Sunday, August 25th, 2013
8:00 AM to 1:00 PM
Location: Hollywood Farmers’ Market, 1600 Ivar Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90028
Event chair: Billie Connor-Dominguez
Free and open to the public, remember to bring your wallet!
We will also have magazines, culinary ephemera, menus, etc.
Parking is available at the ArcLight Theatre on Sunset: the first two hours are $3 with MARKET validation; market rate after (entrance at Ivar and Sunset). All street meters are $2 per hour on Sundays. Metering starts at 8:00 AM. Private lots in the area generally cost $5. The Market is near the Hollywood and Vine Metro Station.
For information, please call Billie Connor-Dominguez at 323-660-6399.
Join Authors Anne Willan and Amy Friedman as they discuss Anne’s new book, One Soufflé at a Time: A Memoir of Food and France with Recipes. Anne and Amy will tell the inside story of memoir writing, good food and life in France including anecdotes that did not make it into print. They will be happy to answer questions and share the secret ingredients to a long life in the kitchen.
Anne Willan has had an extraordinary career in the culinary arts and is recognized as one of the world’s preeminent authorities on French cooking. She founded École de Cuisine La Varenne in Paris in 1975, and has had more than 50 years of experience as a teacher, cookbook author, culinary historian and food columnist. She has written more than 30 books, including La Varenne Pratique, French Regional Cooking and the 17-volume, photo-illustrated Look and Cook series, showcased in her 26-part PBS program. Anne’s books have been published in 24 countries and translated into 18 languages. In May of 2013, Anne was inducted into the James Beard Foundation’s Cookbook Hall of Fame and her last book, The Cookbook Library: Four Centuries of the Cooks, Writers, and Recipes that Made the Modern Cookbook was awarded the Jane Grigson prize for outstanding literary writing by the International Association of Culinary Professionals, as well as the prize for best book in the Food History Category.
Amy Friedman is an author and creative writing teacher whose books include Desperado’s Wife: A Memoir, Kick the Dog and Shoot the Cat, and Nothing Sacred: A Conversation with Feminism. She also works as a ghostwriter and editor. Her articles, essays and stories have appeared in magazines, newspapers and numerous anthologies. Since 1992 Amy has written the internationally syndicated newspaper feature “Tell Me A Story” for Universal UClick, a column that has spawned two book collections and three audiobooks. Amy lives in Los Angeles with her husband, teacher and writer Dennis Danziger.
Rachel Laudan is author of Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (University of California Press, 2013), a book that uses her knowledge of farming from her English upbringing, her experience living, cooking and dining on five continents, and her scholarly career as a historian of science and technology with a PhD from the University of London to challenge the agrarian, romantic, domestic myths of the contemporary food movement. Since she left academia to write about food history and politics, she has also written the prizewinning Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary History, served as Scholar-in-Residence for the International Association of Culinary Professionals, and given keynote addresses at numerous academic and culinary conferences. After fifteen years in Mexico, she now lives in Austin, Texas.
Tonight we are elevating the Christmas spirit with an elegant menu reflective of how the upper crust once dined during the Dickens era. Charles Dickens wrote extensively about food and in today’s time would have been considered a ‘foodie.’ With the holiday season upon us, A Christmas Carol and other Dickens stories remind us that kindness, generosity, and compassion are the values we should honor most.
Charles Perry is a well-known food historian. He wrote the chapter on the Middle East for the American Historical Assn.’s forthcoming textbook on food history, has translated four medieval cookbooks from Arabic and is at work on a fifth, which will be published by NYU Press. A great-grandson of Gold Rush pioneers, he has also studied California food history and is the president and a co-founder of the Culinary Historians of Southern California.
Liz Williams is the Founder, President and Director of the SoFab Institute (SoFAB.) SoFAB opened its doors in June of 2008, in the Riverwalk, overlooking the Mississippi River in downtown New Orleans, LA. She has served as culinary consultant for festivals in Colombia and France, as well as in the US. Much of her research and writing centers on the legal and policy issues related to food and foodways. Her book, The A to Z Encyclopedia of Food Controversies and the Law, was published in 2010. Her latest book, New Orleans: A Food Biography was published by Alta Mira in 2013. Liz served for five years as the President & CEO of the University of New Orleans Foundation, during which time the foundation established and opened the world acclaimed D-Day Museum (now the World War II Museum) and the Nims Center (a film studio with motion capture laboratory.) The Foundation also developed and managed the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. She also practiced law with an emphasis on nonprofit organizations and giving.
Food Preservation is something that most of us take for granted. We have access to fresh food twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week without regard to seasonality or geography. We have pantries and refrigerators that can store weeks worth of food with no effort. Food preservation is something we, especially in the United States, simply don’t have to think about. But this is a relatively unique set of circumstances in human history. We are less than 100 years from the time that food preservation was an issue of major concern for every household. There were no refrigerators, markets (there were no “super” markets) had no freezer sections, and eating local wasn’t a choice, but the only option. Preserving food was something that every household had to engage in, if everyone was to eat. Learn about the rise of food preservation from the dawn of history, the decline in the mid-20th century and why it is rising again.
Erica J. Peters is an independent food historian who helped found the Culinary Historians of Northern California in 2004 and has been the director ever since. She is also the author of San Francisco: A Food Biography (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013) and Appetites and Aspirations in Vietnam: Food and Drink in the Long Nineteenth Century (AltaMira, 2012). Peters received her bachelor’s degree in history and literature from Harvard University and her doctorate in history from the University of Chicago. She has taught at Stanford University, Santa Clara University, San Francisco State University, and the University of Maryland University College. She has published numerous articles on the history of food and drink and has presented at conferences across the United States and abroad. She is currently co-editing a collection of articles about food in French history and continuing her research into San Francisco’s culinary history. 
