Julie Powell was born on April 20, 1973, in Austin, Texas, as Julie Foster. She was known to be an author. She gained popularity when she started a blog about her quest to prepare every recipe in Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking: Volume 1 in the early 2000s. The Julie/Julia Project, which Julie initiated in 2002, was the project for which she was most well-known. The blog documented her quest to prepare every dish in Julia Child’s iconic cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
She revised her writing and published it as a book in 2005 under the title Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. The memoir was later turned into the Nora Ephron-helmed 2009 movie Julie & Julia. Meryl Streep played Child, while Amy Adams played Julie.
Streep, 73, received an Oscar nomination for best actress in the film, which was nominated for a number of awards. Thousands of people visited the blog at a time when many were still using dial-up internet. After a year of being published on Salon.com, it had thousands of regular readers and about 400,000 page views. The book that came after, Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, sold more than a million copies, most of which were the paperback edition.
Powell’s endeavour inspired numerous food bloggers, and their later successful web and social media projects included Dorie Greenspan, Ina Garten, Deb Perelman, and Alison Roman. Cooking through Julia Child’s books made Child relevant to a new generation, and she wrote about cooking in a new, conversational, this-is-my-real-life tone that was uncommon back then.
