Get set to salivate.

Julie & Julia, a film that pairs the true tales of Julia Child, who brought French cooking to American kitchens in 1961, and Julie Powell, a Queens nobody who hit the celebrity jackpot by emulating Child 40 years later, opens tomorrow.

The film stars Meryl Streep as the high-pitched Child, who died in 2004 at 91; Amy Adams as the adorably squeamish Powell; and one close-up after another of food, glorious food.

Tight shots of crisp bruschetta reveal tomatoes at their juiciest (see recipe). Chocolate pie filling looks finger-licking good. And lighter-than-air omelets appear fresh from the pan, even as Powell sweats through failed attempts at separating whites from yolks.

It's all there: Child's apple tart tartin (see recipe), lobster thermidor, and Queen of Sheba cake.

The dishes display a repertoire as remarkable as Streep's, evoking laughter, pain, passion, and cravings. If you leave the theater hungry, thank director Nora Ephron (herself a foodie) and culinary consultant extraordinaire Susan Spungen.

Spungen was food editor of Martha Stewart Living magazine for a dozen years and has a strong local connection. She grew up in Huntingdon Valley, graduated from Lower Moreland High and the Philadelphia College of Art, and had her first kitchen experiences at the Commissary and the Warsaw Cafe. She wrote Recipes: A Collection for the Modern Cook (William Morrow, 2005) and is working on another cookbook.

Spungen cooked all the food that appears in the film and worked with the actors so they'd look comfortable holding chef's knives and stirring pots.

She's as much a perfectionist as Ephron, who insisted that the food in the movie be and look real. There were no tricks for the camera's sake, and to reinforce that we see the actors eating the food.

Ephron's own culinary passion became evident in Heartburn, the 1983 novel that was so closely based on the demise of her marriage to reporter Carl Bernstein - he of Watergate fame - that the book is sometimes referred to as a memoir.

For her script, Ephron combined elements of My Life in France, the memoir Child wrote with her grandnephew Alex Prud'homme (Knopf, 2006), and Powell's 2005 memoir Julie & Julia (Little, Brown). The stories meld nicely as both Child and Powell sought to banish self-doubt by cooking.

Ephron wrote lines for the actors, but scripted the food, too. And in every scene, the food steals the show.

Picture Paris, 1948: Child, who is betwixt and between about her purpose in life, has just arrived on the arm of husband, Paul, an American diplomat on a new posting. They're poised for their first meal: Dover sole meuniere with beurre noisette. When the fish is filleted at the table, Child goes orgasmic (not quite as graphically as Meg Ryan in 1989's When Harry Met Sally. . ., which Ephron also wrote).

"Julia always spoke of that as her Proustian moment, when all of life changed for her," Ephron said in a telephone interview last week. "And I wanted you to look at that dish and think, 'Oh my God, I want that!' "

In another scene, lobster ditches its normally regal pose to become the comic foil when Powell flinches at the idea of cooking the creature live. (Representatives of the American Humane Association were on hand to ensure the lobsters only appeared to be boiled.)

Later, Powell attempts an aspic - a difficult brown meat jelly - with gloppy results. Then she attempts to discard the mess in the garbage disposal only to have the device spit it back. It's a tour de force performance by the aspic.

Spungen made only slight tweaks to Child's sacred recipes. For one scene, she added mozzarella to Child's onion- soup recipe so the cheese would melt better on camera. She even reheated the cheese with an electric paint remover to enhance its drip factor, as required in the script:

"Julia eats onion soup and the cheese extends from her soup to her lips."

But Ephron says the boeuf bourguignon (see recipe) deserves to be in the opening credits because it is cooked so many times in the movie.

It's the dish Julia's editor, Judith Jones, makes to test Child's as-yet-unpublished cookbook. It's one of the dishes Powell burns her first time out.