Recipe for success

Julie Powell was a depressed temp whose life changed forever after she embarked on a year-long Julia Child cook-a-thon.

By Sarah Karnasiewicz

Oct 12, 2005 | In 2002, on the eve of her 30th birthday, depressed and dreading another year as an office drone, Julie Powell decided she needed a hobby. But while knitting or yoga might have appealed to some, Powell's tastes ran to the absurd -- and perhaps the self-destructive. Sitting at her kitchen counter thumbing a well-worn copy of Julia Child's 1961 cookbook classic, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," Powell had an epiphany. She would cook every one of the 524 recipes in the book. And -- damn it! -- she would do it in one year.

And so the Julie/Julia Project was born. For 365 days, on a Salon.com blog of the same name, Powell chronicled her adventures in aspic, her battles with live lobsters, and her catastrophes with crepes in a frank and fearless style that quickly earned her a following. With her husband, Eric, by her side as resident drink-mixer and dishwasher, and from within the tiny confines of her Long Island City, N.Y., kitchen -- with cracked walls, cramped countertops and maggots (yes, maggots!) collecting under the drying rack -- Powell stewed and sautéed, sliced and diced, every kind of fish and fowl imaginable.

Like the star of an Internet reality show for foodies, she kept fans rapt with stories of marital strife brought on by carb-induced crankiness, midnight trips to the market, and a disastrous Sauce Ragout. Along the way, Powell also learned to scrape and slurp the marrow from bones, to deconstruct an entire duck, to savor the smoldering taste of liver. Countless pounds of butter and botched dinners later, she realized to her surprise that she had stumbled upon a spiritual salve. That, and a lucrative book deal.

How's that for a fairy tale ending for a secretary from Queens?

Powell, whose memoir, "Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen," was published late last month, recently sat down with Salon for lunch at New York's Casa Mono. Over sweetbreads and Spanish olives, we discussed her dramatic good fortune, the frightening loyalty of her blog readers and her ongoing fascination with butchers.

A year and a half ago you were a miserable temp and now you have a new book deal and a steady, fairly glamorous gig as a food writer. Don't you just hate yourself?

Life is really good -- so much better now than it was a year ago. But I had this moment when I went into a bookstore and my book was already on the shelf, a full week before its release date, and it just completely freaked me out. My first reaction was like, OK, that's done then. Maybe I don't have a real gift for happiness, but it seems like those landmark events that are supposed to make everything great -- they just don't ever hit. There's always that feeling that something else is going to happen down the road to make it coalesce into a great new fabulous life, and really it's never finished. You just keep living.

Now new stresses come up and replace the old ones. The past few weeks have been hectic and I got myself overcommitted between writing articles and doing photo shoots, and at one point I found myself getting a little pissy about it. And then I wanted to just slap myself, because the worst day I have now is so much better than the best day I ever had as a temp.

So, I hear you have a thing for butchers.

Yes, actually. I really admire their skills. For a long time while I was working as a nanny in the West Village I got in the habit of going to Ottomanelli's, a wonderful old-fashioned butcher shop, anytime I needed something special. Butchers are great because they sell you the duck, and they can also tell you how to cook it. If you go to a store, even a nice grocery shop like Whole Foods, you call them up and they have to patch you through to the resident butcher who is there three days a week until 5, and he's the only guy who knows how to do anything. For my next book I want to train to become a butcher. My husband, Eric, of course wants me to butcher a dog in Korea and a horse in France.

Do you think people need to have a better understanding of where their food comes from?

Sort of. I did this article about ancient cuisines and I needed to find blood, because I had Mesopotamian recipes that used blood as a thickener. And I went everywhere. I went to people who raise and slaughter lambs for a living, and told them I needed blood, and they looked at me like I was fucking Dracula. I wanted to say, "You're the one who killed them!" That got me thinking about how we have these limits based totally on our cultural circumstances. "I'll raise and slaughter an animal, but I'm not going to eat its blood. That's disgusting."

In the beginning of the project, at least, your focus was on cooking. Why did you start a blog, too?

At first, the blog was supposed to serve a purely journalistic function. I was going to cook every night and then record it in the blog, and it was going to keep me honest and keep me working. But I found writing about what I was cooking every night to be extraordinarily boring. "I melted the butter" and "I browned the beef" -- it quickly became very tedious. At first I tried blogging at night after cooking, but I was usually pretty drunk and tired, so I had to stop. Then I started blogging the next morning, before I had a shower, before I had coffee -- and I'd write off the top my head, with no editing at all. To make matters worse, I had dial-up at the time, so I was constantly being cut off and so I just wanted to crank something out and post it before I was interrupted. The stuff about my life was just kind of squeezed in there, but it became the thing that the readers of my blog were more interested in, or at least as interested in. And the personal part made it more interesting for me, too, because the project became like the spine of my life, and everything else was built around it.

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