Join us for a special evening with Adrian Miller and Deborah Chang in celebration of their award-winning book, Asian Heritage Chefs in White House History: Cooking to the President’s Taste. Chefs cooking for the president — in the White House kitchen, for state dinners, on presidential yachts, and at Camp David — help define American cuisine on a national scale. Asian Heritage chefs with roots in China, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand have been cooking for presidents for over a century and continue to do so today.

Learn more about these chefs from Adrian Miller and their recipes, Asian and American, from Deborah Chang at this important conversation moderated by Ernabel Demillo from CUNY-TV.

What makes a food “American”? The answer might be sizzling on a street corner.

Join food historian and Nourishing Networks author Ashley Rose Young for a story-filled evening exploring how everyday foods—from New York hot dog carts to New Orleans gumbo—take root, evolve, and become part of the American table. In conversation with Jennifer Berg (NYU), Young will share vivid stories from her research, revealing how migration, labor, and community shape the flavors we know and love.

Come thirsty: the evening includes a tasting of a classic New Orleans drink.

Join MOFAD for an evening celebrating Lao food, culture, and history as we host Saeng Douangdara, founder of Saeng’s Kitchen and author of The Lao Kitchen. Saeng will be in conversation with Jujubee, a Lao American drag queen, reality television personality, and recording artist. Together, they will explore the personal journey behind the book, the resilience rooted in Lao refugee stories, and how food can be a joyful expression of one’s truest self.

Join us for a special evening celebrating one of Italy’s most influential culinary texts, The Talisman of Happiness by Ada Boni. Bestselling cookbook author, podcast host, and Smitten Kitchen founder Deb Perelman and publisher Michael Szczerban—who spent a decade bringing this landmark work to English—will explore Boni’s legacy and relevance to cooks today.

First published a century ago, The Talisman of Happiness is the cornerstone of Italian home cooking, the mother of all Italian cookbooks to come. Famously, the book taught Marcella Hazan how to cook, shaping generations of Italian cooks in America. Yet Boni’s emphasis on seasonality, thrift, and respect for ingredients is strikingly modern. Amid weeknight time crunches, tight budgets, and endless recipes online, The Talisman of Happiness is a reminder that cooking should be less about perfection and more about pleasure.

Perelman and Szczerban will discuss the journey of bringing this classic to the US, the world Boni captured, and how her lessons resonate today. This event offers a rich look at a pioneering woman in food, and how culinary history is preserved, translated, and brought to life for new audiences.

Join us for an early celebration of Culiniaria: Women of Color Rewriting Our Food Stories, a dynamic entry in the evolving field of feminist food studies. Editors and professors Farha Ternikar and Janaka B. Lewis will be in conversation with contributor Armani Stewart and moderator Willa Zhen to discuss how gender, race, class, geography, and religion all shape the ways women use food.

We need this volume in the lexicon of food studies research and analysis. It challenges us to think differently—not just about food but about the connectedness of food. Food and wellness; food and social care; food and caste, religion, and apartheid; food, dance, and performance; food and modern language, media, and communication; food journalism; and food and the performances of joy. This is an exciting volume because it includes all these vantage points and an array of methods and methodologies to advance these narratives.

— From the foreword by Psyche Williams-Forson

Join us for a MOFAD book club event as we discuss Leah Eskin’s new novel, Like Wafers in Honey, which was inspired by the life and recipes of Edda Servi Machlin. Machlin’s important cookbook The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews (along with its sequels) offers the compelling story of a vanished community — Machlin's family, along with the other Jewish townspeople of Pitigliano, known as Little Jerusalem, fled during World War II. Leah will be joined by Sari Kamin to discuss the process of converting Machlin’s recipes for the modern cook all while showing how memory, food, and storytelling can resist erasure.