It's all there: Child's apple tart tartin (see recipe), lobster thermidor, and Queen of Sheba cake.
The dishes display a repertoire as remarkable as Streep's, evoking laughter, pain, passion, and cravings. If you leave the theater hungry, thank director Nora Ephron (herself a foodie) and culinary consultant extraordinaire Susan Spungen.
Spungen was food editor of Martha Stewart Living magazine for a dozen years and has a strong local connection. She grew up in Huntingdon Valley, graduated from Lower Moreland High and the Philadelphia College of Art, and had her first kitchen experiences at the Commissary and the Warsaw Cafe. She wrote Recipes: A Collection for the Modern Cook (William Morrow, 2005) and is working on another cookbook.
Spungen cooked all the food that appears in the film and worked with the actors so they'd look comfortable holding chef's knives and stirring pots.
She's as much a perfectionist as Ephron, who insisted that the food in the movie be and look real. There were no tricks for the camera's sake, and to reinforce that we see the actors eating the food.
Ephron's own culinary passion became evident in Heartburn, the 1983 novel that was so closely based on the demise of her marriage to reporter Carl Bernstein - he of Watergate fame - that the book is sometimes referred to as a memoir.
For her script, Ephron combined elements of My Life in France, the memoir Child wrote with her grandnephew Alex Prud'homme (Knopf, 2006), and Powell's 2005 memoir Julie & Julia (Little, Brown). The stories meld nicely as both Child and Powell sought to banish self-doubt by cooking.
Ephron wrote lines for the actors, but scripted the food, too. And in every scene, the food steals the show.
