2026, Art, Food, Kids, Stories, Uncategorized

Julia!

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Last Thursday night, YA and I headed over to the Minnesota Historical Center to see the Julia Child exhibit.  It’s been there for a bit but we just got around to it… plus the free Thursday aren’t EVERY Thursday, so it does require a little pre-planning.

I’ve seen Julia Child’s actual kitchen at the Smithsonian, but this traveling exhibit if much more extensive, covering details of her childhood, how she met her husband Paul, their life in France and, of course, her culinary journey.  There are quite a few fun bits in the exhibit:

Pots w/ smells.  There were a few pots next to copies of her most famous recipes.  When you lifted the lid, that recipe’s aroma wafted out of the pot.  Ingenious.  There was a mock-tv studio and if you stood in certain parts of the room, your image was filmed and showed up on three different screens.  Another fabulous part of the exhibit was a 12-foot high copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking; the inside of the book was projected from two different screens and every minute or so, the “page” would turn, taking your to another recipe in the book.  What a marvelous idea. 

I guess I know more about Julia Child than I thought (couple of biographies); the exhibit didn’t have anything that was a surprise about her life but it was enjoyable nonetheless.   

I had been surprised that YA had wanted to come along but she seemed to enjoy it.  We then went on to see a couple of the other exhibits that are showing right now but she didn’t want to stay for the free concert that was going on that night.  Oh well, I take what I can get!

What’s the last museum you’ve visited?  Any good biographies lately?

38 thoughts on “Julia!”

  1. My last trip was a year ago to the Art Institute with the s&h. That has always been a favorite place, but something new on this visit (to me at least) was the Tibetan Buddhist shrine room. It made me wish I lived within walking distance so I could drop in whenever.

    I am fascinated by the pots you can smell at the Julia exhibit, and now I wonder how it’s done. How cool would it be if there were a way you could be prescribed smells therapeutically.

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    2. When I had my total knee replacement surgery twenty years ago, I chose to have it at Woodwinds Hospital in Woodbury. At the time Woodwinds had only been open a few years and was pretty aggressively marketed as a state of the arts boutique hospital. According to a newspaper article I had read, well appointed private rooms, gourmet meals, and aromatherapy were all par for the course. I was sold.

      As it turned out, the meals were no more appetizing than your average institutional meal, but they were served by cheerful young person dressed as a server in a fine dining restaurant. The aromatherapy consisted of a cotton ball with a dab of lavender essential oil pinned to the front of my hospital gown with a safety pin. The facility itself was pretty nice, and the surgery was successful, so who am I to complain?

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  2. Robin and I visited three museums last week- MIA, the Julia exhibit at the History Center and the American Swedish Institute. We resolved to return to MIA at least once a month. There’s just so much to discover there.
    I had seen the Julia exhibit—by myself and more briefly—once before when my book arts club met for a presentation regarding the Minnesota Cooks collection adjacent to the larger Julia Child one.
    We went not expecting much from the current featured exhibit at ASI and we weren’t disappointed. That style of weaving just doesn’t speak to us. But we found ourselves practically alone in the mansion save for a couple of volunteer docents and, without the extensive decoration we encounter when we make our annual visit at Christmas time, we were able to focus on details of the house itself and that was thoroughly worthwhile.
    Last biography I took up was Finding Margaret Fuller by Alison Pataki. I say “took up” rather than “read” because I abandoned it after 100 or so pages. Admittedly, it describes itself as historical fiction and that often simply means that conversations have been extrapolated from historical sources, but this particular narrative indulged in some broad unhistorical mischaracterizations of some of the inhabitants, notably Thoreau and Emerson, that I found unacceptable. I should have been warned when the author commented that she had been inspired after reading American Bloomsbury by Susan Cheever. That was an historical fiction I had found similarly objectionable for the same reason. I have several Margaret Fuller biographies that are better.
    Looking forward, on my TBR pile I have a biography of Lewis Carrol by Morton Cohen and a semi-fictional novel, The Wildes by Louis Bayard.

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  4. I’m currently reading ‘Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher’ about Edward Curtis.
    He photographed American Indians in the first part of the 1900’s. And I love his photos. I have several copies.

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    1. Minnesotan Chris Cardozo, who died in 2021, was considered a foremost collector and expert on the work of Edward Curtis. At the time Cardozo was involved with a reissue of Curtis prints, there was a show of Curtis photography, the prints taken from original negatives at the Minneapolis Photo Center. I went twice.
      Here’s something about Cardozo:

      About Christopher Cardozo

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        1. Though it’s not Minnesota, it is also a photographic Chronicle, Just released by Rutgers University Press:
          Grant Castner
          The Lost Archive
          Nicholas P. Ciotola and Gary D. Saretzky

          In July 2019, staff of the New Jersey State Museum visited a cramped and dusty storage locker in Hunterdon County. Inside was a treasure trove of more than one thousand glass plate negatives. Each negative preserved an image of New Jersey at the turn of the 20th century. They once belonged to a Trenton resident who had used the plates as tools for his chosen art form. His name was Grant Castner. His art was photography.

          Castner’s glass plate negatives are a visual record of New Jersey’s social and cultural history. His many human subjects are rich and poor, young and old, Black and white. They are at work, at play, at home, and in the community. Castner also documented social change brought about by electricity, engineering, education, industry, and transportation. He captured the excitement of public amusements such as parades and fairs. He recorded the aftermath of floods, fires and other disasters. Castner also had a fondness for the outdoors. He used his camera to reflect on the beauty and tranquility that he found in the natural landscapes of New Jersey.

          This book presents the collective work of Grant Castner, an amateur artist whose place in New Jersey history was, until now, completely unknown. His photographic negatives forever preserve pinpoint moments in the past. They are time machines to another era. Let this long lost archive transport you on a visual journey into a New Jersey of days gone by.

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        2. David, It’s been quite a few years since I linked to it and so you might not have seen them but you might be interested in this collection of images taken on a trip through Europe in 1904. They’re taken from a set of large format negatives I found in the early ‘90s.

          1904 Four Boys From Volendam

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        3. Bill, I love that photo. I remember you posting it before and feeling drawn in by the wooden shoes, the cracked earth and the healthy looking children with the round faces. I still love seeing it today.

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  5. The USGA golf hall of fame in Pinehurst, NC. Small, but for a golf nut like me, lots of fun. Sandra was about 60/40 on it.

    IIRC, my last biography read was “John Adams” by David McCullough. Long but interesting. That was 18 months ago, so not recent.

    Chris in O-town

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  6. From Doris Kearns Goodwin
    The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism.
    National Museum of the United States Air Force

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  7. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    A few years ago during a trip to NYC, we visited the 9/11 Museum which was sad and marvelous. The exhibits were effective at communicating those events. They also achieved a quiet, dignified and not-maudlin atmosphere which I appreciated. We also saw the Ellis Island Museum and the Guggenheim. Disappointingly, the MOMA was closed for renovation.

    One of my favorite museums is the Mississippi River Museum in Memphis. The outdoor concrete model of the River is fascinating. The exhibits there also tell an interesting story of geology, erosion, and water.

    In Phoenix, really Chandler, AZ, a suburb of Phoenix, secreted away in the Basha Grocery headquarters, is a Western Art Museum created by the family who owns this grocery store chain. The man who created it was trading groceries for works of art in food deserts on Arizona Reservations. He ended up with a superb collection of Native work, as well as Western art and sculpture. I just looked up the link to discover that the entire collection has been donated to the Heard Museum, downtown Phoenix.

    https://eddiebashacollection.com

    I will have to scan my booklists for bios and memoirs. I knowI have read some and cannot name them now.

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  8. Boy that sounds like fun, VS – would love to see that.

    I was at our Minn. Marine Art Museum just before the closing of this exhibit, where they had a huge scroll of artwork that they advanced periodically, on special days.
    “Performed as a moving panorama, this 1,275-foot long and 8-foot high painting was separated onto four alternating spools, which were mounted in a theater or public hall for a paid performance.”

    Not a bio, but I’ve read a wonderful memoirs in the past year – I finally read Ben Logan’s The Land Remembers – Husband and I read it aloud, and it had terrific stories. Ben or Clyde – wondering if you remember reading it.

    And Margaret Renkl’s Comfort of Crows (also Late Migrations). I love her writing

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  9. I love the Marine Art Museum. Last July I came down to see the panorama on display. It’s one of the few surviving examples and even though that one depicted a whaling expedition, it gets a mention in John McDermott’s Lost Panoramas of the Mississippi .
    Though the scroll was stationary rather than unrolling and showed only a particular segment of the progressive narrative, there was a video on display that would take you through the progression.

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  10. The most recent museum I visited was the Rice County Historical Society museum in Faribault. I was there to donate a painting that was done by a former neighbor on Cannon Lake when I was quite young. The painting was of the King Flour Mill on the Cannon River on the west side of Faribault.

    I visited the MiA last April for Art in Bloom. I enjoy going there, but I don’t visit Minneapolis very often these days.

    I’m reading a biography called Daybreak Woman, by Jane Lamm Carroll. I’m not very far into it yet, but it’s interesting. Daybreak Woman was Anglo-Dakota. Her father was British Canadian, and her mother was Santee Dakota. She was born in 1812. There’s a lot of local history in this book, so I’m finding it interesting.

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  11. I watched Julia on Public television when I was in Elementary and Middle school and I was entranced and motivated to cook as she did. I think her Mastering books were some of the first books I bought at the BDalton store in Sioux Falls.

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  12. Luverne ha an interesting museum. It has the nutcracker exhibit, as well as a vintage Luverne auto from the 1920’s. There was a car manufacturer here then. It morphed into making fire trucks .

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  13. Husband is reading “The Invention of Nature” a biography of Alexander Humboldt, an explorer in South America. The author is Andrea Wulf.

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  14. Twin Cities baboons may be interested in visiting the Smallest Museum In St. Paul. It’s housed in an exterior wall of the Workhorse Coffee Shop on University Avenue near Raymond. Admission is always free. Because it is not inside a building, it is always open.

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