O Say Can You See?

Last-minute gifts for history lovers

The holidays are upon us, and in case you’re still hunting for that perfect gift for the history lovers in your life, we have some ideas:

For fans of  The First Ladies:
Triple-Strand Faux Pearl necklace
Classy and classic, these pearls are a reproduction of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ signature necklace.

For your relative who’s passionate about the Founding Fathers:
The Jefferson Bible, The Smithsonian Edition: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth
This beautiful book is a reproduction of Jefferson’s bible, now on view in our Documents Gallery. The book includes an essay by curators Harry Rubenstein and Barbara Clark Smith on the history of the volume and Jefferson’s views on religion and morality.

For the wonderful cook, or one who needs a little help:
Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking
Challenge and inspire your favorite chef with Julia Child’s classic guide. For extra points, add a visit to Julia Child’s kitchen here at the museum. (But only until January 8, when it closes for renovations for a few months!)

For the history nerds of tomorrow:
Smithsonian Teddy Bear
Why settle for just any stuffed animal? This teddy bear is a replica of one of the original teddy bears, which is on view in our exhibition The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden.

For a young nature-lover:
Snowflake Bentley by Jaqueline Briggs Martin
This wonderful book for ages 4-8 tells the story of Snowflake Bentley, the first person to photograph individual snowflakes. His gorgeous snowflake pictures are in the collections of the Smithsonian Archives.

For geeks young and old:
Yoda Backpack
Do we really need to explain why this is an amazing gift?

Good luck, and happy holidays to everyone!

Megan Smith is an education specialist at the National Museum of American History.

7 ways to survive while Julia Child’s kitchen is closed for 7 months

On December 3, the museum announced the temporary closing of Bon Appetit! Julia Child’s Kitchen at the Smithsonian. The last day to see this popular exhibition, which features the 14-by-20-foot kitchen from the legendary cook’s Cambridge, Massachusetts home, will be Sunday, January 8, 2012.

The exhibition showing Julia Child’s kitchen

The next day, museum staff and volunteers will begin packing all of the tools, utensils, appliances, and gadgets that have been on display in the kitchen since Bon Appetit! opened in 2002. Everything will be carefully stored while a new and larger gallery space is prepared. In late summer, the kitchen will go back on view, with all of its parts and pieces exactly as Julia had arranged them before she donated the kitchen to the Smithsonian in 2001.

Over the course of the next several months, watch this space for news about the new exhibition. In the meantime, the museum team offers suggestions on how to cope for a few months sans Julia Child’s kitchen.

1. Visit the two NMAH websites about Julia Child: Bon Appétit! Julia Child’s Kitchen, where you can virtually explore the kitchen, its history, and many of Julia’s kitchen tools; and What’s Cooking?, which features curators’ stories of collecting the kitchen.

2. Remind yourself of Julia’s masterful cookbooks. Our favorites: Mastering the Art of French Cooking Volumes One and Two; The French Chef; From Julia Child’s Kitchen; Kitchen Wisdom; The Way to Cook; Baking with Julia; and Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home. Pick a recipe and cook it for someone or, better yet, invite someone to cook with you!

3. Make French bread (Mastering, Vol. Two). While you’re waiting for the dough to rise, watch reruns of Julia’s cooking shows on Public TV or get the DVDs of her early French Chef series.

4. Immerse yourself in Julia’s biography by reading about her life: Appetite for Life, by Noel Riley Fitch; Julia Child, A Life, by Laura Shapiro; My Life in France by Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme; As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child & Avis DeVoto, edited by Joan Reardon.

5. Cook with the museum staff—check out our previous blog posts, which reveal how we challenged ourselves to cook our favorite Julia Child recipes in 2009. Get the inside scoop from George Washington University Museum Studies students who helped the museum team conduct condition surveys of hundreds of Julia’s tools and cookware in 2011.

6. Pour yourself a glass of wine and watch Julie and Julia, the 2009 film starring Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, and Stanley Tucci, and directed by Nora Ephron.

7. Brush up on your cake baking skills, because you’ll want to bake a cake in honor of Julia’s 100th birthday on August 15, 2012. May we suggest the exquisite Reine de Saba (Queen of Sheba) cake (Mastering Vol. One, and also in The Way to Cook)?

Paula Johnson is Curator with the Division of Work and Industry at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History

Food culture, supermarkets, and packaging: A researcher’s perspective

Why is there a tiger instead of a manatee on my cereal box? And why is cereal sold in a box at all? In what ways does packaging affect the supermarket shelves we see and the choices we make? These are some of the questions I have been researching as a food historian and a member of the Food and Wine History Team.

Package colors, materials, and other design elements are very deliberate. Much like advertising, packaging appeals to our emotions and directs our attention to specific product features, like health claims or a free toy, while distracting attention from other details, like small serving sizes or questionable ingredients. Below, I’ve shared how contemplating packaging—and the unspoken dialogue between consumers and producers—is one way I try to understand the connection between supermarkets and food consumption habits in the United States.

A photograph of designers from Landor Associates studying cereal boxes in a supermarket setting, circa 1960. Landor Associates designed food packages for hundreds of brands when supermarkets were expanding in the 1950s and 60s. This photograph is held in the museum's Archives Center, Landor Design Collection [box 3.21, scrapbook 14].

When I came across a set of 7-Up bottles in a storage area, I learned that they were collected because of their relationship to a nation-wide campaign to adopt the metric system in the late 1970s and early 80s (all of the bottles are either one or two liter in size). But what struck me most about their packaging was not their size, or their experimental shape, but that the bottles were made of glass.

All soft drink bottles used to be made of glass and supermarkets were once a place where empty bottles were returned “for deposit.” In the 1950s and earlier, bottlers actually washed the empties and re-filled them. Now, of course, bottles are mostly made of plastic and recycled if it’s convenient to do so. Very few states require deposits to be paid on plastic bottles, and because the composition of plastic can vary, recycling it is less straight forward than recycling glass. Plastic is often preferred by producers and consumers, however, for its extreme versatility, lighter weight, and resistance to shattering.

Everyday discoveries in Julia Child's kitchen

Editor’s Note: Today’s post is the fourth in a series of six about the museum’s work in Julia Child’s kitchen. Anneliese Bustillo is a Museum Studies graduate student at The George Washington University.

I often claim that I can make homemade whipped cream. By that, I mean to say that I can pour heavy whipping cream into my KitchenAid Artisan mixer, turn it to the highest speed, and walk away. I return in a few minutes to check that peaks have formed. Then, I add some sugar, mix the cream a little more, and voila! Needless to say, I'm no aficionado of the culinary arts. In fact, I often take all the credit for the work of my stand mixer. I was therefore nervous the first time I entered the kitchen of cooking legend Julia Child.

My nerves quickly disappeared as I stepped inside the kitchen for the first time. It became immediately evident that Julia, too, cherished her stand mixer and the many other gadgets and appliances she owned. I was in the workspace of a professional chef, but this particular room was nothing short of warm and welcoming; I felt like I was stepping into a friend’s kitchen. Julia seemed more real to me than I ever expected.

Anyone who has visited the Bon Appétit! exhibition knows that all the corners and walls are covered with the cookware used by Julia. Every day I worked in the kitchen was full of new discoveries; I constantly learned about kitchen tools that I never knew existed. One day, I came across an object that appeared to be a small silver platter with a tall rim and a handle large enough for one finger. Over the finger loop were the initials “PCC,” those of Julia’s husband, Paul. I looked at the piece for a good five minutes, unsure of what to write in the “object name” section of the condition checklist. Finally, I gave in and searched through the records to find that this “silver platter” was in fact a wine taster. As much as I would love to say that idea crossed my mind, I was not even close.

The wine taster with the initials "PCC."

Every week in the kitchen, I had little adventures like this. There was so much to discover: Julia had salad spinners for washing greens, a knife solely to devein shrimp, a cherry pitter, and a KitchenAid stand mixer engraved with the words “Bon Appétit!” One day, I noticed that Julia had an apple slicer (just like mine!) that cores the fruit and produces eight perfectly even pieces. It may be a superfluous device, but in my mind, seeing that Julia owned one of those slicers seemed to validate that it’s a useful gadget in any kitchen. It’s these moments that made me feel closest to Julia.

The apple slicer in Julia Child's kitchen.

As we examined the objects one by one, we made notes about how it had changed since it was first accessioned and suggestions for how to best preserve the object, so that the Smithsonian can display it for generations to come. I feel as though our work has been important and necessary, but, above all else, it has been enjoyable. I imagine, years from now, I will still be gushing over having that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to step into Julia Child’s kitchen and experience the feeling that she still lives on through the room and its objects.

Anneliese Bustillo is a Museum Studies graduate student at The George Washington University.

Thanksgiving in a can

For early Thanksgiving meals, I bet someone went out and hunted a turkey, gathered some cranberries, and harvested some spinach and beans. Today, we might purchase our freshly killed turkey (“hunted” by someone else), buy a container of fresh cranberries, and get our veggies from the local farmers’ market. How we obtain the food has changed, but the ingredients are essentially the same.

It would seem that Thanksgiving dinner has evolved along a straight line, but I think it made a big detour. There was a time, in the mid-20th century, when the idea of Thanksgiving dinner was similar but the “raw ingredients” were anything but natural and basic. Sure there was turkey, cranberry sauce, and trimmings. The turkey, however, was frozen and inoculated with something mysterious to keep it moist; the cranberry sauce was striped, thanks to the indentations of the can from which it emerged; the green beans appeared more grey than green because they were covered with mushroom soup containing merely a hint of mushrooms and fried onions, also canned, that were more heavy on the flavor additives than the onion. 

It tasted delicious because it tasted like Thanksgiving and it was prepared with love. Quick, modern, and easy were the mantras, rather than fresh, local, and organic. Ignorance was bliss, and sometimes yummy.

If you are feeling nostalgic for a Thanksgiving meal the Jetsons would love, here is a favorite of the Braskich family, courtesy of Naomi Coquillon, Education Specialist at our museum. She wants you to enjoy its bright green color, and notes that in her house, it is a side dish—not a dessert!

Pistachio Fluff
2 packages instant pistachio pudding mix
1 20 oz. can crushed pineapple, drained
1 ½ cups miniature marshmallows
1 12 oz. container frozen whipped topping, thawed
½ cup chopped pecans

In a large bowl, combine pudding mix and pineapple. Add nuts then marshmallows and mix well. Fold into whipped topping.

Sprinkle with additional pecans. Serve chilled.

We hope you have a peaceful and joyful Thanksgiving. Will any artificially flavored, brightly colored, or instant recipes be enjoyed at your feast?

Kathy Sklar is the business program manager at the National Museum of American History.