IPK, 20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor
A panel featuring:
Amanda Hesser, Author, New York Times Columnist
Zak Pelaccio, Chef-Owner, Fatty Crab
Laura Shapiro, Writer
Rica Allannic, Senior Editor, Clarkson Potter
This panel will be moderated by Anne E. McBride.
Recipes are ways of transmitting, translating and fixing practical cultural information. They embody the tension between standardization and improvisation, intimacy and popularity, proximity and distance, “my” culture and “other” cultures. At a time when recipes are broadcast what goals do they serve? How does technology change their form and content? What creative process does a chef, a writer or an editor follow when working on new recipes? How do we categorize recipes? The panelists will address these questions and more, looking at recipes as a practical knowledge system and mode of translation and examine the ways in which medium (oral, print and digital) and audience (size and distance) shape them.
Amanda Hesser has been a food columnist and editor at the New York Times for more than a decade. She has written two award-winning books---The Cook and the Gardener and Cooking for Mr. Latte---and edited the recently published collection of food essays, Eat, Memory. Her next book will be a compilation of recipes from the New York Times going back to the 1850's. Hesser is also a founder of Plodt.com and of the recently launched food52.com. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, Tad Friend, and their two children.
Zak Pelaccio is the executive chef and partner of the critically acclaimed Fatty Crab, a Southeast Asian “joint” focusing on Malay Cuisine. His other most recent endeavors include Cabrito and the upcoming Fatty ‘Cue. Suka, his Malaysian-influenced London restaurant, won England’s Food & Travel “Best Asian Restaurant of 2007” award. Pelaccio has extensively traveled and cooked in Asia, working for a year at the renowned Seri Melayu restaurant in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and spending time in the kitchen of the Westin Hotel in Chiang Mai, Thailand. His culinary pedigree includes Union Pacific and Daniel in New York and The French Laundry in California. He was also the executive chef/partner at 5 Ninth, and chef at Chickenbone Café in Brooklyn.
Laura Shapiro covered food, women’s issues and the arts at Newsweek for 16 years, winning several journalism awards in the process. Her essays, reviews and features have also appeared in the New York Times, Condé Nast Traveler, Gourmet, Granta, The American Scholar, Gastronomica, Slate and many other publications. She is the author of Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century, Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America and Julia Child. During 2009-10 she will be a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Rica Allannic is a senior editor at Clarkson Potter Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. Specializing in illustrated cookbooks and narrative non-fiction on food and wine, she has edited such authors as Harold McGee, Bobby Flay, David Chang, Giada De Laurentiis, Al Roker, and Dale DeGroff. After graduating from Yale, she began her culinary career in Daniel Boulud’s kitchen before entering publishing.
Anne E. McBride is a PhD candidate in food studies at New York University, where her research focuses on the relation between nation, profession, and cuisine in the US. She wrote Bite Size and Chocolate Epiphany with acclaimed pastry chef François Payard, and is the director of the Experimental Cuisine Collective at NYU and of the Center for Food Media at the Institute of Culinary Education.
This event is part of Menus in the Media, a 2008-2009 working group that aims to study the culture of cooking by bridging the traditional barriers between serious scholarship and purveyors of popular culture, while recognizing the limits of both. Menus in the Media is directed by Krishnendu Ray, assistant professor in the department of nutrition, food studies and public health at NYU, and it is sponsored by the Institute for Public Knowledge.
This event is open to the public with photo ID.