Julia Child's Kitchen
Julia Child (1912 to 2004) · 1961 to 2001
Through three doorways, each set in the actual door frames of a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, you look into a cheerful blue-green kitchen where copper pans hang on pegboard walls and a big commercial stove waits for someone to light it. It is the kitchen of Julia Child, the woman who taught Americans to cook French food through her book Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television series The French Chef, which began in 1963. She cooked here for forty years, filmed three television series in it, and when she moved to California in 2001 she gave the entire room to the Smithsonian, down to the last whisk.
Everything is where she left it. Look at the pegboard, where her husband Paul drew an outline around each pan so it would always go back in the same place. The counters are five centimetres higher than standard, because Julia was six feet two inches tall. The eight-burner Garland restaurant range came from a hotel; the old television in the corner sat on the counter so she could watch the news while she cooked. Notice the plastic and wooden implements crowded in jars, the well-worn table where she ate with friends, and the ordinariness of much of it. This is a working kitchen, not a showroom.
Museum staff photographed and numbered more than twelve hundred objects, took the room apart and rebuilt it here in 2002. Julia herself came to the opening and pronounced it correct. Since 2012 it has been the entrance to FOOD, an exhibition on how American eating changed after 1950, with television, supermarkets, immigration and the wine industry. Julia's kitchen is the perfect beginning, because it is where so much of that change was broadcast from.
Did You Know? The counters are built higher than normal because Julia Child was six feet two inches tall.
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