Julia Child’s pots and pans have left the building.

Once proudly featured at Copia, Napa’s now-bankrupt center for food, wine and the arts, the cookware went to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

Recently, the Smithsonian added Child’s cookware to its installation of Child’s actual kitchen from her Cambridge, Mass. home. Apparently, the museum always wanted the cookware, but Copia beat it to the punch. So it remained on display at Copia until the center filed for bankruptcy in December of 2008.  

Child had longstanding ties to Copia founders Robert and Margrit Mondavi and was an honorary trustee of Copia. In 2002, Child lent her name to the Copia restaurant Julia’s Kitchen.

The cookware arrived at Copia prior to the month-long celebration of Child’s 90th birthday in August 2002. At a black-tie event, the downtown center unveiled more than two dozen pieces of her French copper cookware. Afterwards, the pieces remained on display within Copia’s permanent food-related exhibition, Forks in the Road.

The installation also included the original blue pegboard wall with an outline for each individual pot or pan. Eventually, Copia relocated the cookware and wall to the area between Julia’s Kitchen and a café.

“Visitors would come to Copia and actually ask where the pots and pans were. They had heard about them and wanted to see them,” Ainslie Bruneau, Copia’s former vice president of visitor experience, said.

Child “was an American icon and I think (the pots) were symbolic of what she meant to people. They really resonated with people,” she said.

While Child didn’t visit the facility often, visitors loved to see her at Copia, Bruneau said. Heads would turn at hearing her unmistakable voice.

Copia President Joe Fischer pointed out that the cookware never actually belonged to Copia. It was on loan from the Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts based in Santa Barbara.

“On Copia’s closing, the foundation’s representatives said that they wanted them all shipped back to their offices and indicated that they were considering marrying them with other items at the Smithsonian,” Fischer said. About 50 of Child’s cookbooks were also returned, he noted. The handover occurred between January and March.  

“When Copia, much to everybody’s intense disappointment, began its unwinding ... the family decided that Julia would want the kitchen to be reunited” at the Smithsonian, Susy Davidson, coordinator of the Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts, said.

“We were honored to have her cookware and a portion of her library to use while we were open,” Bruneau said. The Smithsonian is a fitting home for the collection, she said. “It’s in place where millions of visitors will have an opportunity to see them. I can’t imagine a better resolution.”

“In a way, the kitchen is complete again,” Davidson said. “It’s very exciting and the Smithsonian has done a lovely job of incorporating the pots almost as they were.”