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Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen Hardcover – September 28, 2005

by Julie Powell (Author)

4.1 1,481 ratings

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Recounts how the author escaped the doldrums of an unpromising career and lackluster Queens apartment by mastering every recipe in Julia Child's 1961 classic, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a year-long endeavor of humor and accomplishment that transformed her life. 150,000 first printing.

Amazon.com Review

Julie & Julia is the story of Julie Powell's attempt to revitalize her marriage, restore her ambition, and save her soul by cooking all 524 recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I, in a period of 365 days. The result is a masterful medley of Bridget Jones' Diary meets Like Water for Chocolate, mixed with a healthy dose of original wit, warmth, and inspiration that sets this memoir apart from most tales of personal redemption.

When we first meet Julie, she's a frustrated temp-to-perm secretary who slaves away at a thankless job, only to return to an equally demoralizing apartment in the outer boroughs of Manhattan each evening. At the urging of Eric, her devoted and slightly geeky husband, she decides to start a blog that will chronicle what she dubs the "Julie/Julia Project." What follows is a year of butter-drenched meals that will both necessitate the wearing of an unbearably uncomfortable girdle on the hottest night of the year, as well as the realization that life is what you make of it and joy is not as impossible a quest as it may seem, even when it's -10 degrees out and your pipes are frozen.

Powell is a natural when it comes to connecting with her readers, which is probably why her blog generated so much buzz, both from readers and media alike. And while her self-deprecating sense of humor can sometimes dissolve into whininess, she never really loses her edge, or her sense of purpose. Even on day 365, she's working her way through Mayonnaise Collee and ending the evening "back exactly where we started--just Eric and me, three cats and Buffy...sitting on a couch in the outer boroughs, eating, with Julia chortling alongside us...."

Inspired and encouraging, Julie and Julia is a unique opportunity to join one woman's attempt to change her life, and have a laugh, or ten, along the way. --Gisele Toueg

From Publishers Weekly

Powell became an Internet celebrity with her 2004 blog chronicling her yearlong odyssey of cooking every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. A frustrated secretary in New York City, Powell embarked on "the Julie/Julia project" to find a sense of direction, and both the cooking and the writing quickly became all-consuming. Some passages in the book are taken verbatim from the blog, but Powell expands on her experience and gives generous background about her personal life: her doting husband, wacky friends, evil co-workers. She also includes some comments from her "bleaders" (blog readers), who formed an enthusiastic support base. Powell never met Julia Child (who died last year), but the venerable chef's spirit is present throughout, and Powell imaginatively reconstructs episodes from Child's life in the 1940s. Her writing is feisty and unrestrained, especially as she details killing lobsters, tackling marrowbones and cooking late into the night. Occasionally the diarist instinct overwhelms the generally tight structure and Powell goes on unrelated tangents, but her voice is endearing enough that readers will quickly forgive such lapses. Both home cooks and devotees of Bridget Jones–style dishing will be caught up in Powell's funny, sharp-tongued but generous writing.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

During her year of culinary experimentation, Powell often served dinner well after midnight. Critics agreed that her efforts were well rewarded, at least from a literary perspective. Even though Powell started her project as a way to sort things outher job, her sex life, her girlfriends sex lives, her reproductive challengesshe has all the makings of a fine food critic. If her self-effacing, humorous, even bawdy tone doesnt always produce great insight into lifes little challenges, readers will appreciate the scattered, small nuggets of wisdom. A few critics felt that the book did not transcend its blog; excessive details and some self-indulgence created a voice like "Bridget Jones if she were a New York foodie" (San Francisco Chronicle). But whats so bad about that?

From Booklist

In her adolescence, Powell came across Joy of Sex and Mastering the Art of French Cooking and forever linked the two in her mind, finding something absolutely sensual about cooking. Years later, living in New York with her husband and coming to the awful realization that her temp job as a secretary was about to turn full-time, she devises the ambitious assignment of cooking 524 recipes in one year and chronicling the experience on a blog. As she moves from simple potato soup to more complicated crepes, Powell engages the help of her husband, brother, and friend, as well as the hundreds of fans she attracts to her blog. A recipe calling for bone marrow prompts a long and hilarious search for a local butcher, and a meal that "tasted like really good sex." The tougher the shopping and cooking assignment, the more sensual the experience, as Powell discovers incredible determination and hidden talents in cooking, writing, and living. This is a joyful, humorous account of one woman's efforts to find meaning in her life. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Print length

320 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Little, Brown and Company
Publication date

September 28, 2005
Dimensions

6.75 x 1.5 x 9.75 inches
ISBN-10

031610969X
ISBN-13

978-0316109697
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Little, Brown and Company (September 28, 2005)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 031610969X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0316109697
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.15 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.75 x 1.5 x 9.75 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #736,194 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #751 in Culinary Biographies & Memoirs
- #7,611 in Women's Biographies
- #20,484 in Memoirs (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.1 1,481 ratings

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Julie Powell

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Julie Powell thrust herself from obscurity (and an uninspiring temp job) to cyber-celebrityhood when, in 2002, she embarked on an ambitious yearlong cooking (and blogging) expedition through all 524 recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She detailed the experience in her critically acclaimed 2005 New York Times bestselling memoir, Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, which was adapted into a major motion picture starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams in August 2009. Julie has made appearances on national television shows from ABC's "Good Morning America" and CBS's "The Early Show" to "The Martha Stewart Show" and Food Network's "Iron Chef America," and her writing has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers including Bon Appétit, Food and Wine, Harper's Bazaar, New York Times, Washington Post, and more. She is a two-time James Beard Award winner, has been awarded an honorary degree from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, and was the first ever winner of the Overall Lulu Blooker Prize for Books.

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C. Ebeling

Very spirited, very smart, very entertaining

Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2005

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At age 29 in 2002, Julie Powell hit a spot many of us know too well. A talented, educated young woman in a thankless, low-paying secretarial job in Lower Manhattan and a microscopic apartment in Brooklyn, she was teetering on very real depression over the realization that the adult world we all yearn for as adolescents wasn't that peachy keen. To cut to the quick: to keep the demons at bay, she set out on the journey known as the Julie/Julia Project, in which she challenged herself to make all 564 recipes in Julia Child's MASTERING THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING, Vol. 1, in 365 days, in that doll-sized kitchen, and to keep a blog about it.

It never occurred to her that the blog would be read by anyone, but she soon accrued a following of faithful "bleaders" and the attention of the national media. While the book reprises some passages from the blog and bleader responses, it is about much more. It is a grand, hilarious and often touching tour of her family and her friends, especially as they finally shed adolescence and take on full adulthood in this post 9-11 world, and it is not egocentric or navel-gazing in the least. She provides a unique and insightful perspective of the phenomenon of Julia Child, her personal accomplishments and their affect on our culture. Powell is a born performer and all her stories, whether of cooking in the most adverse circumstances (imagine all the drains clogging up at once or the big blackout or the media showing up) or the rest of her life, are engaging.

Powell takes an artistic risk that I think works: she intersperses imagined scenes from the early life of Julia and Paul Child, from their meeting to the point early in their marriage when she decides to attend cooking classes in France. These sketches are not disrespectful; they are a way of communicating with the muse.

This book did not just make me laugh, it left me thinking a lot about Julia Child, her way of cooking, how Americans cook now, my late mother, why I cook, lots of significant things. What I love the most about JULIE AND JULIA is that unlike a lot of books where an author dips a toe in offbeat waters in order to write the book, this author grew as a result of her full-plunge and significant experience, landed in a better place than where she began, and the book came last. Julia came first. Julie doesn't let us forget that.

9 people found this helpful

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M. R. Lauer

Not what you'd expect, but an excellent book despite itself

Reviewed in the United States on March 13, 2011

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I am giving this book a 4-star review, but I must explain why in detail because I understand some of the vicious reviews others have given it.

First, by now, most of us buying this book will have already seen the movie, and, as others have noted, the real Julie Powell is not at all like Amy Adams. In the movie, Amy is adorable, cute, and attractive, an ideal protaganist to root for. Julie Powell, as she presents herself in this book, is not only a bitch, but a whining, self-pitying, narcississtic bitch--an almost thoroughly unlikable character.

Second, as we all know, editors have gone the way of linotype machines--I guess they started disappearing 20 or 30 years ago, and by now, the folks with that title seem to be little more than project managers whose only focus is managing deadlines and maybe expenses. The prose in the beginning of the book is really hard to take; reading it made me as uncomfortable as watching an untalented child screeching for attention from a stage. It seemed as though half the sentences had an extra third tacked on where Julie was trying to prove she was an 'author' who could really 'write'. An editor working on a college newspaper could have vastly improved the book with a red pencil and some strong guidance.

Third, this is based on a blog. This means there is only one subject: the attention-starved author whose exhibitionism creates a completely unwarranted sense of self-importance in the author's own mind and heart. The book is not about cooking, not about learning, not even about working through Julia Child's classic cookbook, it is about Julie, and nothing but Julie. I can completely understand why Julia might not have liked the blog: what I wanted to see was, 'Here's what I am going to cook next, here are my adventures and misadventures encountered along the way, here is how it tasted, here is what I learned about cooking and about myself.' That is most emphatically not what this book is about. Julie was given the nickname Sarah Bernhardt from a very young age because she has evidently been given to histrionics and tantrums since birth--that's pretty much what the book is about.

Having now confirmed most of the negative appraisals given by those reviewers who only gave this book 1 or 2 stars and probably wished they could have given it zero, how do I get from here to a 4 star review? Let me try to explain.

This is, quite inadvertantly, a very adult book. Granted, the language is that of a foul-mouthed teenager, the attitude that of a petulant child, the insights, well, there really aren't any. I would not recommend this book to any under 25, maybe even under 30. Imagine a memoir written by a substance-abusing street person who once worked on Wall Street. This is how grim this book is.

Julie Powell is not a drunk, or a drug addict; she is a reasonably sane, functioning adult, but she is deeply damaged, still trapped in some childhood drama that we, even now, know nothing about because she lacks the insight to see it for herself yet.

But, even though I did have to skip a few pages towards the beginning of the book that were just unbearable, the book became more compelling as I forged ahead for two critical reasons:

1) Julie actually learned to write as she was writing this book. A decent editor would have pointed this out and cleaned up the amateurish, exhibitionist beginning to match the more maturely written last half of the book, but, alas, Julie was ill-served by a project manager. Offhand, I would say the most egregiously bad writing is confined to the first 30-50 pages or so, and seems to disappear almost entirely after page 80.

2) The growth I was hoping to see Julie undergo during the project only really began to happen afterwards, while she was writing this book. But she did grow as she wrote the book, although in ways she is apparently yet unable to see. The book is funny, and episodic, and meant to be a number of things, but it is mostly grim and compelling. It's like watching an addict invent rehab on their own without ever even realizing it. When Julie says she was drowing and Julia saved her, she's telling the truth. She was lost in a crappy life, but the only thing that really made her life crappy was her, not her husband, family, friends, job, apartment, or city. All of the crappiness was entirely inside Julie, entirely of her own making, and it was only through committing herself to this journey that she was able to begin to drag herself out of her narcisstic black hole of misery.

Nora Ephron based her movie on two books that she essentially threw away in order to make up a beautiful dual story of personal growth. I am so glad she invented the character that Amy Adams realized so well. This book, on the other hand, tells the very adult tale of an immature, un-self-aware, miserable narcissist who began to work her way out of this nightmare of her own making by discovering the joy of learning that Julia so fully embodied. When she writes of this at the end of the book, she is still embarrassed to use the word 'joy', and this alone should give you an indication of how deeply damaged she really is. But, as you get further and further into the book, you begin to see the redemptive power of committment to a project outside of one's own neurotic orbit, a redemption that begins to work its magic even though Julie is too miserable and flawed to see anything more than glimpses of it herself.

The movie is cute, and funny, and wonderful, and light. This book is a grim memoir of redemption that is made all the more powerful by the fact that the author is too unperceptive to see what is going on herself. There is a turning point in the book, but it's hard to find because Julie never saw it herself, so she didn't structure the narrative around it. The book is life-affirming and ultimately very positive because it shows that the right mission, diligently followed, can save us despite our attempts to sabotage it.

56 people found this helpful

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Dee Jay

I guess you either get it or you don't

Reviewed in the United States on August 30, 2012

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"Julie and Julia" was never touted as a cookbook, or even a cooking lesson. It's a personal memoir that happens to revolve around a young woman's quest to replicate all of the recipes in a very famous (and difficult) French cookbook.

If you liked "Bridget Jones' Diary" and other books of that type, you will absolutely devour (ha) "Julie and Julia". Julie Powell is whiny - yes. She is self-absorbed - yep. She can be a bit of a jerk - absolutely. But she is also real and hysterically funny. If the haters who gave this book a bad review didn't catch the self-deprecation in her language....I don't know what to say. I thought her tone was crystal clear, presenting herself honestly in all her imperfect glory. One reviewer complained that she's mean to her husband. I mean, geez...raise your hand and give yourself a halo if you've never snapped at your spouse. There were complaints about the profanity: really??? A light smattering of f-bombs equals extreme obscenity? Who knew?

Like I said above, do not expect this to be a cookbook in any form. You will not learn to cook a thing - not even boil water - from this book. You will, however, be highly entertained by Julie's antics and fits - her struggles with aspic in particular, as she transforms from a girl who won't eat anything (EVER!) to slurping down poached eggs in beef jelly. You will also laugh out loud at her descriptions of friends and family. Powell has a gift for language and a refreshing honesty that makes this book a winner.

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A. Roth

So gut wie der Film

Reviewed in Germany on November 5, 2019

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Ich fand den Film toll, und habe ihn. schon mehrmals gesehen. Deshalb war ich neugierig auf die Buchvorlage. Und ich
wurde nicht enttäuscht. Es ist interessant, beides zu kennen, und zu vergleichen. Mir hat das Buch gut gefallen, und ich
hatte viel Freude beim Lesen. Ich werde mir als nächstes noch das Buch von Julia Child, über ihre Zeit in Paris holen.
Zwei sehr interessante Frauen. Und ein lesenswertes Buch

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Cliente de Amazon

Gracias

Reviewed in Mexico on July 14, 2017

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me encanta...!!!
llego a tiempo y en perfectas condiciones, lo estoy disfrutando mucho, por bastante tiempo habia buscado este libro, la oferta de productos es ilimitada

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Lily 2

Hard to put down

Reviewed in Australia on December 7, 2017

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Excellent book..Much better than the movie...I really loved this book

Gillian Grant

This book makes you love your life, and take things more lightly.

Reviewed in Canada on September 11, 2013

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Not everything has to have a specific purpose in life. This book really shows how it's about the journey and not the destination. Hilarious stories, glass-half full perspective and good writing. Enjoyed this book very much.

One person found this helpful

currer bell

grittier than the film

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 15, 2010

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I watched the film of this first, really liked it a lot and nearly didn't read the book, being put off by reveiws claiming the book isn't as good. well, i think the book is as usual superior to the film,much grittier admittedly but much more realistic, the film was a bit fluffier and girlier, the book has a lot more backbone, and makes more sense in how difficult the recipes would be to a modern woman living the way that Julie Powell does. I love it.As some of the previous reviewers have pointed out, Julie is much less likeable than in the film, but actually she is just much more real from my point of view, living the kind of life that many of us struggle with now which mostly rules out complicated cooking and food preparation, and while we might be foodies in the making, having jobs, living in flats in the city and trying to have a life as well means actually we do often end up eating fast food, and there is precious little time for sieving a veloute!!!!!
I wish we could see Julia child in action in her shows here in the Uk though, she sounds very entertaining even if as a vegetarian there is zero chance i will ever cook like this!

2 people found this helpful

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