“Find something you’re passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it.” – Julia Child

If you have been to the Washington DC area, you may know that the Smithsonian Institute is comprised of eleven museums and galleries on the National Mall plus six other museums and the National Zoo. All of them are free to visiting guests which really is amazing. The newest addition Museum of African American History requires a timed entry ticket due to popularity at peak times, but still no charge.

At the Museum of American History is one of the museums I saw when I was there last year. The museum has more than 1.8 million objects in its collection and more than three shelf-miles of archival collections. Many items of Popular Culture like Archie Bunker’s chair, Fonzie’s leather jacket, Kermit the Frog and Dorothy’s ruby slippers just to name a few.

The first exhibit we visited was the Food – Transforming the American Table 1950 – 2000. This is where you find Julia Child’s Kitchen. It is the starting point of the exhibit which covers almost 50 years of food and food trends. As a person who is interested in food it could have easily become a problem because you could spend hours in this one exhibit and there was so much ground to cover, and it was only our first museum. Good walking shoes are a must for multiple museum visits and a city like Washington.

There are a lot of interesting facts around the display like all of the cupboards and working surfaces were lowered due to her height. The whole room is a ‘view only’ as everything is authentic. All of the tools, equipment and appliances are arranged in exactly the way they were when Julia Child turned them over to the museum in 2001.

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To celebrate her birthday I will end with this quote from Julia Child

“A party without cake is just a meeting”