Maite Gomez-Rejón
The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino is inviting you to join them on Thursday, February 11, on “Taste of Art: Women in the Collections,” a live Zoom event where educator, writer and cook Maite Gomez-Rejón shares the culinary history of the Middle East, as deliciously captured in Claudia Roden’s “A Book of Middle Eastern Food.”
Maite Gomez-Rejón is an art and culinary historian and founder of ArtBites, a video series of small “bites” where she explores the nexus between culinary history and The Huntington’s collections. She earned her BFA from the University of Texas at Austin, her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Grande Diplome from the French Culinary Institute in New York City.
Gomez-Rejón has worked in the education departments of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum. She also has taught art history at the college level, and has worked as a private chef and caterer.
The book’s author, Claudia Roden, is a Cairo native who moved to London in the early 1960s and began sourcing recipes from fellow refugees and immigrants, especially those who longed for the kind of food they grew up with.
Before “A Book of Middle Eastern Food” was published in 1968, most Middle Eastern cookbooks were English translations of medieval recipes. Roden’s book is part cookbook, part cultural anthropology, and is considered a landmark in culinary history.
During the webinar Thursday, participants will learn to make inspired recipes such as falafels, baba ghanoush, and a rosewater gin cocktail.
The event will start at 5 p.m. The link to the Zoom event, and recipes, will be sent to attendees in their registration confirmation email.
For more information and to register, go to www.huntington.org/events/
For membership information, visit www.huntington.org/
