Dinner in a movie as Julia Child brought to big screen
PASSION | Streep, Ephron bring Julia Child to screen
WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. -- Even after spending several months playing the legendary Julia Child in Nora Ephron's new film "Julie & Julia," Meryl Streep still says she's a "completely adequate, solid, but fairly middle-of-the road home cook" but "not in the league of" noted foodie Ephron or even her "Julie & Julia" co-star Stanley Tucci.
During a recent chat at a hotel outside New York, the two-time Oscar winner shared an experience she had when Tucci and his wife, Kate, came to Streep and husband Don Gummer's home shortly after Tucci was cast as Julia Child's husband Paul in the film they would make together.
"Obviously, Stanley and I knew each other socially, plus we made "[The Devil Wears] Prada" together, but I thought I should probably invite him over to dinner," said Streep, sitting next to a grinning Tucci. "I decided to make blanquette de veau [veal ragout with white sauce], but when Stanley and Kate arrived it wasn't ... quite ... ready," said the actress.
"So Stanley came in and completely took over the kitchen," added Streep, immediately going into a dead-on impression of Tucci's voice:
"Why are you doing it that way? Is that what you're going to do? No, seriously, I'm just asking. Why do you hold it that way? Can I just .. . It's OK ... but I can show you an easier way."
As Tucci erupted into laughter at Streep's clever retelling, Streep smiled and said, "So, it was out of my hands. He's a great chef. I'm just a cook."
Streep might consider herself "just a cook," but she's quick to say she's far better than her mother ever was.
"My mother was of the generation that made the I Hate to Cook cookbook by Peg Bracken so popular. ... As far as my mother was concerned, if it's not done in 20 minutes, it's not dinner.
"She had a lot she wanted to do, but cooking was not one of them," Streep said.
The actress illustrated her mother's fairly typical 1950s mentality about culinary skills by sharing a story from her childhood.
"When I was about 10, I went up the street to play at another little girl's house. She and her mother were sitting at the kitchen table and, to me, it looked like they were peeling tennis balls.
" 'What are you doing?' I asked, and was promptly told they were making mashed potatoes.
" 'What do you mean? Mashed potatoes come in a box,' I said. If you can imagine, I had never seen a real potato before!"
Streep also said she recently came across a Women's Day magazine from 1967, lying in the bottom of an old knitting basket. Along with the knitting patterns, she was intrigued to discover a lot of recipes from that era.
"It was all Del Monte canned peas. Del Monte canned corn. Del Monte canned peas and corn. Canned green beans. ... A lot of the recipes were all about taking ground meat, layering it with artificial mashed potatoes and topping it off with tomato sauce -- which also, of course, came from a jar. Put it in the over and presto! Dinner!
"This is how we ate. People forget we've come a long way ... and Julia changed the way forever what we -- especially Americans -- think about cooking."
For filmmaker and writer Nora Ephron, the chance to merge Julia Child's My Life in France with overnight phenomenon Julie Powell's Julie & Julia book, which evolved from her year-long blogging about preparing all 574 recipes in Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, was "far more than just my dream project. ... I'm just obsessed with food, as many people know."
Yet, for Ephron, who is probably best known for her films "Sleepless in Seattle," "When Harry Met Sally" and "You've Got Mail," her love of most things cooking related doesn't mean she's a food snob.
"I really am the kind of person who will drive hours for a special bowl of chili," Ephron says. "I'm not a 3-star restaurant kind of person. I'm just a food person."
So, even though it was Julia Child who clearly lifted the taste buds of the American public through her initial cookbook and her iconic "The French Chef" PBS television program, it was the way Child "brought all those sophisticated details of fine French cooking down to a level that anyone who can read English could understand," said Ephron.
As for the recipes from Powell's experience and book that appear in the film, the writer and director claimed she had made "most everything in the movie myself, at one time or another ... with the exception of aspic. You would not catch me ever making aspic recipes -- though I do love tomato aspic."
But as Ephron worked on the script -- intertwining Child's memoir of the years she discovered French cooking while living in Paris in the late 1940s with Powell's decades-later homage to all things Julia -- she "was surprised at the things in Julia's cookbook I hadn't done. I thought I had cooked everything Julia, but realized I hadn't made quiche -- ever. Nor had I made crepes."
However, Ephron hastened to put Mastering the Art of French Cooking into perspective -- especially for women (and some men) or her generation.
"When I moved to New York, if you didn't know how to make boeuf bourguignon or that chocolate cake Chris Messina [who plays Julie Powell's husband Eric in the film] gets so worked up over at the end of the movie -- you had failed as a college graduate person in the 1960s," said Ephron, only half-kidding. "It was the thing you did. Period. It was part of New York life."
Asked why she thought Julia Child's first cookbook had such an impact and was so popular, Ephron said it was more than just that, "she did something that no one had done before. Yes, there was no cookbook that explained French cooking in the amazing way she did, but it's far more than that."
From Ephron's point of view, the average person doesn't have to do what Powell did and cook every recipe in Child's groundbreaking book. "If you go and cook 10 things in Julia's cookbook you learn so much beyond those recipes.
"You learn the whole idea of how sauces work. You learn how flavorings affect things and how to fix things if something goes wrong."
As Ephron sees it, Child's whole philosophy can be summed up by this concept: "Don't worry if 'X' happens, because you can do 'Y' [to fix it.]"
More important, Ephron -- joined by Streep, co-star Amy Adams (who plays Powell), Messina and Tucci -- all agreed Child's great gift was teaching Americans "you can be very relaxed as a cook," as Ephron phrased it. While the idea of preparing virtually all of the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking may seem daunting to a beginner -- even frightening -- you quickly learn that things usually turn out fine.
"For me, cooking is completely different from writing," said Ephron. "You know if you cook something -- if you follow the directions -- you know it's going to work.
"If only this was also true of writing, which we all know is not always true," she said with a laugh. "In cooking, if you add this to that, it will work out."