Pushing thirty, living in a rundown apartment in Queens and working at a dead-end secretarial job, Julie Powell is, in a word, stuck. In her desperate search for an escape, she comes up instead with The Project - a deranged assignment, to take her mother's dog-eared copy of Julia Child's 1961 classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking and cook all 524 recipes. In the span of one year. At first she thinks it will be easy. But as she moves from the smooth sailing of Potage Parmentier into the obscure culinary backwaters of calves' brains, she realizes there's more to Mastering the Art of French Cooking than meets the eye.For every triumphant Bifteck Saute au Beurre there is a disastrously soupy Creme Plombieres. Still, with Julia's stern warble steady in her ear, Julie carries on. She haunts the city's butchers buying kidneys and sweetbreads, whilst her husband endures the crying fits and midnight dinners. Together they discover the importance of blanching bacon, the trick to extracting marrow from bone, and the (kinky) thrills of eating liver. And somewhere along the line she realizes something has changed. With spectacular humour and a dash of hysteria, she begins to master the fine art Julia has really always been about - the art of living with gusto.