Anne Willan, one of the world’s leading authorities on French cooking, will visit the University of California, San Diego on November 7 to discuss her new memoir, “One Soufflé at a Time: A Memoir of Food and France.” Willan will be discussing her book at 5 p.m. at the UC San Diego Faculty Club with her coauthor, Amy Friedman. The event is sponsored by the UC San Diego Library, and is free and open to the public.
Guests at the event will be able to sample libations and hors d’oeuvres from recipes included in the book. In “One Soufflé at a Time,” Willan, who founded and runs the celebrated La Varenne Cooking School, tells her story of the food-world greats—including Julia Child, James Beard, Simone Beck, Craig Claiborne, Richard Olney, and others—who changed how the world eats and who made cooking fun. She also writes about how a sturdy English girl from Yorkshire was able to overcome the highly closed male world of French cuisine, and then went on to found and run her now legendary cooking school.
Following their talk, Willan and Friedman will be on hand to sign copies of their book. The UC San Diego Bookstore will have books available for purchase.
Willan, a recipient of the James Beard and Bon Appétit Teacher of the Year awards, is the author of more than 30 cookbooks, including most recently “The Cookbook Library: Four Centuries of the Cooks, Writers, and Recipes That Made the Modern Cookbook,” which won the Jane Grigson Award for outstanding literary writing. Willan was inducted into the James Beard Foundation’s Cookbook Hall of Fame this year for her outstanding body of work.
Willan’s visit is sponsored by the UC San Diego Library and its Special Collections & Archives, the repository for the American Institute of Wine and Food (AIWF) Culinary Collection, which includes more than 6,000 books, cookbooks, manuscripts, and other materials documenting culinary history dating back to the 17thcentury.
About the UC San Diego Library
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