Julia Child Notebooks

The Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts was created by Julia Child in 1995. Its mission is to honor and further her legacy, which centers on the importance of understanding where food comes from, what makes for good food, and the value of cooking. Headquartered in Santa Barbara, California, the Foundation is a nonprofit that offers grants to support research in culinary history, scholarships for professional culinary training, and food writing and media; it also bestows the annual Julia Child Award.  The Smithsonian Institution has housed Julia Child’s kitchen almost continuously since 2002. It was donated by Julia in 2001 when she moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts, back to California. Smithsonian curators collected the entire contents of the kitchen and assembled everything in the museum exactly as Julia and her husband Paul had arranged it.