her size 12 shoes; sets the corners of her eyes in a permanent crinkle; and causes her voice—that voice!—to bubble up from some sweet, deep place in her soul. In Nora Ephron’s film Julie & Julia, you’re convinced that Julia Child is still here. This is reassuring stuff for those of us who learned to cook from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Watching the determined Julia slip a piece of carbon paper (carbon paper!) between two sheets of onionskin and roll them into her typewriter for the first time is quietly thrilling—like being there at the creation.

The story of Julie & Julia is essentially a two-memoir mashup: Julia Child’s own My Life in France and Julie & Julia, Julie Powell’s 2005 book about spending a year cooking her way through the 524 recipes in the first volume of Mastering and blogging about it from her loft in Long Island City, Queens. It’s kind of Julia squared, a double-edged story of food and love, cooking and redemption. The movie ping-pongs in time and place—Julia among the idle rich in ’50s Paris, Julie (Amy Adams) in working-class 21st-century New York—but both characters are essentially on the same path. They’re searching for themselves—“I decided I had three main weaknesses,” Julia says in her memoir. “I was confused. I had a lack of confidence. I was overly emotional”—and food shows them the way. Surrounded by all that (then affordable) copper cookware, Julia confides to a friend as she lowers a whole fish wrapped in cheesecloth into a pot of poaching liquid: “I’m in heaven here. I’ve been looking for a career all my life and I’ve found it.” Julie—secretary by day, food blogger by night—cooks with Julia’s voice in her kitchen and in her head, “always chortling quietly to herself, like a roosting pigeon in its cote,” Julie says. “I was drowning and she pulled me out of the ocean. She saved me. Both of us were saved by food.”

... contd.