Reunited Kitchen with Copper Pots

Child and her husband, Paul, bought most of the pieces in Paris between 1948 – 1952, often at the venerable cookware shop E. Dehillerin on rue Coquillière. Paul designed an ingenious peg-board system so the gleaming pots and pans could hang within easy reach—and in full view—of television viewers when Julia filmed three of her PBS series in the Cambridge, Massachusetts, kitchen. The set quickly became an icon of American food television and a symbol of Child’s insistence on professional-grade tools for home cooks. Just weeks before she donated the rest of the Cambridge kitchen to the Smithsonian in 2001, Child promised the copperware to COPIA: The American Center for Wine, Food & the Arts in Napa, California. From the center’s opening in late 2001 until COPIA’s bankruptcy and closure in December 2008, the pots were a star attraction, letting West-Coast visitors examine the dents, rivets and hand-tinned interiors that told decades of culinary stories. When COPIA folded, the Child family estate asked the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History to “bring the copper home.” The museum trucked the 30-plus pieces across the country and officially unveiled them on July 29 2009, the day after announcing their arrival in a press release. The spectacular copper wall was re-installed exactly as Paul had laid it out, completing the 14-by-20-foot kitchen tableau that had gone on view in 2002. Today the reunited kitchen—over 1,200 objects strong—anchors the museum’s “FOOD: Transforming the American Table” exhibition. Visitors can stand inches from Child’s whisk-scarred sauté pans and stockpots, hear clips of The French Chef, and trace how one woman’s joy in French technique reshaped everyday American cooking. The preservation of these pots underscores the broader mission of using material culture to explain how foodways, technology and media converge in shaping national life.