The 1990s and a part of the first decade of the twenty-first century saw blogging at its peak, bringing to the fore writers, amateur cooks and photographers. One such person was Julie Powell whose story became the foundation of the excellent film Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams while Stanley Tucci played the role of a supportive husband. Powell has passed away at the age of 49 in upstate New York and with her leaves one of the finest stories around blogging.
Powell was inspired by Julia Child to take on the challenge that was akin to climbing Mount Everest. On August 26, 2002 she started a blog called Julie/Julia Project. Her goal was to cook all 524 recipes from her mother’s copy of Child’s 1961 classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1.
She was an untrained cook with the day job of a secretary. Living with her husband, three cats and a python above a diner in Long Island City, she began the challenge and soon the world started following her progress. According to Salon, the website where her progress was viewed, her blog or Web Log had among the highest hits back then. The blog detailed Powell’s cooking triumphs as well as traumas, besides documenting “a woman working through a life crisis”.
She worked her way through individual chapters and went from preparing simple recipes to the more complex ones. In no time, she was cooking veal kidneys, sautéed potatoes, glazed onions and a cherry clafouti. Blogging allowed her to reach audiences no food writer previously could think of while she kept her language direct and personal. “We have a medium where we can type in the snarky comments we used to just say out loud to our friends,” she said in a 2009 interview. All it took was an article in The New York Times to turn her project into something explosive. The blog changed the way food writing was done and, at the same time, inspired amateur writers and cooks.
Julie Powell had a blogging project called Julie/Julia
Little, Brown & Company turned the blog into a book titled Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, which went on to sell more than a million copies, mostly under the title given to the paperback: Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously.
Her publisher, Judy Clain, the editor-in-chief of Little, Brown and Co, paid tribute to Powell, writing: “Julie & Julia became an instant classic and it is with gratitude for her unique voice that we will now remember Julie’s dazzling brilliance and originality.”
The book inspired the 2009 film Julie & Julia, which turned out to be the last film written and directed by Nora Ephron, who died in 2012.
Powell’s second book — Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession — arrived in 2009 and it was about butchery and her marriage.
Reflecting on the Julie/Julia Project to Salon.com in 2005, Powell spoke about the early days of blogging. “For me, what I became more interested in was how my life began to inform my cooking and what I came into the kitchen with from my day. I don’t know if I would have ever come to that realisation if I hadn’t been keeping a blog. If I’d just written in a journal, I’m not sure I would have finished, because the communal nature of the blog definitely kept me going.”