Julie Powell
Food writer whose unflinching blog recreating dishes by Julia Child became a publishing sensation
JULIE POWELL, who has died aged 49, was the pioneering food blogger whose warts-and-all account of cooking all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s 1961 classic, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in 365 days became a million-copy bestseller and a hit film, Julie and Julia, starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams.
In August 2002, Julie Powell set herself the 12-month task to drown out an existential crisis. She was about to turn 30, doubtful of her fertility and miserable in her latest temporary job, as secretary at the government organisation rebuilding lower Manhattan after 9/11.
She shared a one-room, walk-up apartment in a blue-collar area of Queens, New York, with her husband, three cats, a dog, a pet snake and some uninvited maggots.
One comfort was vodka gimlets. Another was her mother’s copy of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a book every housewife in 1960s America aspired to own. Julia Child was a heroic figure in the history of the American kitchen, her millionselling book and subsequent television series educating America in the arts she had learnt at the Cordon Bleu in Paris.
Julie Powell, in her tiny kitchen, began with Julia Child’s recipe for potage parmentier (leek and potato soup), and decided to do all the rest, even if it meant having to eat her first ever egg – a revolting prospect for her. She would cook when she got home after work at 9pm, often not eating until midnight. By then, too drunk to write, she would set an alarm for 5.30am and “crank something out” before her dial-up internet cut out, “off the top of my head, with no editing”.
She intended to write about the cooking, but found it “extraordinarily boring”. Instead, her blog turned into a spiky confessional about her anxieties, her friends and her sex life.
The result – “Bridget Jones with a meat bat”, as one reviewer later put it – caught the zeitgeist. Just two days into the project, her husband told her: “You are going to be famous.” But it took her mother eight months to stop telling her she must be mentally ill.
With just 5,000 blogs in competition, within a year hers had had 400,000 page views. Any missed day of posting would elicit frantic, concerned comments from her thousands of regular readers, whose attention – “creepy, but nice” – forced her to see the year through. Some sent her money, others ingredients, as she struggled to pay the rent on her “sticky, dusty, cat-hairy” apartment, the kitchen now spattered with lobster entrails, and everywhere the odour of boiled hoof.
By the end of the year, she had a $100,000 deal for a book, Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, which became an instant bestseller. The screenwriter Nora Ephron bought the rights to the film, which was told in two timeframes, with Amy Adams as Julie Powell in 2000s New York and Meryl Streep as Julia Child in 1950s Paris, a performance for which she was nominated for an Oscar.
Julia Anna Foster was born in Austin, Texas, on April 20 1973, to John Foster, a lawyer, and his wife Kay. She attended Amherst College, in Massachusetts, graduating in 1995 with a double major in theatre and creative writing. Three years later, she married her childhood sweetheart, Eric Powell, an editor at Archaeolog y
magazine, and together they moved to New York, where she tried to be an actress or a writer, but failed by “half-heartedly” pursuing both at once. In the late 1990s, she was nanny to the children of the Booker-winning Australian novelist, Peter Carey.
Her success with Julie and Julia pushed Mastering the Art of French Cooking back into the bestseller charts, but Julia Child, then in her late 80s, was far from grateful. She damned Julie Powell’s blog, calling her “not a serious cook”. “Flinging around four-letter words when cooking isn’t attractive,” Julia Child’s editor added. “She didn’t want to endorse it.”
This upset Julie Powell profoundly, and she also found herself becoming a lightning rod for vitriol from traditional media against bloggers, but without finding much solidarity with her fellow bloggers. “I’m a terrible citizen of the blogosphere,” she told the press. “The truth is, I actually find most food blogs really boring.”
She published a second memoir, Cleaving (2009), about her infidelity to her husband, and his to her, which she exorcised by training as a butcher.
Julie Powell died of a cardiac arrest. Her husband survives her.