WHITE PLAINS, NEW YORK—Considering that the media junket in a hotel in a New York exurb is for a film that looks back at the contribution made to modern American cuisine by cookbook author Julia Child, it’s not surprising that most of the people interviewed are supportive of Child’s place in American culinary history. It is left to Meryl Streep, who plays Child in Julie & Julia, to add an exclamation mark to the debate.

“I remember when I was 10 [in 1959] and was at this other little girl’s house and I thought she and her mother were doing something to tennis balls,” Streep recalls. “I asked them what they were doing, and my friend said they were making mashed potatoes. They were peeling potatoes, but I had never seen a potato. I thought mashed potatoes came out of a box. My mother’s motto was, ”˜If it is not done in 20 minutes, it is not dinner.’ She had a lot to do, and cooking was not a priority. I think that changed with Julia.”¦The organic movement and other things have helped to take food where it is now, but Julia changed the way people thought about cooking.”

The film, which opens Friday (August 7), is based on two books: Child’s coauthored My Life in France and Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. In the film, Julia Child is almost 40, living in Paris in 1949 with her diplomat husband, Paul (Stanley Tucci), and looking for a career. She loves French food and is surprised to discover that there is no English-language cookbook for those who want to cook French recipes. Eventually, she teams up with two Parisian writers to create Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The film moves between her story and that of Powell (Amy Adams), who, in 2002, was a temp in New York when she decided to create meals from all 524 recipes in Child’s book. She started out with a blog and ended up with a bestseller.

The film’s director, Nora Ephron, decided to add a scene in which Powell and her husband (Chris Messina) are watching a famous Saturday Night Live clip of Dan Aykroyd imitating Child hosting her televised cooking show, The French Chef. Streep says that the clip has become so iconic that even she was concerned that there might be more Aykroyd than Child in her performance. She says that eventually she settled on working with Ephron’s script and memories of her own mother.

“I bet everyone can do their own version of Julia Child but how do we know if we are doing her or Dan’s version? But when Nora gave me the script about a year ago, I thought it was so beautifully written and I thought it was an opportunity to do a couple of things. For me, it was embodying her or at least embodying Julie Powell’s version of her,” Streep says. “I was also doing a version of my mother, who had a similar joie de vivre and an undeniable sense of how to enjoy her life. Every room she walked into she made brighter. So this is my homage to my mother.”

In addition to being a salute to Child, the movie is about career choices. Child was almost 50 when her cookbook was published, and Powell had turned 30 with no career in sight. Streep says that she was fortunate to have found her own career while still in university. She says that she almost turned away from it because she assumed that acting was not a good choice.

“I questioned whether it was a serious enough thing to do with my life. I mean, what are you going to do with your one life? When I was starting out doing plays in university, I thought it was silly and vain, even though it was the most fun thing I had ever done. I remember the first time someone asked me what I did, and I took a while before I said, ”˜I am an actor.’ Like every actor, I have been unemployed more than I have been working. But I take every day as a miracle, and I am just happy to be working and that people are not sick of me because I am sick of me a little bit.”