Bon Appetit! Julia Child's Kitchen at the Smithsonian
A picture of her kitchen
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Opening the Doors to Julia Child's Kitchen
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By Judith Weinraub
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 19, 2002; 2:42 PM
Long lauded as the woman who taught Americans how to cook--and take pleasure in cooking--Julia Child became an official national icon today when she untied the apron strings of an exhibit that has reconstructed her Cambridge, Mass., kitchen on the first floor of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.
"It's a tremendous pleasure to be here and see that kitchen – I thought I'd seen the last of it," said Child, obviously moved by the occasion and somewhat frail from three recent back operations. "I wish I could come in and turn everything on; it looks exactly right."
Child, who turned 90 last Thursday, donated the kitchen to the museum last year before moving into a retirement community in Santa Barbara in her home state of California.
"They asked me for it," she said. "How could anyone say no?"
Late last summer and fall, Smithsonian staffers photographed, measured, sketched and catalogued the kitchen. Then in November and December, they packed it up in more than 50 crates and sent it to the museum, which has been reassembling it since January. It is now part of the museum's permanent collection and will remain on display through February 2004.
An open straightforward space where she cooked with family, friends and some of the country's top chefs – and the set for several of her television series – the 14 by 20 foot kitchen is well-known to almost anyone interested in cooking. She boned chicken there, pressed duck, coddled eggs, minced garlic, peeled tomatoes, stewed beef. (Pastries were made in a separate cooler area just off the kitchen.)
"We hope visitors will keep coming and learning the lessons she's been trying to teach us all these years," said Rayna Green, co-curator of the exhibit. "To come back to the kitchen, to make it the heart of the household, to move away from packaged food, to make the kitchen the social center of your household and to understand it ought to have that meaning."
Clearly the work space of an active cook, the room houses the culinary equipment Child relied on for decades (she has started over in Santa Barbara) as well as the curvy Norwegian kitchen furniture she and her late husband Paul loved. The cabinets, which are painted in Mediterranean blue and green, set off maple countertops.
A practical environment in which two or three cooks could work without bumping into each other, it reflects Child's no-nonsense attitude to her work. There is nothing particularly fancy here. Just about every standard tool is visible and in easy reach. "I like the idea of having everything at hand, of being able to just reach for [something] and it's there," she said.
Pots and pans hang on pegboard, '60s style, from floor to ceiling (Paul Child, who designed the kitchen in 1961 and died in 1994, originally drew their outlines on the pegboard for easy storage and retrieval). Measuring cups, funnels, graters, sieves, ladles and magnetic bars holding knives are just where she needed them to be. Her blender and food processor sit on a countertop so they never have to be lifted up or down. Spoons, spatulas and forks are stored in ceramic crocks within easy reach of the late 1950s six-burner range.
"It's not a styled kitchen or a Martha Stewart kitchen," said Geoffrey Drummond, who produced her last four television series. "It's simple, functional, complete, a place to enjoy family and friends. It's a kitchen that harkens back to what one grew up with – but there's good food coming out of it."
The Smithsonian exhibit is not the only place Child or her work can be seen in Washington. A photograph of her when she was a young file clerk working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Ceylon (present day Sri Lanka) is on view at the new International Spy Museum on F Street in the Penn Quarter.
Child worked for the OSS after graduating from Smith College in 1934, a stint writing ad and public relations copy for a furniture store in New York and a couple of years of what she has described as "just slopping around Washington." She was in Ceylon and then China with the OSS, predecessor to the CIA, when she met and married her husband, whose job eventually took them to France, inadvertently changing the course of American culinary history.
(Last year, when the 40th anniversary edition of her landmark "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" was released, she told the Washington Post's Food section that her husband married her in spite of her terrible cooking. "After we were married I went into it seriously with Gourmet magazine and 'The Joy of Cooking' as my guides," she said. "But my cooking really began in France. I'd never made mayonnaise or a cake or a souffle or anything like that.")
In Paris, Child and a new French friend Simone Beck joined a group of American GIs taking advanced classes in the basement of the famed cooking school, the Cordon Bleu. Everyday Child exhibited her growing skills to her husband when she dashed home to prepare an elaborate lunch for him before returning to class. Then in 1950, with another French woman Louisette Bertholle, Child and Beck established L'Ecole des Trois Gourmandes (the school of the three hearty eaters) teaching cooking classes of their own in Child's kitchen.
The recipes they used became the basis for the groundbreaking "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." Volume 1 appeared in 1961, and volume 2, written with Beck, in 1970. The books – the first of 12 more – and the precise way in which Child wrote the recipes not only showed Americans how to cook in the French manner; with their emphasis on actually teaching readers how to recreate the recipes, they also changed the way cookbooks were written.
But it was her television series that made her a star. Starting in 1963 with "The French Chef", the shows highlighted her casual style, and instinct for lively improvisation when things went wrong.
Her admirers range from people who just read cookbooks to the most experienced chefs. "Without Julia Child, Americans would be 50 years behind," said White House Pastry Chef Roland Mesnier, as he peered into the kitchen at the opening reception Sunday evening. "She's the one who spent countless hours developing recipes and baking bread and finding the right pots and pans to bring back to this country. What she told us years ago is still correct. She taught us to laugh at our mistakes and mishaps and learn from them. I loved to watch her – and I learned many tricks from her. She really influenced many people in our profession – I am one of them, and I'm not ashamed to admit it."
'Bon Appetit! Julia Child's Kitchen at the Smithsonian' is on exhibit at the National Museum of American History, 14th Street and Constitution Avenue NW through February 2004. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. daily except Christmas. For information, call 202-357-2700 or visit americanhistory.si.edu.
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