Julia Child from her TV series Julia Child & Company (Jim Scherer/Sony Pictures Classics)

It was a simple omelet that launched Julia Child’s television cooking career in 1962. Scheduled to promote her new book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, on a Boston public television book review program, she asked cameraman Russell Morash for a hot plate. “She made a proper omelet in a proper omelet pan that night, and the host was blown away by its lightness and its taste,” recalls Morash in Julia Cohen and Betsy West’s delightful documentary (not to be confused with the forthcoming HBO Max series about Child, also entitled Julia).

At a time when Americans were eating Jell-o salads and grilled spam with slices of pineapple (“We didn’t eat with much style, flair, and imagination,” says Morash), Child’s demonstration lit up the phone lines at the WGBH station, and managers ordered Morash to produce three pilots featuring Child cooking. The first TV culinary star was born with the debut of The French Chef.

It is serendipitous moments like this that shaped Child’s remarkable life. Directors Cohen and West, who profiled another groundbreaking woman, Supreme Court associate justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in their Oscar-nominated RBG, follow their subject’s unlikely path from a stultifying conservative Republican childhood in Pasadena, California, to a stint as a clerk-typist in the OSS (the precursor to the CIA) during World War II. Volunteering to go to Asia landed Julia McWilliams in Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka) where she met Paul Child.

It was not love at first sight as excerpts from their letters reveal. Paul described Julia to his brother as having “a slight atmosphere of hysteria, giggling rather wildly, which gets on my nerves.” And Julia was not impressed by Paul’s “unbecoming moustache, and long nose.” Somehow this unpromising beginning developed into a lifelong love affair and happy marriage that the film recounts with touching tenderness.

Paul’s foreign service posting to Paris was the catalyst that awakened Child to her true purpose. After an unforgettable first meal of sole meunière, a delicate white fish cooked in butter (mouthwateringly re-created and photographed by director of photography Claudia Raschke), she enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu cooking school. Eventually Child would collaborate with two Frenchwomen, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, on the cookbook that changed the American culinary landscape.

Not surprisingly, for a film “produced with the generous cooperation of the Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts,” the documentary incorporates plenty of previously unseen archival footage and personal photos (including a tasteful nude shot of Julia!), along with clips from her TV shows and talking-head interviews with friends and family and contemporary cooking experts, including Sara Moulton, Ruth Reichl, Marcus Samuelsson, and Ina Garten.

However, this is not a total hagiography as the filmmakers address some of Child’s less attractive qualities. Like her conservative father, Child could be a tough businesswoman, especially in regards to her French co-authors, who were overshadowed by Child’s celebrity. She did not take kindly to the criticism of younger chefs who advocated for more farm-to-table ingredients and less reliance on what was available in supermarkets. And her disdain of gay men was only overcome by the AIDs death of her attorney Robert Johnson.

The documentary crams a lot of living into 95 minutes, but not surprisingly there are gaps. Beck’s grandson notes that Mastering the Art of French Cooking was never translated into French and there is no trace of the authors’ work in France. How could that be? One wishes the filmmakers had explored this detail a little further. Likewise, how did Beck and Child’s frosty relationship eventually thaw to the point that Child and her husband built a house on Beck’s land in Provence?

With Rachel Portman’s lively score that reflects Child’s joie de vivre and the luscious food photography, this loving tribute captures Child’s joyful passion for helping ordinary American cooks create delicious meals. Just don’t watch on an empty stomach.