We kick off our 2013 lecture series on Saturday, January 12th with CHSC President Charles Perry on “Eating My Way Across Uzbekistan”

Charles Perry will speak on his expedition to Uzbekistan to research Central Asian food shortly after the country became independent. He visited Tashkent, the Ferghana Valley, Samarkand and Bukhara, where he talked with a number of bakers and cooks and developed a taste for horsemeat sausage and steamed pumpkin dumplings. He will also discuss a poignant meeting with the family of the most famous Uzbek food writer, with whom he had corresponded in the Eighties. Perry collected Uzbek cooking equipment and will bring a qazan (hemispherical caldron), a sach (convex griddle) and a number of chekiches (bread punches).

Charles Perry is the president and co-founder of the Culinary Historians of Southern California. He was a major contributor to the Oxford Companion to Food, has served as a trustee of the annual Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, and was a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times Food Section from 1990 to 2008. He has translated four medieval Arabic recipe collections and is currently establishing the text of a fourth, based on eight manuscripts.

The program will be at 10:30am in the Mark Taper Auditorium of the Los Angeles Central Library. All programs are free to the public. Please visit our website at www.chscsite.org for more information.