If you’ve salivated over the tempting French-inspired concoctions Julia Child once made in her TV kitchen, you’ll leave Julie & Julia hungry. Following a recent screening of the film I left craving some boeuf bourguignon which is one of the centerpiece dishes in director Nora Ephron’s witty, sweet and tasty film.

But Julie & Julia is not a movie geared only to chefs, French or otherwise, nor only for fans of Child’s cooking show. Child is the Julia of the movie’s title of course, played with pitch-perfect and nearly look-perfect accomplishment by Meryl Streep.

But the Julie of the title is writer Julie Powell, who spent 365 days between 2002 and 2003 cooking 524 dishes from Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking cookbook and telling anyone who was interested about her experiences on her daily blog. Later Powell turned those short pieces into a book of her own.

Powell is played by Amy Adams, Streep’s costar in Doubt — the troubles-in-the-convent movie — for which both were nominated for Academy Awards. With Julie & Julia, they both could find themselves in the Oscar derby again.

Julie & Julia tells two parallel stories of two women trying to find meaning to their everyday lives through food.

Though separated by decades and great distances — Julia’s story begins in 1949 France; Julie’s starts in 2002 in the New York City borough of Queens — there’s a kinship to their experiences.

Ephron has cleverly woven parts of two best-selling memoirs. My Life in France by Child with Alex Prud’homme recounts her experiences trying to master French cooking while living in France with her husband, Paul, an American diplomat. Powell’s Julie & Julia recounts her experiences in trying to balance her daytime job of helping victims of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, her life with her husband, Eric, and her kitchen adventures, some of which turn out amusingly dreadful.

At the start of Julie & Julia both women feel unfulfilled and are looking for something to satisfy their talents, though they are not certain at first which direction to take.

Child, looking for something to do when she finds herself in Paris with free days while her husband works at the American Embassy, at first takes a course in hat making(!).

Powell, caught up in the tragic stories of the families of 9/11 victims, hopes that maybe her cooking hobby will get her mind off things and that writing about her experiences on a blog will both relieve her own frustrations and might amuse others. It’s not long before the hobby begins to consume her life and turn into an obsession with her husband, Eric (Chris Messina), increasingly feeling left out.

Child, happily and passionately married to Paul (the always wonderful Stanley Tucci) and with a passion for French food and for France in general, discovers her calling in a class of professional chefs at the famed Cordon Bleu cooking school. There the statuesque Julia is the only woman student, always in pearls, and immediately earns the distaste and enmity (and vice versa) of its female head. Julia is a quick learner, although her early attempts at perfecting the way to slice an onion and in murdering a lobster are laugh-out-loud funny.

Julie’s attempt at ending the lives of three rather frisky lobsters is even funnier. Although she seriously feels that by following Julia’s cookbook advice to the letter she is somehow under the influence of Julia Child who is watching her like a guardian angel, Julia’s method of skewering the crustaceans is a wee bit too unnerving a plunge for Julie to make.

Both women face challenges in their chosen paths. Julia has decided to teach French cooking to Americans in France — $2 a lesson in the early 1950s — with the assistance of two female French cooks, Simone Beck (Linda Emond) and Louisette Bertholle (Helen Carey).

But there’s the problem of Louisette, who is often absent from their classes, but still collects her third of the profits. This leads to further complications later when the three decide to write a cookbook and, characteristically, Louisette remains a slacker.

There’s also a problem on the home front during the early ’50s McCarthy era when the Wisconsin senator publicly made a stink about communists in the United States government and vows to ferret them out. Both Paul and Julia are suspected of being pinkos because both served in the U.S. spy agency OSS in China during World War II.

For Julie, the challenge is trying to keep her sanity and her marriage together. As her imagined relationship with Julia Child expands and she works late into the night on her cooking and her blogging, Eric feels abandoned.

Ephron, who has mastered complicated romantic problems in such films as You’ve Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle (not to mention Bewitched), handles the fraying relationship delicately, with understanding for both sides. She does not abandon Eric, who is played with compassion by Messina.

Besides sounding like and looking like Julia Child, Streep makes her very human, peering behind the TV image most of us knew and loved, to show a woman of great conviction, determination and a great sense of humor about herself. Her never-give-up spirit fills the film with a bubbly fizz.

Julie Powell is a more complicated character, full of uncertainties and doubts. We see those in an opening scene where she’s the powerless one in a power lunch with three of her college friends who have gone on to self-important careers.

But in this she is also very human and Adams makes her a likeable character even if one may sometimes wonder, as is hinted in one devastating moment in Julie & Julia, whether she’s just riding Julia Child’s coattails to achieve her own fame … a sort of karaoke act in the kitchen.

Fortunately, Adams’ Julie rings true, with all her frailties and foibles intact. Pass the burgundy, please, and another slice of that boeuf bourguignon.

****Julie & Julia

Starring: Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Stanley Tucci, Chris Messina, Linda Emond, Helen Carey, Frances Sternhagen.

Rated: PG-13, contains adult themes, profanity.

mjanuson@projo.com