365 Days, 524 Recipes by Joan Fitting Scott

Of the two, Julie and Julia, I liked Julia better. The new movie Julie and Julia tells two true stories. It showcases a blogger reporting on her efforts to cook 524 of Julia Child’s recipes in a year’s time, taking us back and forth between writer Julie Powell’s prodigious undertaking and Julia Child’s charmed life in Europe and later the United States at mid-century. Both women found cooking a raison d’etre in lives they deemed meaningless.

But as I followed Julie’s struggles, I found I counted the minutes until I could get back to Julia. Although Julie’s search for meaning and her identification with Julia resonated, I somehow felt the “Julie/Julia Project” was self-serving; isn’t that what we do in this culture—find the gimmick that gets us noticed? (It worked, by the way. Julie Powell now writes for salon.com.) But maybe I should give the woman credit; it’s not easy to work at a dull job all day and cook all night and blog in the wee hours. We writers have got to break out of the pack somehow--and Powell did.

Julia, on the other hand, was simply delightful, and once I started watching Meryl Streep channel her, I was mesmerized. She had every charming mannerism down pat. I didn’t want to go back to Julie’s dingy Queens apartment and 5 am blogging, but to hang around Paris with Julia and her diplomat husband and chic friends, French and American. Was Child really as wonderful as that? I’ll take Streep’s word for it.

For Julia is a taster not just of food, but life. Inquisitive, questing, savoring all she encounters, she devours Paris--its markets, people, restaurants and food. She is sunny and funny, and charms Parisian grouches into Huggy Bears. She is determined—as when she vows to show up her male counterparts at the famed Cordon Bleu cooking school, chopping huge piles of onions to perfect her technique. She is tenacious in pushing her piece de resistance, the book Mastering the Art of French Cooking, through all the hoops required for publication. This took years. This was tough. As an author, I know.

So I’ll give the movie kudos for its warm portrayal of the doyenne of cuisine, for its humor and for Stanley Tucci, who is lovable as Julia’s devoted husband. Whoever knew this was a great love story as well as a culinary one? And Amy Adams as Julie was pretty darn good as well, even if her character is less simpatico; after all, there was only one Julia Child. Amy had stiff competition.

Joan Fitting Scott is the author of Skinning the Cat: A Baby Boomer’s Guide to the New Retiree Lifestyles