Julia Child Turns in Her Apron

It’s hard to believe the old-fashioned kitchen at 103 Irving Street fed a revolution in American cooking. The mint-colored cabinets and the room’s yellows, greens and browns give the kitchen a warm, subdued quality. Many of the walls are covered by pegboard, on which hang beaters, ladles, strainers and spatulas. An entire wall shines with copper pots and pans.

Crocks sitting on one shelf are labeled with masking tape: “spoonery,” “forkery,” “spats., misc.” Instructions on the wall next to the sink warn, “No grease, no fat, no artichoke, no husks. Beware onion skins.” Above the door hangs a colorful ceramic piece sent by a fan wishing visitors “Bon Appetit.”

And then, in the far corner, there’s a six-burner Garland range from 1945. Much of Julia Child’s kitchen seems to be from another era, but seeing that piece of equipment truly feels like time travel. The Garland is a beauty. It’s big and black, a rugged old unit that looks about as solid as a steam locomotive.

The room is clean and cheerful. It feels well-loved—which it has been for a long time. Child and her late husband, Paul, fell in love with the rambling Victorian residence off Kirkland Street in 1956 and moved in two years later.

This weekend, after 43 years in Cambridge, Julia Child will leave for a retirement community in her native state of California, where she has spent winters since 1980. While the quiet neighborhood near Harvard Divinity School has been a “lovely place to live,” Child, who turned 89 in August, says looking after the house has gotten to be too much.

“At my age, with the great big house, it’s better to get rid of it while I’m still in charge of everything,” she says.

Tonight, city officials and prominent local chefs will present a “Salute to Julia,” the last in a long series of farewells in her honor. The $125-a-plate dinner will benefit a scholarship fund for graduates of Cambridge Rindge and Latin School’s culinary arts program.

Billed at tonight’s farewell dinner as the local “culinary hero,” Child remains a living legend. By the time she moved to Cambridge, she had already completed most of the work on Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the legendary text she published in 1961. Her first cooking show aired on public television in 1963.

At a time when French food became chic, Child helped popularize the cuisine and bring French cooking down to earth. On television, Child was known for hacking the heads off fish, firing up her blowtorch to caramelize a creme brulee and trilling about “wonderful” and “delicious” dishes.

Besides her legacy as a TV chef and cookbook author, Child leaves behind a lifetime’s worth of papers and cookbooks in the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe. She is giving her house to her alma mater, Smith College, which plans to sell the residence.

And the kitchen—where dozens of famous chefs have come to cook, and Child has taped several of her television series—is moving to Washington, D.C., where a group of dedicated curators at the Smithsonian Institution now plans to preserve the kitchen that made Julia Child a household name.

You Can Take It With You

As Child moves west, her kitchen is heading south. Smithsonian curators will pack it up—every knife, every larding needle, every rolling pin—and then ship it 442 miles to the National Museum of American History and reconstruct it piece by piece.

Starting Monday, a crew of five specialists will arrive in Cambridge for the first round of dismantling. The team will spend a week gutting the kitchen down to the walls. A photographer will document the location of each pot and pan. Then, wearing white gloves and marking each object with a color-coded tag, the crew will label and pack away the kitchen one spoon at a time. They’ll also take the cabinets and the kitchen sink.

For an entire week, the kitchen will be filled with “museum drones at work wrapping up Julia’s fish scalers,” says Rayna Green, the curator who is organizing the project. “We will strip the kitchen, every fish scaler, the Kitchen Aid mixer, all of the stuff hanging on the walls, the small stuff.”

Snug in bubble wrap, packing peanuts and tissue paper, the utensils and gadgets that fill Julia Child’s drawers and cabinets will travel to the museum. As soon as they hit the loading dock in Washington, the boxes will go straight to an exhibit room where museum workers will unpack them in full public view. For about six months, visitors will be able to watch as each object is given its official number and is registered in the museum’s database of artifacts.

“We’ll literally unpack the crates in front of people,” Green says. “It’s museum people at work....It’s not really dramatic but, hey, it is what we do. And [museum visitors] will get some of this stuff that they’re dying to see.”

The appliances won’t be moved until early next month, but the project has already become quite a production. There’s a project manager who oversees legal and logistical requirements. Carpenters who specialize in historical reconstruction will build an exact replica of the kitchen’s walls and windows at the museum. Engineers from Canada will offer their advice on how to transport the range. All told, 20 people will work on the move and the eventual cost of a full-fledged exhibit will be around half a million dollars.

Although Green directs the museum’s American Indian Program and supervises its cultural history department, she’s also a self-described “foodie.” She and her colleagues say culinary history offers serious lessons for social historians—but she confesses to just plain liking Julia Child.

“We’re also fans,” she says. “It’s amazing to have a person who’s so public be so untainted and so unbaggaged. She’s pretty cool.”

‘Jolly’ Times

During her time in Cambridge, Child assembled an ecletic collection of gadgets and cookware. Now, as she leaves her life here behind, her cooking utensils are going their separate ways.

Most of her kitchen is going to the Smithsonian, except for one wall of copper pots that is heading to a culinary institute Child helped found in California. Assorted stoves and other household objects have been pledged to her nieces and nephews.

“She’s going home to California. I think it’s difficult for her to be leaving,” says Barbara Haber, a curator at the Schlesinger Library who has known Child for the last three decades. “She’s leaving the scene of her life with [late husband] Paul. But she’s making it very clear to people, ‘Don’t feel sorry for me. I’m going back to California and I knew I always would.’”

Indeed, during an interview at her house earlier this fall, Child still remembers fondly the “jolly” times she had taping shows in her Cambridge kitchen.

Her production team transformed the kitchen for every episode. The cabinets were taken out to make room for three television cameras. Her big Norwegian wooden table was removed and in its place was put an island. Technical equipment was located in a side room, and the cellar became a prop room—where Child once ran seven bread machines simultaneously during an episode on French bread.

On TV Child often championed bread machines and other modern inventions, such as the food processor. She also used big props, including a long, flashy “fright knife” and a massive mortar and pestle that her husband Paul once lugged home from a flea market in Paris.

She also became a convert to color television after filming 119 episodes in black and white. One of the dishes on her first color episode was a strawberry tart and, when they saw the show air, she and her husband “were so impressed we went out and bought a color TV.”

In black and white or color, the style was “loose in a way,” she says.

While her lines were not scripted, Child would usually plan the opening and closing segments to sustain the show’s excitement. It’s a philosophy she says she learned early in her television career: “You go on with a bang and you don’t want to go out with a whimper.”

Plans often went awry and, to American audiences, that was part of the charm. Child recalls one show in particular, an episode for British television entitled “Coq au Vin versus Chicken Fricassee: Sisters Under the Sauce.”

Filming got off to a messy start. Two pots of contending poultry were simmering on the stove and, just before the cameras were about to roll, Child unveiled them with a flourish. She took the covers off the pots and swung them up over her shoulders.

“I went like this,” Child recalls, swinging her hands wildly, “forgetting there was condensation. It fell on my blouse. They started and I was brushing off my blouse and giggling. So all the English thought I was drunk and that’s the last show they saw.”

Her on-air persona of informality notwithstanding, Child has long lived in the upper ranks of the serious food world. With a constant stream of events and invitations, her professional contacts have dominated her life in Cambridge—and fellow chefs will undoubtedly continue to surround her after her move to California.

“I’ve been so busy, I haven’t been very social,” Child says. “Most of my friends are in the business. It’s like a big family.”

—Staff writer Andrew S. Holbrook can be reached at holbr@fas.harvard.edu.