Culinary Historians and Homebrew this Weekend

Folks, I'm back at school and by rights I ought to be studying my butt off with no side distractions whatsoever. And I'd be stickin' to that plan too, except now we're gettin' into the time of the year when stuff gets interesting. Real interesting.

For starters, SoCal Culinary Historian Charles Perry switched up his Saturday talk. Instead of Spanish BBQ, he's goin' for the rise of the restaurant.   Here's the skinny on that one:

Dinner in the Exploding City

Saturday, September 10th, 2011 – 10:30 AM at the Los Angeles Public Library

Mark Taper Auditorium, Downtown Central Library, 630 W. 5th St.

Free and open to the public

Charles Perry presents…

“Dinner in the Exploding City: Los Angeles Restaurants 1830-1930″

Before the famous Hollywood restaurants of the 1930s, there was a restaurant scene in Los Angeles – in fact, a swift series of scenes, from tamales around the old Plaza and French restaurants in adobes to the Croatian-owned places of the 1870s and 1880s. In the 1890s there were temples of haute cuisine, 24-hour diners and Japanese-owned 10-cent dinner houses, and in the 1900s, L.A. spawned the cafeteria and the theme restaurant. Every decade seemed to forget the previous one … a pattern that has continued.

Charles Perry is a fourth-generation Southern Californian. After (or despite) majoring in Middle Eastern Languages at UC Berkeley, he was an editor at Rolling Stone Magazine from 1968 to 1976. In 1978 he returned to Los Angeles as a food writer and worked in the L.A. Times Food Section from 1990 to 2008. He is the president and a co-founder of the Culinary Historians of Southern California.

 Programs, except where noted, are 10:30 a.m. at the Mark Taper Auditorium, Central Library, 630 West Fifth Street, Los Angeles 90071-2002. For more information, please call (213) 228-7241. Parking at the Central Library on Saturday and Sunday is $1.00 during library hours at 524 S. Flower St., with a library card and validation from the Information Desk in the library. Library cards are free.

Programs are free and open to the public, unless otherwise noted.

You do need to bring an id to get your library card, but an LA City Library card, besides the fact that you can use it at a bunch of locations, also gives you access to a bunch of internet resources. Well worth having.

And then I'm going to study for the next 30 hours straight.

Now some time back, Jane's Uncle Doug gifted us with a bunch of brewing equipment. We've made mead of course, and some beer, but we could really use a refresher course. Our primary brew shop is the Home Wine Beer and Cheesemaking Shop in Woodland Hills, home to the Cellar Masters and the Maltose Falcons. But it's kind of a haul to get out there. So we signed up for a new place that just opened in Eagle Rock for a Sunday evening class. If all goes well, there'll be a post on that soon. If all goes badly, there'll be a post on that soon.