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Julie Powell, a food writer known for chronicling her journey of making every recipe in Julia Child‘s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” has died. She was 49.
Powell died on Oct. 26 at her home in upstate New York. Her husband, Eric, told The New York Times that the cause of death was cardiac arrest.
Powell was known for starting a blog, the Julie/Julia Project, in which she wrote about her kitchen mess-ups and wins as she cooked her way through Child’s cookbook. As a blogger in 2002, she was a pioneer for the casual format that’s been adopted by thousands of contemporary bloggers and social media users today.
Her blog on Salon.com was eventually turned into a book in 2005, called “Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen.”
The book was then adapted into the 2009 movie, Julie and Julia, which was also based on Julia Child’s autobiography, “My Life in France.” Directed by Nora Ephron, the film starred Meryl Streep as Child and Amy Adams as Powell.
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In 2009, she spoke with the Orlando Sentinel about the nature of her food writing. “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.”
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Powell kept up her early blogging tone on the more modern platform of Twitter, tweeting everything from photos of her pets to critiques of The Great British Baking Show.
Along with Julie and Julia, she wrote Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession. The book drew parallels between her work at a butcher shop and her and her husband’s affairs.
Fellow writers and social media users have shared heartfelt messages about Powell, including Deb Perelman of the blog Smitten Kitchen.
“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,” she wrote.
Chef Pim Techamuanvivit also tweeted about Powell’s legacy.
“How very sad. She was so young. I was a huge fan of her blog, and I am definitely old enough to remember when social media was more about being snarky about oneself than putting down others. RIP Julie,” she wrote.
