How did Julie Powell die? 'Julie & Julia' food writer, 49, cooked every recipe in Julia Child's 1961 cookbook
OLIVER BRIDGE, NEW YORK: Popular food blogger, Julie Powell, who chronicled every cooking recipe in Julia Child's 1961 'French Cooking' book and which later inspired the Oscar-nominated movie 'Julie & Julia', has died at the age of 49. Powell became popular in the early 2000s when she documented a blog about her attempt to cook every recipe in Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking: Volume 1. The project cemented her legacy as one of the internet's first food bloggers. She went on to write the book Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen in 2005.
The book was then adapted into an Oscar-nominated feature film by the late writer and director Nora Ephron, with Meryl Streep playing Julia Child and Amy Adams in the role of Powell herself. Powell died of cardiac arrest at her home in Olivebridge, upstate New York, on October 26, her husband told The New York Times. Powell embarked on her new journey by launching her Julie/Julia Project as she was left disappointed with her low-level administration job after moving to New York.
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Powell successfully pulled off all 524 recipes in Child’s classic French cookbook over the course of one year from her tiny, broken-down apartment in Long Island City, Queens that she shared with her husband. The blog gained a loyal following that shared her successes and failures both in and out of the kitchen, thanks to her spiky humor. Powell's blog gained hundreds of thousands of views at a time when many people still used dial-up internet. It had around 400,000 page views and thousands of regular readers within a year of launching on Salon.com.
In 2009, she spoke about her nature of food writing with the Orlando Sentinel. "Food bloggers, like all bloggers, are contentious, they say what they think and they hate on people," she wrote. "And that's good and valuable. But it's a Wild West kind of world, and people feel free to say things they never would in a face-to-face civil conversation. We have a medium where we can type in the snarky comments we used to just say out loud to our friends." Besides 'Julie and Julia', she also wrote 'Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession', where she drew parallels between her work at a butcher shop and her and her husband's affairs.
Many food bloggers later followed in Powell's footsteps, which include Dorie Greenspan, Ina Garten, Deb Perelman, and Alison Roman. "I was shocked to learn this morning of the passing of Julie Powell, the original food blogger," Perelman tweeted Tuesday, November 1, under the account of her famous social media and cookbook brand, Smitten Kitchen. "Cooking through Julia Child's books, she made Child relevant to a new generation, and wrote about cooking in a fresh, conversational, this-is-my-real life tone that was rare back then."
I was shocked to learn this morning of the passing of Julie Powell, the original food blogger. Cooking through Julia Child's books, she made Child relevant to a new generation, and wrote about cooking in a fresh, conversational, this-is-my-real life tone that was rare back then. https://t.co/5aB3bcUtKu
— smitten kitchen (@smittenkitchen) November 1, 2022