I
couldn’t start the day without a small celebration of the 100th
birthday of Julia Child. Jacques Pépin has written a wonderful piece about
her for the New York Times. I wrote an
essay in May, and you may remember that they are two of my favorite chefs.
I will always be indebted to Julia Child for the great
idea she had. She didn’t like being able to see the back of her refrigerator as
she went into her kitchen, so she had a bookcase built there to house her
cookbooks and Encyclopaedia Britannica, and to hide the coils. I did the very
same thing, with shelves for our Britannica, in our new house – this was in
1976! – because you would have been able to see the side of the refrigerator,
coils, dust and all, as you came in the front door. I always thought this one of the cleverest
bits of decorating inspiration I’d ever encountered. I still have the
well-illustrated article, from a May 1976 New York Times Magazine, about “The
Kitchen Julia Built”. Her kitchen was, as the article said, a model of
“practicality, chic, warmth and fun.”
 |
| Julia's kitchen circa 1976 |
The Julia Child kitchen now at the Smithsonian is the
updated one devised in the 90’s to accommodate the taping of her television
shows. I couldn’t locate a good shot of the bookcase on Google Images so I
scanned in the one from the article. I
wish I had a picture from my own kitchen in that house – three houses ago! –
that bookcase was very handy.
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