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She attempted to cook every recipe in a classic Julia Child cookbook and documented the effort in a popular blog that became a best-selling book and a hit movie.
By Kim Severson and Julia Moskin
Julie Powell, the writer whose decision to spend a year cooking every recipe in Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” led to the popular food blog the Julie/Julia Project, a movie starring Meryl Streep and a new following for Mrs. Child in the final years of her life, died on Oct. 26 at her home in Olivebridge, in upstate New York. She was 49.
Her husband, Eric Powell, said the cause was cardiac arrest.
Ms. Powell narrated her struggles in the kitchen in a funny, lacerating voice that struck a nerve with a rising generation of disaffected contemporaries.
The Julie/Julia Project became a popular model for other blogs, replicated by fans of the cooks Ina Garten, Thomas Keller and Dorie Greenspan, and helped build the vast modern audience for home cooking on social media.
In 2002, Ms. Powell was an aspiring writer working at a low-level administrative job in Lower Manhattan. She was about to turn 30 and had no real career prospects. It was, she said in an interview with The New York Times, “one of those panicked, backed-into-a-corner kind of moments.”
To lend structure to her days, she set out to cook all 524 recipes from her mother’s well-worn copy of Mrs. Child’s 1961 classic “Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1.” But as an untrained cook who lived in a small Long Island City loft, she found the road to be long, sweaty and bumpy.
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