Julie Powell—the writer who chronicled a year cooking her way through the recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, leading to a popular food blog, and later a biopic starring Amy Adams and Meryl Streep—died last week at her home in upstate New York.
Her husband told The New York Times on Tuesday that Powell had died of cardiac arrest. She was 49.
A 29-year-old administrative worker in lower Manhattan at the time, Powell began her Julia Child journey in 2002, launching a blog called the Julie/Julia Project as she attempted to make the hundreds of dishes in Child’s seminal 1961 cookbook.
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“I had no idea what it was going to do for me when I started,” she told the Associated Press in 2009. “It was really sort of a personal project to cut out a piece of my daily existence, purely for me, that gave me a creative outlet so the rest of my life didn’t seem so stultifying.”
Her first post, published Aug. 25, read: “Government drone by day, renegade foodie by night... Julie Powell was looking for a challenge... she has signed on for a deranged assignment. 365 days. 536 recipes. One girl and a crappy outer borough kitchen.”
She quickly grew a devoted following unusual for its size on the early internet, blogging with a snarky wit and brutal honesty as she described the culinary battles she waged from her tiny loft in Long Island City.
She parlayed the success of the project into a 2005 memoir, Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. That in turn inspired the 2009 film Julie & Julia, which starred Adams as the disaffected Powell and Streep as a burgeoning Child in a split-timeline story.
