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.”