Maybe you’re thinking of redoing your kitchen. Or considering spending a fortune on the latest luxury surfaces and glitzy appliances. Or even trying to find a way to hide every pot and pan behind closed doors.
Before you write the check, pay attention to the 14-by-20-foot kitchen that has just been installed at the National Museum of American History in full view of the museum-going (and Web-viewing) public.
Pots and pans hang on pegboard from floor to ceiling. Ladles and sieves and measuring cups and scissors and funnels and graters and strips of knives too. Just about every standard tool a kitchen artist needs is visible and at the ready. The blender is always out waiting to whir into action, and the electric mixer, too, and the old toaster oven and the industrial-gray trash can. The main gesture toward high style is a 1950s six-burner restaurant stove.
It’s a sensual space too — just the right backdrop for enjoying a meal with friends and family. Tea tins and honeys on a countertop invite a quick cuppa. The curvy Norwegian kitchen chairs beg to be touched. The blues and greens of the cabinets are sunny, upbeat complements to the butcher-block work surfaces. And it’s large enough for several people to cook in at the same time.
This is Julia Child’s kitchen.
Everything in its place
“It’s a wonderful classic home kitchen,” said Geoffrey Drummond, who has spent many hours there producing four of Child’s cooking series. “Everything is out and visible, and labeled: the canisters, the famous pots and pans on the pegboard, the baking utensils in the pantry. There’s nothing frou-frou. It’s not like a designer kitchen where you think, `Did anybody ever cook in here?’ There’s a real sense of community and comfort.”
As it happens, for the last 40 years, the primary person cooking in there has been the most influential chef and cooking teacher in the United States. So naturally, the Smithsonian Institution wanted it.
“This kitchen is where she’s cooked for herself, her friends and the American people,” said Rayna Green, co-curator of the project. “It stands for her singular and absolutely considerable influence on the way Americans think about food and its history.
“We also think the kitchen is a rich context for changes in the lives and work of women in the 20th Century,” Green said. “It’s like an onion: When you peel back the layers, it’s just an American kitchen for an American family in later 20th Century, but it’s also the kitchen of a professional woman who like that basic American family kitchen has grown and changed, whose life evolved like that kitchen, from that of an ordinary cook to one of the most influential professionals in the country who grew and changed and brought everybody else along with her. And it’s a public kitchen, one most Americans think they’ve been in.”
Last summer, Smithsonian historic restoration specialists disassembled the room from the Cambridge, Mass., house that the 89-year-old Child recently gave up for the warmer climes of a retirement community in Santa Barbara, Calif. They then packed it up and shipped it–cabinets and cookware and all–to Washington, D.C., where its installation will be the first major project of the museum’s American Food and Wine program. (The house itself goes to Smith College. Child’s papers go to the Schlesinger Library on the history of women in the United States at the Radcliffe Institute for Advance Study.)
Nothing to hide
The thing that many museum-goers are likely to notice is Child’s just-about-everything-in-plain-sight approach. But its significance is considerable.
“Before then, the whole idea was that everything was sanitized behind closed closet doors,” said Judith Jones, Child’s longtime friend and editor, who has eaten and cooked in the kitchen since she edited “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” in the early ’60s. “But Julia hung them out where you could see things and grab them quickly — and that wasn’t part of our notion about kitchens. I really think it was Julia who started the whole trend.
“I think she started the whole vogue of getting a chef’s stove too. The gas jets were strong, fierce and boiled water quickly. I hadn’t seen them and immediately got one and still have it.”
If the kitchen mirrors Child’s approach to cooking, it also reflects personal needs and choices, such as the 38-inch counter height comfortable to the over 6-foot-tall Child; the blues and greens so familiar from the colors of Provence, and the country furniture of Norway where Child’s husband, Paul, was posted as a foreign service officer; the pegboards, kept in order by Paul Child’s outline drawings of each individual pot and pan, so that his wife and the many people who cooked in her kitchen over the years could put things away; the ’60s-style Marimekko oilcloth (topped as well by clear plastic sheeting) on the kitchen table.
And it also hints at the way American cooking and eating developed, and the increasing number of choices open to us no matter what brand of tea or artisanal olive oils or European culinary gadget we crave.
Kitchen as exhibit
Child’s kitchen and its accompanying exhibition will be set up on the first floor of the museum, under the eye of co-curators Green and Paula Johnson along with program director Nanci Edwards. (The three have taken a hands-on approach. Green, for example, washed 1,200 objects before they were packed.)
Film footage taken by Drummond and Child’s longtime TV crew interviewing her on her own stories and legends as well as the history of the kitchen–the people who have cooked there, memorable meals, the knives and gadgets that intrigue her–will be incorporated into the exhibition.
Web site viewers can access it at www.americanhistory.si.edu. The museum is looking for money for a permanent exhibition and accompanying public programs.
“I want Julia to be able to come in here and sit down,” says Green, looking at stacks of packing crates in the otherwise empty gallery the other day. “And it will be her kitchen.”
