, 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 unreliable dial-up internet cut out, 'off the top of my head, with no editing at all'. She intended to write about the cooking, but found it 'extraordinarily boring. 'I melted the butter' and 'I browned the beef'...' Instead, her blog turned into a spiky confessional about her anxieties, her friends' antics and her sex life. The result – 'Bridget Jones with a meat bat){kind=link}
Within a year she had 400,000 page views, though Julia Childs accused her of not being ‘a serious cook’
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. Child was a heroic figure in the history of the American kitchen; where Britain had Elizabeth David, Delia Smith, Robert Carrier and Fanny Cradock, Child was all of them, rolled into one, her million-selling book and subsequent television series educating America in the arts Child had learnt at the Cordon Bleu in Paris.
Julie Powell, in her tiny kitchen, began with Child’s recipe for potage parmentier (leek 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 unreliable dial-up internet cut out, “off the top of my head, with no editing at all”.