Julie & Julia: How Nora Ephron's film about Julia Child reminds us of the transformative power of cooking

To this day, the American chef Julia Child reminds us that cooking can (and should) bring joy. It’s a path to enrichment, however we may define that term: it can encourage us to be more daring, bring us a sense of peace, or even introduce a little order into our lives. Nora Ephron captured this sentiment perfectly in her 2009 film Julie & Julia, drawing parallels between the life of the acclaimed chef and TV personality (played by Meryl Streep in the film) and that of Julie Powell (Amy Adams), who found temporary fame blogging her own journey of cooking each of the 524 recipes in Child’s 1961 book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking: Volume One.

Neither of these women had any clue of their greater purpose in life when they graduated from college. Child earned a degree from Smith College, in Massachusetts, in 1934, at a time when women, in her own words, were destined to be “either nurses or teachers”. But she used her flair for words to land a job in advertising and, after the Second World War broke out, she worked as a file clerk in the Office of Strategic Services. While posted in Ceylon, in modern-day Sri Lanka, she met her future husband, Paul Child. They married in 1946 and moved to France, where she experienced a culinary awakening after a meal of oysters, sole meunière, and wine.

The winning combination of flavours had sparked a new energy within the 36-year-old Child. She enrolled in classes at the famous cooking school Cordon Bleu and, after joining Paris’s Le Cercle des Gourmettes – a social group for women with refined palates – she met Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck. The three of them together produced a manuscript for what would become their debut cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It went through multiple iterations and was rejected by several publishers, before finally finding a home at Alfred A Knopf.

Child, by this point, had returned to Massachusetts and agreed to appear on local TV in order to promote the book, bringing her own pots and pans in order to demonstrate how to cook the perfect omelette. She was an instant hit with viewers and, at age 50, became the face of her own cooking show, The French Chef. In total it ran for 10 years and was broadcast on 96 television stations, with Child herself becoming a major influence on today’s notion of the celebrity chef.

She had shown American households that cooking could be so much more than a necessity. It could be fun. It could be an adventure. The gourmet tastes of the elite classes no longer felt like an inaccessible world – the right ingredients, cooked the right way, could send tastebuds travelling across the world and to the dining clubs of Paris. As the introduction of Mastering the Art of French Cooking: Volume One humbly suggests: “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.”

open image in gallery

Powell, meanwhile, took cues from Child and became her own kind of culinary explorer. Armed with a degree in theatre and creative writing from Amherst College, she had hoped to pave her way as a writer, but ended up in the demoralising position of answering phone calls from those affected by 9/11 for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.

Her blog, “The Julie/Julia Project”, started life largely as a way to refocus her energy, serving as motivation on her quest to cook every recipe contained in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, all from the confines of her compact apartment kitchen. However, Powell’s honest way of writing about her triumphs and tribulations, describing the deboning of a duck as if it were an enterprise of epic proportions, clearly struck a chord: “The Julie/Julia Project” ballooned in popularity, leading to a bestselling book on the subject and, in turn, Ephron’s film.

Yet, as the film suggests, it wasn’t just sautéing tips that Powell took from Child’s work, but her outlook on life. The two stories presented aren’t just about cooking bringing a new joie de vivre, but about two women learning to accept and celebrate imperfection. Though Child was remarkable in her skill, charm, and clarity of instruction, a key part of her appeal was that she wasn’t afraid to make mistakes. A now-famous incident from her TV show sees her fail in flipping a potato cake, sending it flying out of the pan, only for her to daintily snatch it up and place it right back in the pan, commenting: “If you’re alone in the kitchen, who is going to see?”

In Julie & Julia, Child helps Powell come to terms with the imperfections of her own life. She realises that it doesn’t matter that she burnt the beef bourguignon right before a potential editor comes to visit. Even her blog doesn’t matter so much, when compared to the people in her life who love and support her. “I was drowning and she pulled me out of the ocean,” she says of Child. She helped Powell find her own sense of freedom, as she has done for so many others who have embraced her work.

If the power of food gets your creative juices flowing, check out this year’s Nespresso Talents contest. The unique competition asks filmmakers to tell a story through the format of vertical video on the theme of ‘We are what we eat’. To find out more*, visit Nespresso.com/Talents

*18+. Terms apply