Julie and Julia

365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen

By Liz Crain

January 23, 2007

Julie Powell’s bestselling Julie and Julia is the book that made food blogs seem like, well, books. Fed up with a dead-end temp job in Manhattan, a nonexistent acting career, and the pressure to have a child, the 30-year-old Powell decides to do something different. After picking up a copy of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1, Powell makes a pact to cook everything from the classic cookbook in one year in her tiny outer-borough apartment kitchen and write about it on a blog.

Stuffed with self-effacing witticisms, office rants, relationship mania, cooking debacles, and culture collisions, Julie and Julia chronicles this culinary quest, featuring fictional episodes from Julia and Paul Child’s lives. Powell’s bleaders (blog readers) and, now, her readers, are spectators to the often hilarious, often touching, recipe race that Powell wins in flying flambé colors.

Liz Crain is a writer based in Portland, Oregon.