Spaghetti Carbonara in Bed

On food and love in the films of Nancy Meyers and Nora Ephron

“Would anyone love me if I couldn’t cook?” Nora Ephron, Heartburn

For my 28th birthday, I made key lime pie. I followed Nora Ephron’s recipe, as it appears in the novel Heartburn. Unlike the novel’s heroine, I didn’t throw the pie in anyone’s face. I ate it with my friends, over the ensuing “birthday week”, reveling in how good hand-whipped cream and homemade pie tastes. It’s the heart of so much of Ephron’s singular career as a writer and director: homemade food made with both love and precision (Ephron was a Taurus, in case that wasn’t obvious) is the way to anyone’s heart. 

Ephron’s films intertwine good food and real romance, a legacy that lives on in all the best romantic comedies. She was the first to pen love stories where cooking and baking are sites of genuine joy for women, rather than a sacred duty. Beginning her film career in the post-feminist 80s, Ephron’s love of food, and food as love, stand out as genuine expressions of pleasure, freed from the dutiful wives of 50s sitcoms and production code-era films. Before Nora, food was a woman’s obligation to her husband. After her, food was again infused with joy and pleasure, something to be shared between two people, not provided by one to the other. 

In Mike Nichol’s 1971 film Carnal Knowledge, Bobbie, played by Ann-Margaret, serves her husband Jonathan (Jack Nicholson) burnt TV dinners in bed, a dismal and flavourless dish that stands in for her myriad failures as a woman, a wife, and an object of sexual desire. Carnal Knowledge isn’t a romantic comedy for many reasons, but chief among them is the total lack of joy the characters get from eating and having sex. The first time I watched Carnal Knowledge, I thought of Heartburn immediately. Not only because Jack Nicholson plays the womanizing leading man in both (typecasting if I ever saw it) or because they’re both Mike Nichols films, but for the scenes of eating in bed, and how different they are. 

Heartburn is also not really a romantic comedy. Its famous eating-in-bed scene comes early in the film, when our heroine Rachel (thinly veiled Ephron, played by Meryl Streep) cooks spaghetti carbonara for her new beau Mark (thinly veiled Carl Bernstein, played by Nicholson), which they eat together in bed. The spaghetti carbonara is both indulgence and seduction, a reminder that these characters don’t want to leave the bed. What might happen when they do? The carbonara is the precursor to domesticity. They’re cynics playing house, dangerously close to monogamy and love for two people who say they never want to get married again. The film has its fans not because of its two stars or the writer and director team of Mike Nichols and Nora Ephron, but because of the food. Cooking is central not only to Rachel’s conception of herself and her value, but her courtship with Mark. The promise of a great relationship is evident in her ability to casually throw together an incredible carbonara. Because food is so closely tied with sex in Heartburn, it easily becomes about humilitation. The film ends with Rachel throwing the aforementioned key lime pie in her husband’s face, her greatest domestic and sexual strength now a weapon. 

Eating is one of the most pleasurable things you can do in bed with someone you love. The risk of mess, of spilling ice cream on a beloved duvet cover, or getting popcorn crumbs in the sheets, is worth it. It’s half the fun — the transformative power of food and love to make banal moments sites of joy. And all the best romantic comedies use food as shorthand for love, sex, and romance. 

Heartburn, along with Julie and Julia, perfectly frame Ephron’s singular career, and her relationship to both food and marriage. As Nikhita Venugopal writes in The Ringer, “If When Harry Met Sally is about food and falling in love, and Heartburn is about food and divorce, then Julie & Julia is about food and marriage—a successful one, this time.”

Sex and food are two of our most basic desires, ones we spend much of our modern lives supressing. Diets, fasting, abstinence — whether for religion, health, vanity, or some other reason, we expend a lot of energy not indulging. Since the rom com renaissance of the 80s, films have been a release valve for women deprived of real pleasure, drinking Soylent rather than eating a creamy plate of pasta, swiping through Hinge absent-mindedly rather than going on IRL dates. We’ve been settling for TV dinners for decades. 

In romantic comedies, we take the way characters relate to food as their philosophy on sex and relationships. In the first of many scenes that take place over a meal in When Harry Met Sally…, Sally’s weirdly specific pie a la mode order exposes her neuroses about sex and relationships. Harry’s comparative ease of ordering, too, reveals his relationship to sex and love, one of indiscriminate taste. The diner, the delicatessen, the coffee shop — these are the places where women are allowed to ask for what they want. Sex and food are as intimately tied for Sally as they are for Rachel. But Rachel is a cookbook writer and a wife — Sally is an unmarried journalist. Food reveals different aspects of their sexuality, because married women, single women, career women, and homemakers all have different relationships to both cooking and consuming food. Sally exercises control over food, how it’s made and served, ensuring the highest degree of pleasure possible. Obviously, she can’t do the same in her relationships. 

The other iconic rom com writer-director to emerge in the 80s and 90s is, of course, Nancy Meyers. Meyers’ most signature visual touchstone is the large, extravagant kitchens her characters talk, kiss, and cook in. Bright and distinctly American in their decor, the kitchens display an upper class, timeless beauty, an aesthetic most recently described as “coastal grandmother”. Although far from minimalist, Meyers’ kitchens are pristine and white. And in her pristine kitchens, equally pristine food. In Something’s Gotta Give, the camera lingers on Diane Keaton’s Erica Berry washing cherries in a colander. The red of the fruit is lush and romantic, but we never see anyone eat them. Cherries are beautiful; spaghetti is messy and impractical and much more satisfying. As Erica walks through a Hampton’s market, squeezing oranges and putting bread in her basket, food is a display of class first, and expression of love second. 

The food in Meyers’ films are always feasts for the eyes, not the stomach. Food is not about the bedroom, it’s about the kitchen, and the kitchen is about taste — aesthetic, not culinary. While the kitchens are famous, her characters rarely cook in them. How could Diane Keaton cook a Nora Ephron-worthy meal in a white turtleneck?

In 1987’s Moonstruck, Loretta, played by Cher, is often seen cooking for her family. The film’s most pivotal scenes occur around the kitchen table, and in a neighborhood Italian restaurant. Moonstruck’s focus on food is deeply cultural, connecting Loretta to her family and domesticity. When she invites Ronny (Nicholas Cage) to a meal, she’s inviting him into her family, not her bed. While an Ephron character is likely to have opinions about caviar, cocktails, and boeuf bourguignon, Loretta’s tastes connect her to her heritage, an expression of care and duty as a daughter. At the end of the 80s, just two years before the chocolate sauce on the side of the wedding cake in When Harry Met Sally…, Moonstruck offered a totally different type of femininity, one that celebrates food around a small kitchen table in Brooklyn Heights, rather than at an Upper West Side dinner party. 

Indeed, the complexities of food and romance are inextricable from the history of food in specific communities. In each of the romantic comedies I’ve written about here, the focus is on Italian-American and Jewish communities in New York. Food connects us to romance, to our deepest passions, but also brings us into community, back to our roots. It’s where food gets messy. Food can be an exploration of new flavours, new sensations — and then it has the power to call us home. For so many of Meyers’ and Ephron’s characters, nothing says home like Zabar’s. 

These directors, who both began as writers themselves, often give their leading ladies writing careers of their own. Julie of Julie and Julia is a blogger, Iris in The Holiday is a columnist, Sally in When Harry Met Sally… is a journalist, Erica in Something’s Gotta Give is a playwright, and Rachel in Heartburn is a cookbook writer. Of all of them, Rachel’s career seems most connected to her relationships and how she navigates them. Cookbooks exist in our real lives, and the pages usually end up sticking together. We scratch in the margins, make the recipes our own, leave ourselves notes about cooking time and portions and when to add more seasoning. We fold memories between the water damaged pages. Cooking has become much more populist over the last 30 years, especially thanks to women like Ina Garten and Julia Child. For these real life women, too, love and food are deeply intertwined. 

Nothing distills Ephron’s thesis as a filmmaker quite like Julie and Julia does. Chronicling the parallel lives of two women whose love of food and cooking centre on the home, rather than the commercial kitchen, it’s an homage to the domestic as art, and cooking as an expression of love. Both the titular women are supported in their pursuit of writing and cooking by loving husbands, who are side characters to the gorgeous food. And, because it’s Ephron, both Julie and Julia delight in butter and beef and carbs without for a minute considering the caloric content — food is an expression and object of love, and should not be subjected to counting or tracking. 

Julie’s kitchen is like the anti-Nancy Meyers kitchen, a cramped space where she struggles to cook a lobster and host a dinner party worthy of her hero Julia. A struggling writer with a crappy day job, Julie finds joy and connection through food. More than any other romantic comedy, Julie and Julia brings together the pleasure of true love and great food. Julie and her husband fight, and sometimes the stew gets burned, but there’s always another dish, a moment of redemption between the fighting couple. It’s a true homage to Nora’s famous six-word autobiography: “Secret to life, marry an Italian.” If you can find good love and good food, you don’t need much else. 

The job of the rom com isn’t to show us reality, but to expose us to our own hidden desire, the desire we cannot name. Unlike erotica or porn, our desire isn’t hidden because it’s taboo, but because it’s too conventional, too traditional. We indulge in our secret urge for romance that ends in marriage, the relationship that involves pancakes and chocolate cake and eating carbonara in bed. For 90 minutes, we imagine ourselves as women who prepare dinner parties in beautiful kitchens, and fall in love. Like Julie, I follow my own hero, Nora Ephron, and her recipes, in hopes of accessing a little of her joy and wisdom.