Please join us as Los Angeles based artist Hande Sever presents Eating History, Recipes I Remember From. She will be serving Ashure dessert, which she has prepared, followed by a reading from Mukemmel Yemek Kitabi (The Excellent Recipe Book). This event will be held on Saturday October 12th at 12:00 pm at Art Salon Chinatown.
Food items with their sensual properties trigger the memories of the past through smell, taste and hearing as they become important tools to remember and reconstruct the past in present conditions. Eating History, Recipes I Remember From will trace the conditions of erasure and resistance through recipes and stories from a cookbook that Hande Sever borrowed from her grandmother when she first left Istanbul.
Ashure has been called “the oldest dessert in the world”!
This book is a recent edition of Vaginag Purad’s Mukemmel Yemek Kitabi – an Ottoman cookbook published in 1926 with Armenian alphabet in Istanbul. The number of Turkish books published with Armenian alphabet in Istanbul decreased since 1915; but it continued in different cities such as Tabriz, Aleppo, Damascus, Cairo, Beirut, Alexandria, Paris, Marseille, Buenos Aires, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and New York.
Vaginag Purad’s cook book Mukemmel Yemek Kitabi/The Excellent Recipe Book, was first published in Istanbul (1926) in Armenian by Takvor Mardirosyan Publication House. It features Vaginag Purad’s memories of working as a chef during the Ottoman times and 600 recipes from him.
Hande uses recipes from this book often. She will prepare a limited number of servings of Ashure to share at the event to uncover resistance through cooking and discuss the cultural and political history of cookbooks, food and their journey.
First come, first served, Due to the limited quantity of Ashure!