Without "Julie & Julia," there would be no "Addie & Nigella"

Remembering the food blogger whose imperfect earnestness inspired a movie — and a food writer movement— with a little less je ne sais quoi.

Julie Powell wrote a book, “Julie & Julia,” about her experience cooking every recipe from Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” The book became a book in 2009 starring Amy Adams as Powell and Meryl Streep as Child.

I saw the news earlier this week that Julie Powell, the blogger who cooked Julia Child recipes for a year and wrote a bestselling memoir about it, died at age 49.

The movie that made her story famous came out in 2009, the year after I started writing about food at the Austin American-Statesman. Part of my whole pitch to the editors at the time was that we needed to have a food blog. Maybe not exactly like “The Julie/Julia Project,” but a place to publish first-person stories that were often experimental or out-of-the-ordinary.

It’s easy to forget that slice-of-life food writing wasn’t nearly as common in the 2000s, when Powell, living in a post 9/11 New York and miserable at her job, sought solace in “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” a book Julia Child published 40 years earlier.

A screen capture of the first post on Julie Powell’s blog, which started in 2002, that catapulted her writing career. Food blogging was becoming mainstream by the time “Julie & Julia” came out in 2009.

The only people writing about food at the time were people who were paid to do so by a publication or TV station. Gourmet, Bon Appetit and Saveur had the market cornered, as did every newspaper and regional magazine, where food editors ran tight ships that didn’t leave much room for the emotion Powell so freely displayed in her near-daily posts that year.

There were a few online food chat groups or listservs at the time, but no social media where people could share easily share photos, recipes or cooking tips.

If you wanted to learn how to cook, you had to do what folks did: Cook using a recipe from a physical book.

But then, she did a very 21st Century Thing: She decided to tell the world about it.