• Saturday, January 9th, 2016 at 10:30 AM
• Los Angeles Public Library, Mark Taper Auditorium
• Downtown Central Library, 630 W. 5th St.
• Free and open to the public
• Charles Perry on…
• “Dried, Frozen and Rotted: Food Preservation in Northern Eurasia”

Once you head inland from the great Eurasian civilizations — Europe, the Middle East, India and China — you are in a vast, empty land where agriculture is impossible: the dry grasslands of the steppe, the pine forests and lichen barrens of the subarctic tundra and the bitterly cold arctic. Apart from some favored areas where large fish spawns make it possible to live in year-round villages, most people here have been obliged to follow a nomadic way of life.

So they have had to develop preservation methods which mostly involve drying, freezing or fermenting (in tubs, sacks or pits in the ground). For instance, both freezing and fermenting are used for preserving blood and fat (essential to survival in this climate; the average Mongol eats a pound of butter a day). On the tundra, vegetables are in particularly short supply, so inhabitants dry or freeze roots (in some places stolen from field mouse burrows) or partially digested moss from reindeer stomachs.

Because nomads are obliged to live on a low level of material culture, great ingenuity was expended on food preservation. This was not often appreciated by 18th- and 19th-century visitors, who complained about the leathery texture of dried fish, reported that fishing villages could be smelled miles away and speculated gravely on the reasons for the prevalence of tapeworm in Siberia.

Charles Perry is a well-known food historian. He wrote the chapter on the Middle East for Food in Time and Place, the American Historical Association’s 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 studied California food history and is the president and a co-founder of the Culinary Historians of Southern California.

• Saturday, February 13th, 2016 at 10:30 AM
• Los Angeles Public Library, Mark Taper Auditorium
• Downtown Central Library, 630 W. 5th St.
• Free and open to the public
• Albert Sonnenfeld on…
• “Global Warning: Macrowaves on Stormy Restaurant Seas”

Albert Sonnenfeld

Albert Sonnenfeld has degrees from Princeton University, where for 27 years he was professor of French and Comparative Literatures and longtime departmental chair. He moved to Los Angeles in 1986 to chair the department of French and Italian (for 12 years) at USC, during which time he held the M.F. Chevalier Professorship and won the prestigious Zumberge and Raubenheimer Awards. He retired in 2004.

Sonnenfeld directs the series Arts of the Table: Studies in Culinary History for Columbia University Press, where he has published Culture of the Fork (2001) and Food: A Culinary History (1999), Food is Culture (2006), and has in this series prefaced publications, A Cultural History of Italian Food; A History of Pasta; British Food and Hervé This’s Molecular Gastronomy, among others. More than thirty volumes have appeared in this distinguished series at Columbia.
Four times decorated by the French Republic, most recently as Officier dans l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres (1993) and Chevalier dans l’Ordre du Mérite agricole (2006) he completed four terms on the National Board of Directors of The American Institute of Wine and Food. In 2002, he was named editor of The FCI Review by The French Culinary Institute of New York.

• Saturday, March 12th, 2016 at 10:30 AM
• Los Angeles Public Library, Mark Taper Auditorium
• Downtown Central Library, 630 W. 5th St.
• Free and open to the public
• Deborah Prinz on…
• “On the Chocolate Trail: Faith Diffused Chocolate Around the World”

Deborah Prinz

On The Chocolate Trail

• Sunday, April 3rd, 2016 – 6:00 to 8:30 PM
• TiGeorges’ Chicken – 309 Glendale Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90026
• Members Only Event
• $45.00 per person (price includes tax and a modest tip)
• There are only fifty spaces, so reserve soon

The cuisine of Haiti is one of the most distinctive in the Caribbean, and includes Spanish, French, and African ideas. For years TiGeorges Chicken has been the only Haitian restaurant in Los Angeles, but it will close for an indefinite period in the middle of April. They will serve one last feast to us, to include acra patties, pikliz, seafood legume, griot, avocado wood roasted chicken, and the salted red snapper that is a traditional Easter dish. Chef Georges Laguerre will come out between courses to explain Haitian festivals and food traditions, and we will finish the meal with his house-roasted coffee. There will be a limited number of spaces for a kitchen tour and preparation lesson beforehand – this will begin at 2 PM.

• Saturday, April 9th, 2016 at 10:30 AM
• Los Angeles Public Library, Mark Taper Auditorium
• Downtown Central Library, 630 W. 5th St.
• Free and open to the public
• Andy Smith on…
• “Fast Food: A Global Perspective”

For better and worse, fast food is the most pervasive culinary trend of our time. At its heart are large multinational chains, running an estimated one million outlets in virtually every corner of the world, serving hundreds of millions of customers every day. Partly due to this success, scathing exposes have been published charging the industry with harming the environment, undermining the health of customers, degrading the diets of children, and underpaying its workers—to name just a few criticisms. Why has this industry has been so successful? Why have observers been so critical? And what are the options for the future?

Andy Smith

• Saturday, April 9th, 2016 at 10:30 AM
• Los Angeles Public Library, Mark Taper Auditorium
• Downtown Central Library, 630 W. 5th St.
• Free and open to the public
• Andy Smith on…
• “Fast Food: A Global Perspective”

Liz Pollock

Liz Pollock has owned The Cook’s Bookcase, in Santa Cruz, California since 2007. Her store specializes in unique books and ephemera on cooking, wine, and gardening. She is a member of the Book Club of CA, Slow Food USA, The James Beard Foundation, and the Independent Online Bookseller’s Association.

• Saturday, June 1th, 2016 at 10:30 AM
• Los Angeles Public Library, Mark Taper Auditorium
• Downtown Central Library, 630 W. 5th St.
• Free and open to the public
• Amelia Saltsman on…
• “This is Jewish Food? Who Knew?”

Amelia Saltsman traces the delicious thread of Jewish food from its biblical roots to today’s focus on seasonality and sustainability and explores the deep connection of Jewish traditions to the year’s natural cycles. Traveling the foodways of this global cuisine, she takes us beyond corned beef and kugel to a world of diverse flavors ideal for today. Whether you’re Jewish or not, observant or not, Ashkenazic or Sephardic, this culinary journey will have you saying, “This is Jewish food? Who knew?”

Amelia is the author of The Seasonal Jewish Kitchen and the award-winning The Santa Monica Farmers’ Market Cookbook. She is a frequent guest on KCRW’s Good Food, her work appears in national and regional publications, and she is a long-time member and former newsletter editor of CHSC. Amelia is the daughter of a Romanian mother and an Iraqi father who met in the Israeli army and immigrated to Los Angeles, where she was born and raised.

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When the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453, a rough nation of warriors decided to settle down a little (though their armies actually kept conquering for another two centuries) and enjoy itself — particularly with food. Culinarily, it inherited traditions from Central Asia (yogurt, the layered bread that eventually became baklava), the Byzantines (a love of fish, keen connoisseurship of spring waters) and Baghdad (they were great collectors of medieval Arab cookbooks), but they transformed everything. For instance, they scrapped the venerable medieval craze for spices and nearly abandoned the antique practice of cooking meat with fruit.

Their empire became almost as obsessed with food as China; the life of Mevlevi order (Whirling Dervishes) was permeated with food imagery, and the very symbol of the Janissaries, the Sultans’ private troops, was the regimental caldron. The Turks are still great foodies, as persnickety as the French about the quality of ingredients. It’s very hard to sell a fruit or vegetable out of season in Istanbul.

They are unique in the Middle East for their keen interest in their food history, and here is where Priscilla Mary Işın comes in. She is an Englishwoman who lives in Turkey (her last name is pronounced more or less “uh-shun”) and writes in both English and Turkish. Bountiful Empire is her harvest of the records of Ottoman cuisine. In addition to the material recorded by the Turks themselves, she has apparently read every European traveler’s awe-struck report from the 16^th through the 18^th centuries (she does not dwell on the later period of decay, when Turkey was known as the Sick Man of Europe).

The resulting picture reminds me of certain Turkish paintings, crowded with people busily doing a multitude of things, all in colorful uniforms indicating their roles. I mean, really crowded. On some pages there’s so much detail that I found myself mostly just wallowing in the lushness.

The Ottomans were a proverbially organized people, maintaining caravanserais to ease merchants’ travel and charitable kitchens called imarets. Charity and hospitality were a prominent feature (even today, a visitor notices how naturally generous the Turks are). One of the things that helps explain the success of the Ottoman armies, it emerges from Işın’s account, is that they were simply better fed than their European counterparts.

It was above all the palace cuisine that impressed people about the Ottomans. Anybody who has visited Istanbul has seen the Topkapı Palace with its twelve kitchens. (There was actually a thirteenth, just for the Sultan.) Thousands of people (4,000 in the 17^th century) were involved in feeding the palace residents, particularly catering to their raging sweet tooth. There were so many palace confectioners that they had a separate mosque from the other cooks.

As you’d expect, the Sultans had private sources for their ingredients and they got first pick of all imported ingredients. They also had regular supplies of snow and ice — what they didn’t use for cooling their sherbets and fruit compotes they sold to the public. One sultan had a room at his palace suspended over the Bosphorus with a trap door so he could fish privately at his leisure.

Istanbul was loaded with restaurants, including kosher establishments and places selling vegetarian dishes for Greek diners, who observed a lot of meatless days. For that matter, there were apparently countless holidays and life events (such as marriage, childbirth, first day of school) that called for special foods. On certain occasions, the Sultans would entertain themselves by organizing an event called a yağma (plunder), for which many plates of food and whole cooked animals would be laid out someplace and then either a military regiment or the general public would be invited to rush in and grab whatever they could. Sometimes, there might be a live bird inside the carcasses, for a rather carnivorous version of four-and-twenty blackbirds. 

Among the interesting things Işın brings up is concerns the famous dish Circassian chicken (çerkes tavuğu), which is served with a walnut sauce. (In Damascus I once met woman who came from a Circassian tribe in southernmost Ukraine, and I asked her what she ate growing up. She said, “Pasta. Chicken, chicken, chicken.”) Işın says its popularity is probably due to the fact that by the 19^th century most of the Sultans’ harem girls were the famously blue-eyed Circassians.

This is another important book of Middle Eastern food history from Reaktion Books, like the 17^th-century Persian cookbook recently reviewed on this blog. Let’s hope they do more.

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Back in the ’70s, when I was working in San Francisco, a shower of foodies arrived from Boston, many of them (such as the renowned Jeremiah Tower) recent graduates of Harvard Architecture School. They were all working through the cookbooks of Elizabeth David and had shopped at Julia Child’s favorite butcher in Boston.

I soon learned why some people call 617 the most opinionated area code in the country. The newcomers were always ready to correct my mistaken ideas, one of them being that the proper name of a vegetable I grew up calling scallop squash was cymling. I was not impressed — the squash in question looks like a bulbous mushroom cap with (wait for it) scallops around the edge, so I didn’t start using this weird East Coast word.

Many years later I looked it up and found out where it came from. It’s a form of simlin (an example of what linguists call hypercorrection, as when Bob Dylan named one of his albums John Wesley Harding, rather than Hardin).

Simlin is a word with a long history. It’s a dialect form of simenel, the medieval English pronunciation of a word which the Oxford English Dictionary says is “related in some way to the Latin simila or the Greek semidalis,” which itself is presumed to have been borrowed from the Assyrian samīdu. In ancient times it meant fine flour (not necessarily semolina), but during the Middle Ages it came to be the name of a cake made with fine flour.

So how did we get from there to the squash? Well, in England the simnel (its usual pronunciation), which has been through a daunting period when it was a pudding which was first boiled and then baked as hard as wood, became the traditional English Easter cake. In some places it was associated with Mothering Sunday, which falls three weeks before Easter and was the day when servant girls were allowed to go home, carrying a simnel with them, to visit their mothers.

As a festival dish, the simnel was made with expensive ingredients such as nuts and dried fruits and it ended up as a rich fruitcake topped with a layer of almond paste brushed with egg yolk and then stuck under a broiler or salamander to make it golden. Because of the association with Easter, it became traditional to arrange eleven balls of almond paste around the top, representing Jesus’s disciples … all, that is, except the one who fell into considerable disrepute on Good Friday.

And that’s the canonical shape of a simnel: a thick disk with knobs around the edge. It’s easy to see how Americans who used the dialect pronunciation simlin/cymling were reminded of it when they saw that delicate green summer squash.

Is this just a tall tale to get back at all the Area 617 people who thrust the word cymling at me so knowingly? No, it’s all the solid truth, I swear it. And I made a simnel today, using a recipe from Mary Berry, one of the judges of PBS’s The Great British Baking Show, and here’s how it came out. (Viz. a little overdone. Should have started checking on it after 3 minutes under the broiler.)

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As we know (and by “we,” I merely mean people who happen to know this), Chinese soy sauce is made by infecting boiled soybeans with a mold called Aspergillus sojae and then soaking them in salty water until everything turns dark brown. During the Middle Ages, the Middle East made something that tasted quite the same using raw barley dough.

It was called murri, from the Greek halmyris, “brine,” because it descended — as did Chinese soy sauce — from the widespread ancient practice of using pickling brine (derived from the making of ham, salt fish and the like) as a flavoring. How mold and barley, or soybeans, for that matter, got involved in the recipe is lost in the mists of time, but one medieval Moorish cookbook refers to a distinction that was still being made between “bread murri” (soy sauce) and “fish murri” (a fish sauce like Thai nam pla).

Murri is extinct in today’s Middle East, but we have a number of medieval recipes for it. You might want to give it a try. The rotting process is ghastly to behold, but I once took a batch to a lab which pronounced it pretty much carcinogen-free, and I think we can assume that people weren’t getting sick on it during all those centuries when murri was made.

The process starts with gathering broad plant leaves (a major landing place for mold spores); fig leaves are ideal. They must be fresh — because of preservatives, bottled grape leaves don’t work. And you have to obtain barley flour; usually you must make it yourself by grinding barley in a grain mill or the like. Then add enough water to make a dough you can form into doughnut shapes about 3 inches in diameter. Wrap the doughnuts with the leaves (the upper part of the leaf touching the surface) and put them in a loosely lidded container for a couple of weeks.

After 10 days or so, they should be covered by what the Arabic recipes refer to as “that which resembles spider webs” and mycologists call the “arachnoid net.” This, and the smell of rotting leaves, will confirm the presence of Aspergillus molds. As soon as the barley doughnuts have dried hard and are all green and black with mold, you pick off the leaves and break the barley up into pieces — the only difficult part of the procedure. Smashing into smallish pieces with a sledge hammer (in a confined space so not too much gets lost) and then blitzing them in a food processor is my technique. I wear a gauze mask, just because the air will be swirling with green mold spores.

Then mix 2 parts rotted barley with 3 parts salt and 3 parts water and put the bowl out in the open — recipes say to put it on your rooftop in the hottest part of summer — and leave it for a couple of weeks, or as long as you like, stirring it up twice a day and adding water as needed.

Voilà: It will turn brown and taste like soy sauce: not strong tamari soy but your everyday Kikkoman type. The Middle Eastern way was to flavor it with spices — fennel, saffron, caraway, fenugreek and nigella are mentioned in various recipes — and then to press out a liquid sauce. You will feel a sense of accomplishment, and you may also have enjoyed grossing out your friends during the rotting process.

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