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BY MAGGIE SCOTT

In the introduction to her 1999 cookbook collaboration with the celebrated French chef, Jacques Pepin—“Julia and Jacques:Cooking at Home”—the legendary American chef Julia Child wrote, “Food is not only our business but our greatest pleasure, and we think its preparation should be a joyful occupation. Of course, cooking with two is far more lively than cooking alone, but when you know pretty well what you are doing, the food itself is your companion.”

Film director and writer Nora Ephron knows something about being in a joyful occupation; and in her new dramady, Julie and Julia she’s got some pretty lively “cooking” of her own going with boon companion Meryl Streep pulling off a formidable portrayal of Julia Child “before she was Julia Child.” Ephron has written greatness for Streep before: the real life characters of Nora Ephron in Heartburn (about her breakup with journalist Carl Bernstein) and Karen Silkwood, the martyred corporate whistle blower, in Silkwood.

What makes Julie and Julia such a savory dish is not just Ephron’s having, according to Streep, “the perfect bon mot to toss off…effortlessly.” It’s Ephron cooking up a delicious balancing act blending her adaptations of Child’s memoir of her early years in Paris and Julie Powell’s book, “Julie and Julia” about her year of cooking and blogging about cooking her way through Child’s ground-breaking work, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.”

Although the scales clearly tip Julia’s way as far as being the meatier story, Ephron sagaciously recognized the parallels in the particulars of her characters’ journeys:

Julia turning her love of eating and desire not to be thought of “as a frivolous housewife looking for a way to kill time” into the pursuit of a deep knowledge of the classic art and science of cooking; and Julie turning her love of cooking and desire to finally learn to finish something she’s started into an audacious challenge to finish not just 524 recipes but to finish a daily blog about her experiences, whether finger-licking-good or scrape-into-the-disposal bad.

Julia’s odyssey starts in 1949, when she and foreign service husband Paul (Stanley Tucci) are relocated to Paris, and she swoons over a restaurant’s preparation of sole meuniere. Tired of “government work,” and searching for the answer to the question of what she should do with herself, Julia takes herself off to Le Cordon Bleu school of cooking, requesting “harder” classes as the only woman in a kitchen-full of male GI’s.

From Brooklyn in 2002, Julie (Amy Adams) follows her husband to 900 square feet over a pizza parlor in Queens, that’s closer to his job and decides to make the connection between the writing she’d like to make a living at doing and the cooking she knows represents the best of herself and the bliss it can bring herself and her husband.

Although the “companion” Child speaks of in her introduction to the “Julia and Jacques” book that cooking becomes to Julie eventually causes a rift between her and her husband, in contrast, Julia and Paul are devoted soul mates: she, the “butter to his bread;” he, the “breath to her life.” He is there for her when she begins the long process of putting her knowledge and skill onto the pages of a book which will convince and inspire the average person in the average kitchen that she or he can whip up a souffle, flip an omelet, mold an aspic or bone a duck.

Streep believes she has “captured” Child—her joie de vivre—and she is absolutely right; without caricature, even as this gleaming actress seems possessed by the mischievous spirit of the rather dowdy giantess (6 foot, 2 inches) with the hooty, slightly-starved-for-air voice. Adams and Julie suffer in comparison, even though they have the good fortune to share more screen time with mouth-watering food than Streep and Julia do. Although it leaves you hungry for a film devoted entirely to Julia, Ephron’s concoction is a splendid feast sure to layer a cornucopia of accolades over itself.