6 Greatest movie meals for you to try

Whether you're into rom coms or action films, animé or period dramas, there's one thing that all films have in common, and that is that at some point, everyone needs to eat, even if it's just a quick bite between saving the world and reuniting with the love of your life. 

From the questionable to the quintessential, here are some of the greatest movie meals for you to try at home to truly honour your favourite films. 

Where else to begin other than France, a place where food is considered integral to the national culture because of it's ability to bring people together over some of the freshest, ingredients of the highest quality. In fact, UNESCO even declared French cuisine a “world intangible heritage”. 

While you may not be ecstatic about the idea of rat in your kitchen—even if he does offer to do the cooking—this film is a wonderful celebration of food. In the film, Remy the rat prepares the ratatouille in a confit byaldi style, one forkful of which evokes a transportive childhood nostalgia in the notoriously harsh food critic Anton Ego. 

Originating from 18th century French cuisine, the word "ratatouille" is derived from the french verb "touiller" meaning "to stir up". According to food experts, the correct way to cook ratatouille is to cook all the vegetables separately and then combine them at the end so that each vegetable tastes unmistakably like itself.

Get Remy's Ratatouille recipe here. 

At first glance, paying five whole dollars for a milkshake seems, quite frankly, ridiculous. Not when you can get a whole meal deal for less than four pounds these days (only just). Except when you consider that, thanks to inflation, Mia's vanilla milkshake that cost five dollars (without even a drop of alcohol in it) in 1994 would now be more like 10.15 dollars, it seems rather reasonable. 

Despite Vincent's admission that it is a "pretty f******g good milkshake", save yourself the pennies either way, and make this indulgent milkshake yourself at home. While it does mean that you won't get to sit across from John Travolta while you drink it, nevertheless you could add that shot of bourbon it so desperately needs for the price. 

When you think of a grilled cheese, it's normally associated with quick and easy comfort foods, and is usually pretty simple dish to make. It's something you can even rustle up when you get home, starving, after perhaps a few too many glasses of wine on a night out—speaking for a friend.

However, in John Favreau's film Chef, this classic grilled sandwich is elevated to a new level of Swiss sophistication, as his character lovingly stacks layers of cheese between lavishly buttered slices of white bread to serve to his son, who immediately complains because, "mum cuts off the crust". 

As he was building his character for the film, Favreau watched episodes of Master Chef 101 in order to master something even as simple as a grilled cheese sandwich. Even though at first glance this may seem like just a sandwich, when you put as much and passion into cooking as Favreau does in this scene, "you bet your a**" it's going to be the best grilled cheese sandwich you've ever had. 

Returning to French cuisine once more for another quintessential dish, Julie and Julia is adapted from food blogger Julie Powell's book My Year of Cooking Dangerously. The film follows Julie who, inspired by Julia Child's biography, My Life in France, decides to spend a year cooking all 524 recipes from her recipe book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Posting the results on her food blog from her tiny one bedroom apartment in New York, Powell eventually completes the impressive culinary feat, despite domestic tensions between her and her husband after he points out that she is prioritising her project over their marriage. 

Julie makes this simplistic yet delicious bruschetta dish while complaining to her husband Eric about her friend Annabelle's blog, who posts every though that passes through "her stupid, vapid, insipid brain". Disheartened by her dead-end corporate job and her own unpublished novel, because "you're not a writer, unless someone publishes you", it's not until Julie and Eric are crunching their way through this delicious bruschetta dish that she decides to write a blog about cooking.

Even if you don't fancy yourself as much of a chef, but perhaps you'd like to be, heed the advice Eric gives to Julie, when he tells her, "Julia Child wasn't always Julia Child" and start with this beautiful bruschetta recipe. You never know, perhaps it'll help you find your true calling as well, and if not, at least you'll have been able to enjoy a delicious meal. 

Get the bruschetta recipe here. 

Like any good film about an Italian family, food appreciation features largely in this film, and many of the scenes are shot in restaurants in New York, including the iconic restaurant scene in which Joe Pesci asks Ray Liotta, "You think I'm funny?", which inspired the first episode of the second season of Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag. 

In another scene, the film's protagonist Henry Hill impresses his date and future wife, Karen Friedman, by taking her to meet his friends at the Copacabana restaurant. As Harry leads her in the side entrance because it's "better than waiting in line", we see bites of food being snatched in the hallway, chefs preparing delicious looking dishes in the kitchen, and fancy bottles of wine offered to Henry as a gift by a neighbouring table, prompting Karen to ask, "what do you do?"

However, although restaurants are a key setting in Goodfellas, the part of the film that truly encompasses the Italian love for food most deeply has got to be the preparation of the prison pasta sauce. As Henry narrates in the voice over, "in prison, dinner was always a big thing" involving "a pasta course" and "a metre of fish". 

Henry compliments Paulie's method of finely slicing garlic with a razor blade and admits that Vinnie's tomato sauce is "a very good sauce" even if he does go a bit heavy on the onions. Although you might want to reach for an actual kitchen knife instead of a razor blade to prepare your vegetables, and a broiler for your steak, if you're looking for fine Italian dining, you could do a lot worse than this meal from the Goodfellas, complete with two types of wine! 

Unsurprisingly, the love affair with Paris and French cuisine continues for our final movie meal. As the voice over tells us in the French film Amelie, cracking the crust of a creme brûlée with a teaspoon is, like plunging your hands through a sack of legumes, or skimming a stone on the Canal Saint-Martin, one of life's small, unequivocal pleasures. 

The best way to replicate this humble yet decadent, traditional desert, so that you too can seek joy in the little moments, is accompanied by the film's soundtrack, beautifully composed by Yann Tiersen.

In it's most basic replication, Creme brûlée is basically just vanilla custard that you get to scorch with a blow torch to get that all important crackable top layer, but if that doesn't scream simple French delicacy, I don't know what does.