Opinion Julie Powell in the kitchen

Julie Powell’s first book, Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously (2005), was so different from the usual food books that reviews were mostly dismissive. Based on the popular blog, The Julie/Julia Project, that Powell had started to chronicle her attempt to cook all 524 recipes from Julia Child’s 1961 classic, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, its bare-all qualities didn’t appeal to critics who believed that its “incontinence” did disservice to a respectful, respectable genre.

But Powell, 49, who died of cardiac arrest last week, was not writing for the critics. Contemptuous of “pretty much all food writers” (with a few notable exceptions), Powell had no time for the staid formality of the genre. Her writing, which began with the blog she started in 2002 as a 29-year-old, was for others like herself — “servantless” cooks who had unbounded enthusiasm for food and no training. It was all blood and guts, revelling in Powell’s misadventures — forgetting to truss the chicken for a Poulet Poele a L’Estragon, balancing a mixer on the trash can in her tiny kitchen, having a meltdown over watercress — with a hearty helping of her personal life. If the establishment criticism stung — including from Child who believed the blog was a “stunt” — the huge success of the book, followed by a hit movie starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams in 2009 — more than made up for it.

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Like Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential in 2000, Powell’s blog showed a different way of writing and thinking about food. In an early post, she compared food to sex and death, as one of the “universals”, demanding for it the passion and depth that these two subjects inspired. In writing about her life — including uncomfortable revelations about her marriage — with the same urgency as she did about a “sexy” crown roast, Powell was instrumental in turning food writing into one of the most successful genres of our times.