Foodie’s mission to cook like Julia Child led to popular blog and a Hollywood hit

In 2002 Julie Powell had a dull government desk job in New York, and was fearful that in her 30th year her life was in ‘‘a tailspin of secretarial ennui’’ and she was going nowhere.

How to transcend this existential crisis? ‘‘I’ve always found that when you’re in a rut, you have to do something crazy that’s just for you,’’ recalled Powell, who has died aged 49. ‘‘It doesn’t have to make any sense to anyone else. Follow the voice in your head because that’s the one that’s leading you where you need to be.’’

Her remedy was to spend a year cooking every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French

Cooking, the landmark 1961 cookbook credited with launching hundreds of celebrity chefs and helping to teach America to cook and eat continental cuisine.

Using her mother’s 40-year-old foodspattered copy of the book, she set about making aspics and sweetbreads, cooking calf’s brain in wine and trying to steam a live lobster in her tiny apartment kitchen. She chronicled her triumphs and disasters in a daily blog about ‘‘this loony undertaking’’, which she titled ‘‘The Julie/Julia Project’’.

In her first blog post she wrote: ‘‘The 10 chapters of recipes conveniently add up to 10 recipes per week, roughly equivalent to the pace I need to set to get through the thing in a year. Also, there is the suspense factor. Because the book is structured like a classic cooking lesson, building up from basic techniques, the going will get gradually tougher as time goes on.’’

Writing with lacerating wit, a digressive stream-of-consciousness and Bridget Jonesstyle irony, her ingenue posts punctured foodie snobbery with a refreshing selfdeprecation. Before she tackled Child’s recipe for Oeufs a la Fondue de Fromage, she admitted she had never eaten an egg before.

Her efforts in the kitchen were punctuated by regular shots of vodka and four-letter tirades when recipes went wrong or she couldn’t find ingredients such as veal kidneys and calves’ feet. The blog hit a nerve with similarly frustrated Generation X-ers looking for purpose and struggling to obtain a worklife balance. She swiftly garnered a substantial following. When The New York Times wrote a feature about the blog, her numbers hit the stratosphere.

To Powell’s disappointment, the one person who could not understand it was the author of the cookbook that had inspired her. Instead of appreciating the renewed attention, Child took offence and dismissed Powell’s project as a worthless stunt.

‘‘She just doesn’t seem very serious, does she?’’ Child told the Los Angeles Times. ‘‘I worked very hard on that book. I tested and retested those recipes for eight years so that everybody could cook them. I don’t understand how she could have problems with them. She just must not be much of a cook.’’

Child died in 2004 aged of 91, so she did not live to see Powell’s blog posts published in book form as Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen (2005). The clumsy title was later replaced for the paperback edition by the snappier Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously.

It became a million-seller and earned Powell an honorary diploma from Le Cordon Bleu, from which Child had graduated in 1951. It also led to the 2009 Oscar-nominated film Julie & Julia, the final film written and directed by Nora Ephron, in which Meryl Streep played Child and Amy Adams played Powell.

In one scene in which Powell is told by a journalist that her biggest inspiration does not like her blog, she collapses to the ground wailing: ‘‘Julia hates me!’’ Yet she remained grateful to Child. ‘‘Though I never met Julia, she changed me, as she did with so many of her other acolytes.’’

She admitted that her portrayal by Adams was not entirely accurate; the real Julie was ‘‘not as sweet as the movie Julie’’ and was even more neurotic. ‘‘It did . . . sand down the quirky and the spiky and a lot of the things everyone knew her for and loved her for,’’ her husband, Eric Powell, conceded. ‘‘But she was OK with that.’’

She and Eric had married in 1998; they had known each other since high school. After his wife became a celebrity chef, Eric – an editor for the magazine Archaeology – hit on the idea of commissioning her to prepare menus of ‘‘ancient cuisine’’ based on Mayan, Mongolian and Mesopotamian recipes.

Though known as Julie, she was born Julia Anne Foster in 1973 in Austin, Texas, to Kay and John Foster, a lawyer. According to her brother Jordon, as a child she enjoyed being the centre of attention and was ‘‘the most experimental and sophisticated cook among us, and we were all people who cooked’’.

After graduating from university with a degree in creative writing, she moved to New York, hoping for a career in the theatre. When that did not work out she dreamt of becoming a writer and owned up to ‘‘seven years of three-quarters-finished novels’’ in her bottom drawer. –

‘‘She just doesn’t seem very serious, does she? . . . She just must not be much of a cook.’’ Julia Child on Julie Powell’s culinary efforts