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

*Editor's Note (2) : We received a review copy of As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto, and a paragraph from the Introduction describes the book — which we recommend you either purchase or borrow from a library; the letters were selected and edited by Joan Reardon, the book published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2010.

"The letters included in this collection begin when Julia Child was living in Paris with her husband, Paul, and wrote a fan letter to Avis DeVoto's husband, Bernard, which Avis answered. They continue until 1961, when volume 1 of Mastering the Art of French Cooking was published. Beyond telling the warm and human story of a friendship between the two dynamic women, they document the evolution of the book from its inception to its publication. They cover a wide range of other topics as well, including the various foods that were available in the United States at the time and their quality; other cookbooks and magazine recipes; the pitfalls and successes of a career in the foreign service; the national temperament and character of the French, Germans, Norwegians, and English; even the Kinsey Reports on human sexuality — all juxtaposed against the hysteria of the McCarthy era and the general political climate of the 1950s and 1960s, mirroring to a surprising degree some of the issues of the current American scene."

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