It's difficult to believe in an age of Nigella Lawson, Jamie Oliver, Delia Smith and Gordon Ramsay that once there wasn't a public appetite for cookbooks.

Yet back in the 1950s Uncle Sam appeared to subsist on a diet of spam fritters and hash browns. It took one enthusiastic amateur to capture the imagination of the more ambitious American housewives and acquaint them with the intricacies of haute cuisine.

Julia Child's Mastering The Art of French Cooking distilled her nourishing experience of learning how to cook while a diplomat's wife in Paris into 524 de-mystified servings.

The book was a runaway success and led to a TV show and ultimately - fifty years later - to an internet sensation when keen-as-mustard New York home chef Julie Powell blogged her attempts to plate up every one of Child's classic dishes.

Cutting back and forth between the two stories, director Nora Ephron has cooked up an often rather delicious melange of the two memoirs. 

Streep - serving up a simmering hybrid of Fanny Craddock and Susan Boyle - threatens to over-egg the exuberant character of Child (sometimes you want to whack her with an whisk) yet just manages stop things boiling over.

Her segments of the film - doing battle with a haughty Parisian kitchen madame, joining an all-maie cookery class - all the while emotionally shored up by her wrily supportive diplomat husband (Tucci) are the tastiest.

However, in a more malnourished role, Amy Adams plays the New Yorker whose heroic attempts to get to grips with Child's recipes in a cramped Queens apartment are painstakingly described in her blog.

Ultimately, the film - a celebration of friendship and wise choices of spouse - belongs to Streep...and the lingering food porn shots...

Tuck in.

Tim Evans