“Most architects I know don’t know anything about cooking, and their designs are not practical for cooks!” Julia Child wrote to architect Pamela Heyne. Indeed, our contemporary kitchens are showplaces with islands, hidden appliances, and cold stone surfaces. They resemble laboratories more than the heart of the home, and they are neither cook friendly nor family friendly. American culinary icon Julia Child embraced the significance of the family meal and was devoted to sharing delicious food with friends and family at the comfortable dining table in her kitchen, a place where conversation was as important as cuisine. Pamela Heyne and Julia’s long-time food photographer Jim Scherer collaborate to share Julia’s kitchen design and lifestyle concepts in this book, which examines the kitchens in her Cambridge, Massachusetts, home; at la Pitchoune, the Childs’ French vacation retreat; and in her television studio. The authors reveal which materials, layouts, and equipment Julia preferred and why, providing practical advice interspersed with Julia’s inimitable, wry humor. They bring Julia’s wisdom into the contemporary kitchen, exploring current trends, including modern green sensibilities, and varied styles of kitchens, featuring architectural designs by Heyne, Jacques Pepin’s kitchen, a renovation Julia Child consulted on for PBS’s This Old House, several celebrity home kitchens, and more.

This book demonstrates the ways in which the kitchen—the centerpiece of domesticity and consumerism—was deployed as a recurring motif in the ideological and propaganda battles of the Cold War. Beginning with the famous Nixon–Khrushchev kitchen debate, Baldwin shows how Nixon turned the kitchen into a space of exception, while contemporary writers, artists, and activists depicted it as a site of cultural resistance. Focusing on a wide variety of literature and media from the United States and the Soviet Union, Baldwin reveals how the binary logic at work in Nixon’s discourse—setting U.S. freedom against Soviet totalitarianism—erased the histories of slavery, gender subordination, colonialism, and racial genocide. The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen treats the kitchen as symptomatic of these erasures, connecting issues of race, gender, and social difference across national boundaries. This rich and rewarding study—embracing the literature, film, and photography of the era—will appeal to a broad spectrum of scholars.