Kitchen goddess: Actress Meryl Streep in character as Julia Child on the kitchen set of 'Julie & Julia.'

Nora Ephron’s new comedy "Julie & Julia" serves up two stories: that of Julia Child (Meryl Streep), who introduced America to French cuisine a half-century ago, and that of Julie Powell (Amy Adams), the modern-day amateur foodie who took on a year-long culinary quest: cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s book “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” Powell chronicled her trials and tribulations in a blog that caught on with the food crowd. 

With such a delectable subject as French cuisine, the filming of Julie & Julia was marked by the constant presence of food and its preparation.  Thus, Streep and Adams spent a lot of time in their cinematic kitchens.

Production designer Mark Ricker and his crew took over two huge stages at Silvercup East Studios, across the East River from Manhattan, to build a whole series of kitchen sets—some eleven in all, most of which were period kitchens from the mid-20th century for the Julia Child segment.

“Julia’s kitchen in Paris was beautiful, but kind of rough and tumble—very low-ceilinged and just squirreled away at the top of this house, above a winding staircase,” notes Ricker. “One element was this huge, ancient French cast-iron oven. We never really knew if it was still functioning. In photos, it looked like it was only used as a support for a countertop with a very small, modern French oven set up on top. There’s a famous picture of Julia just towering over it.

“All the kitchens that we built for the movie had to be functional, working kitchens,” adds Ricker. “And they had to have every implement that you could possibly imagine for Meryl, for Nora, for Amy. It all had to be there.”

The first kitchen to be completed, however, was the Powells’, as the “Julie” part of the film would be shot first, with the “Julia” section to follow during the latter half of the production schedule. Ricker was able to visit the actual apartment on Jackson Avenue in Long Island City where Julie and Eric had lived, and recreated it at Silvercup East. “I was thrilled to find out that there was a tin detail in her apartment that had a fleur de lis repeated throughout” – fleur de lis being the motif on the famous Child cookbook – “all the way up the staircase.  We went to the apartment and took a mold of that and incorporated it into Julie’s apartment set that we built on stage.”

Ricker says that what they built at Silvercup East was pretty close to the square footage of the Powells’ real place. “It wasn’t a tiny space that they lived in,” he says.  “It was scripted as nine hundred square feet and that’s about what we built, and I think that’s about what she lived in. The basic through-flow of the apartment was pretty accurate.  It was essentially one big room, with an ‘L’ off one side.  The kitchen was in the middle, as we did it.  Hers was actually a little bit bigger than the one that we built, but you could see how it would have been difficult for her to get through this cookbook, squirreled away in the kitchen that she had.