Food writing just lost two great influences. Gael Greene, New York magazine’s inaugural restaurant critic, was 88. Julie Powell, whose blog about cooking her way through Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” inspired the 2009 movie “Julie & Julia,” was 49. Separated by decades, and very different writers, both women challenged and changed their medium by ignoring its conventions and deploying their own authentic voices.
It was 1968 when Greene grabbed the wheel and the template from those who had been restaurant critics before: mostly men, all white (not much has changed there), who assumed authority with the ease of shrugging on a bespoke sport coat. It was made for them, after all.
Restaurant reviews had largely been factual and reportorial, steady in syntax and sometimes self-important in tone, doling out adjectives with an even hand. Then came Greene, literary and gimlet-eyed. She recognized that appetite was appetite, blurring the lines between food and sex. To her, life was a beautiful banquet groaning with pleasures. It was all juicy, from rare rack of lamb to the city’s social scene. It was all worth tearing into, and sometimes tearing down.
“Lapsing into sexual metaphor seems sacrilegious. But I have had more than a dozen meals at cafe Chauveron that justified both decadence and sacrilege,” she wrote in 1969. “Great sensuous feasts to stagger home from, giggling, pleased with the sheer brilliance of having chosen so well. Les moules au Chablis glacées, mussels buried in a sublime wine sauce enriched with whipped cream, then glazed under the salamander. Tender, pink-fleshed rack of lamb with primeurs, infant vegetables tasting as if they’d been grown in butter. And then a great voluptuousness of the chocolate, the Chauveron mousse — the Sophia Loren of mousses — gutsy, not the least bit subtle, wrapped in a thin sponge-cake package, served with a whipped-cream-fluffed sabayon sauce and — holy gluttony! — moist almond-scented macaroons. Fresh strong café filtre. Measure that climax, Dr. Masters!”
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‘Scuse me while I fan myself. That paragraph was a whole meal.
As critic, Greene worked anonymously (she was famed for her floppy-hat disguises in public), visited each restaurant multiple times, and paid for her meals. She also followed her appetites where they led, which was sometimes into bed with chefs. She solved the conflict like a journalist, with full disclosure. A 1977 review headlined “I Love Le Cirque But Can I Be Trusted?” chronicled both the evolution of the restaurant and Greene’s trysts with chef de cuisine Jean-Louis Todeschini. Racy, but relevant — Greene used what she learned about cooking and restaurants through the relationship to enlighten the reader.
(She also slept with Elvis Presley, one of many dalliances described in the memoir “Insatiable: Tales From a Life of Delicious Excess.” She once referred to herself in an interview as having been “single and lusty in that wonderful moment between the pill and the plague,” a turn of phrase that deftly conjures decades of womanly New York experience.)
Meanwhile, in 2002, Powell was having a Gen X crisis. (Like all good Gen X crises, it involved temping, depression, and nearing 30.) To escape “secretarial ennui,” she started cooking her way through Child’s masterwork, writing about the process, and posting her thoughts online — “where anybody can see it,” she told her skeptical mother, according to the book that resulted (also called “Julie and Julia”). Her writing was honest, confessional. It wasn’t poetry; it was more workaday, diaristic. She made no bones about presenting herself as a flawed human. In fact, she seemed to revel in it. She wrote about her husband, her boring job, being young in New York. She ranted. She cursed. She cooked. In other words, Powell had a food blog.
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She was an early entrant to the oeuvre: Chowhound, often considered the first food blog, started in 1997. Cookbook author and pastry chef David Lebovitz followed in 1999, featuring recipes, musings, tales from his expat life in Paris, all the distinctly first-person hallmarks of the deluge that would follow in the next five or so years. Powell’s approach — cookbook as framework — was novel. It would prove to be influential, with “cooking my way through X” becoming a regular format: There were blogs by people cooking their way through the Alinea cookbook, the entire Ina Garten repertoire, and so on. Even more influential, though, was her voice. She wasn’t so much writing as a writer as she was as a reader’s friend — frank, funny, relatable.
After her Day 1 post (bifteck sauté au beurre and artichauts au naturel), Powell wrote, “I got thirty-six hits. I know I got thirty-six hits because I went online to check twelve times that day at work. Each hit represented another person reading what I’d written. Just like that! At the bottom of the entry there was a spot where people could make comments, and someone I’d never even heard of said they liked how I wrote!”
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Sigh. It was all so heady, so innocent, back then. (And I need to digress here, in real sadness: Powell wrote a second, darker book, “Cleaving,” in 2009, about butchery and the challenges of marriage. When she died last week of cardiac arrest, she was trying to make progress on writing something new — this according to her posts on Twitter, a medium perfectly suited to her style. On it, she also wrote about her ongoing depression and a recent bout with COVID. Her feed has now turned into a debate about whether the virus or the vaccine somehow caused her death, with anti-vaxxers joking about comeuppance because last year she made a cruel and tasteless comment about COVID killing “some of the right people,” those who refused to get vaccines or wear masks. One has to search for the comments offering condolences, remembrances, celebrations of the joy Powell’s writing brought her readers. I would say for the comments expressing the normal human emotions, but this darkness is normal too. And it’s out and about, on a spree.)
Sample from a blog entry, Oct. 1, 2002: “My friends, I confess to backsliding. I have committed the sins of sloth and indolence; at least, I must have, although I can’t remember a time in the past month when I haven’t been running around like a chicken with its head cut off. Because I am failing on all fronts. In the past week I have failed as a secretary, as a tenant, as a housekeeper, as a wife, as a daughter, as a cook, and, dear readers, as a blogger. I have insufficiently cleaned ovens and had my deposit taken away from me. I have disturbed my family that loves me by moving into a hellhole of an apartment. I have produced substandard briefings. I have quailed before the thought of cooking and, God forgive me, ordered Domino’s pizza instead.”
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Readers loved it. Critics did not. In a New York Times review of the book “Julie and Julia,” David Kamp (author of bestseller “The United States of Arugula” and others, including a series: “The Food Snob’s Dictionary,” “The Wine Snob’s Dictionary,” and several other snob’s dictionaries) dismissed it as chick-lit for cosmo drinkers, as opposed to the “genuine” lit he thought it had the potential to be. “‘Julie and Julia’ still has too much blog in its DNA: it has a messy, whatever’s-on-my-mind incontinence to it, taking us places we’d rather not go.”
Who is this “we,” one wonders. The book sold more than a million copies.
Greene referenced George Eliot and classical music; Powell called upon John Hughes and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” But both were irreverent and self-aware. And both ignored the expectations and conventions, the male gaze and snobbery, to inhabit and express themselves. Like writers do.
Devra First can be reached at devra.first@globe.com. Follow her @devrafirst.