The famous homemaker will leave her Kirkland Street home in favor of a California retirement

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.”