Julie Powell, the author whose determination to spend a yr cooking each recipe in Julia Youngster’s “Mastering the Artwork of French Cooking” led to the favored meals weblog, the Julie/Julia Mission, a film starring Meryl Streep and a brand new following for Youngster within the last years of her life, died on Oct. 26 at her house in Olivebridge, in upstate New York. She was 49.

Her husband, Eric Powell, stated the trigger was cardiac arrest.

Julie Powell narrated her struggles within the kitchen in a humorous, lacerating voice that struck a nerve with a rising technology of disaffected contemporaries.

The Julie/Julia Mission turned a well-liked mannequin for different blogs, replicated by followers of the cooks Ina Garten, Thomas Keller and Dorie Greenspan, and helped construct the huge trendy viewers for house cooking on social media.

In 2002, Powell was an aspiring author working at a low-level administrative job in decrease Manhattan. She was about to show 30 and had no actual profession prospects. It was, she stated in an interview with The New York Occasions, “a kind of panicked, backed-into-a-corner sort of moments.”

To lend construction to her days, she got down to prepare dinner all 524 recipes from her mom’s well-worn copy of Youngster’s 1961 traditional “Mastering the Artwork of French Cooking, Quantity 1.” However as an untrained prepare dinner who lived in a small Lengthy Island Metropolis loft, she discovered the street to be lengthy, sweaty and bumpy.

In a weblog for Salon.com that she referred to as the Julie/Julia Mission, she wrote lengthy updates, punctuated by vodka gimlets and full of entertaining, profane tirades in regards to the difficulties of discovering elements, the minor disappointments of grownup life and the larger challenges of discovering goal as a member of Technology X.

Earlier than the yr was up, Salon reported that the weblog had about 400,000 complete web page views, in addition to a number of thousand common readers who held on the drama of whether or not Powell would truly end in time.

Running a blog made it doable for Powell to achieve readers on a comparatively new platform and in a brand new sort of direct language. “We’ve got a medium the place we are able to sort within the snarky feedback we used to simply say out loud to our buddies,” she stated in a 2009 interview.

These feedback have been posted simply as well-liked curiosity in meals, cooking and cooks was rising. Powell’s self-deprecating type turned a bridge from the authority of meals writers like Youngster, James Beard and MFK Fisher to the accessibility of Rachael Ray, Bobby Flay and Nigella Lawson.

Simply weeks earlier than Powell’s self-imposed deadline was up, Amanda Hesser, a founding father of the web site Food52 who was then a reporter for The New York Occasions, wrote about her undertaking, and curiosity exploded.

The Julie/Julia Mission upended meals writing, Hesser stated in an e mail. “I’d by no means learn anybody like her,” she wrote. “Her writing was so recent, spirited — typically crude! — and so gloriously unmoored to any custom.”

Powell impressed different newbie meals writers to start cooking their approach by means of cookbooks and made skilled meals writers notice “they’d been caught within the mud of conformity,” Hesser stated. “The web democratized meals writing, and Julie was the brand new faculty’s first distinctive voice.”

Author Deb Perelman, who began her meals weblog (now referred to as Smitten Kitchen) in 2003, stated: “She wrote about meals in a very human voice that seemed like folks I knew. She communicated that you would write about meals even with out going to culinary faculty, with out a lot expertise, and in a real-life kitchen.”

Little, Brown & Co. turned the weblog right into a e-book, “Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny House Kitchen.” Though some critics wrote that it lacked literary heft, it went on to promote greater than 1 million copies, principally beneath the title given to the paperback: “Julie & Julia: My Yr of Cooking Dangerously.”

Gross sales spiked after the favored 2009 film “Julie & Julia,” Nora Ephron’s final work as a author and director, which starred Streep as Youngster; Stanley Tucci as her husband, Paul; and Amy Adams as Powell.

Julie Powell “was comfortable for the story to be Nora Ephron’s story,” stated Eric Powell, a deputy editor at Archaeology journal. “It did sort of sand down the quirky and the spiky and lots of the issues everybody knew her for and liked her for. And she or he was OK with that.”

The movie’s success additionally lifted Youngster’s e-book to the best-seller record for the primary time.

Youngster by no means noticed the movie — she died in 2004 — however she was acquainted with Powell’s undertaking.

Russ Parsons, a former Los Angeles Occasions meals editor who was among the many first to report on the weblog, despatched Youngster, then in her 90s, some excerpts. She took the undertaking as an affront, not the self-deprecating romp that Powell supposed, and instructed Parsons that she and others had examined and retested the recipes so they’d be accessible to cooks of all ability ranges.

“I don’t perceive how she might have issues with them,” he recalled her telling him. “She simply should not be a lot of a prepare dinner.”

Julie Foster was born on April 20, 1973, in Austin, Texas, to John and Kay Foster. Her father was a lawyer. Her mom stayed house to take care of her and her brother, Jordon, after which went again to varsity for a grasp’s diploma in design from the College of Texas.

Julie Powell graduated from Amherst School in 1995 with a bachelor’s diploma in theater and fiction writing.

As a baby, her brother stated, Powell was each bookish and dramatic.

“She liked to be onstage, and liked simply being excessive and having everybody watch her,” he stated. And, he added, she was “essentially the most experimental and complex prepare dinner amongst us, and we have been all individuals who cooked.”

She met the person who would turn out to be her husband once they have been taking part in the romantic leads in a highschool manufacturing of the Arthur Miller play “All My Sons.” They married in 1998.

Julie Powell’s second e-book, “Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession,” revealed in 2009, dived deeply into their relationship, which typically flourished and typically faltered. She described intimately her battle with an extramarital affair she had and, later, one her husband had. This time, the meals connection was darker: She juxtaposed her apprenticeship as a butcher with a dissection of her moods and the wedding.

With out the sauciness and superstar connection of her first e-book, “Cleaving” was not as properly acquired, and though Powell continued writing, it was her final e-book.

“She had a lot expertise and emotional intelligence,” stated Judy Clain, editor-in-chief of Little, Brown, who was Powell’s editor. “I solely want she might have discovered the following factor.”

After years splitting time between Lengthy Island Metropolis and a comfy home within the Catskill Mountains that she bought in 2008, the couple moved upstate completely in 2018. Along with her husband and her brother, Powell is survived by her mother and father.

Powell, who was politically candid and a staunch advocate for animals, maintained her full of life voice on social media, a pure extension for the quirky and direct voice she honed as an early blogger. On Twitter, she posted pointed commentary, combined in with mundane bits of each day life. As ever, she made her emotions public, whether or not she was depressed, annoyed or excited.

Eric Powell, her husband, as soon as stated to her: “You hate everybody and you’re keen on everybody. That’s your present!” She turned it into her Twitter bio.