The Part Of Julia Child's Kitchen She Barely Ever Used

Julia Child achieved great success as the host of several popular cooking shows and built a cooking empire while staying true to her unpretentious cooking style and straightforward techniques. Child's kitchen design is as inspiring as her culinary successes, as it features simple organization methods that prioritize efficiency over style. Child herself told friends that she didn't like modern, minimalist, or sleek kitchen design trends and preferred a kitchen that was functional and well-used, even if it looked cluttered.  

From the pots and pans hanging from the kitchen pegboards designed by her husband, Paul, to the butcher block counters and large, practical kitchen table that subbed as a food prep space, Child's kitchen was a functional and comfortable place. Child and her team worked for hours there to develop and perfect the recipes that filled her cookbooks. Yet despite all the time she spent in her kitchen, there was one area she never really used. 

According to a 2016 Julia Child book, Child rarely used the grill top on her restaurant-style Garland gas range. Pamela Heyne and Jim Scherer, authors of "In Julia's Kitchen: Practical and Convivial Kitchen Design Inspired by Julia Child," write that the stove was purchased from a friend and was one of Child's favorite parts of her kitchen. Yet Child felt no need to use the grill top, and almost always kept it covered so that she could use the space for cooking utensils and pans. 

A grill top is a flat metal or cast iron surface on a stove. It is typically next to the stove's burners. It can be used to grill foods inside without firing up a barbecue. Unlike a griddle, a grill top or a flattop grill is heated from underneath by the heating element in the stove. Griddles are either placed over a stove's burners and heated by the burners or are electric and plugged into an outlet.

The specific restaurant-style Garland stove that Child used is not recommended for home use anymore. Because it was a commercial oven and stove, it put out way more heat than a typical residential kitchen would need. However, the brand does make pro-style and commercial-style gas and electric ranges that have a flattop grill feature. Some of the best electric range brands, like Wolf, Thermador, Mueller, Viking, and Frigidaire, make stoves with built-in grill tops or flattop grills.