Cook-Along with the Clark: An Online Culinary Experience

Julia Rhoton, Chef Instructor and Culinary Arts Coordinator, UCLA

Did you know that the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library houses an extensive collection of cookbooks, handwritten recipe collections, and treatises on food from the 1650s to the 1950s? As we celebrate the Clark Library’s centennial during the 2026-27 academic year and showcase the many facets of its collections, join us as we cook along with Chef Julia Rhoton and learn how to create a recipe from the 1927 Southern California Home Economics Association pamphlet “Luncheon, Tea and Party Suggestions.”

Guests who register in advance will receive a detailed shopping list and a step-by-step recipe in order to cook along with Chef Julia Rhoton from the UCLA Teaching Kitchen. This hour-long virtual experience will allow participants to follow along in their own kitchens, learning to create a recipe that was printed one hundred years ago. Chef Julia will be joined in her campus kitchen with a few special guests, and together with everyone at home, participants will learn how recipes, cookbooks, and culinary education have evolved over the years, all while creating a delicious recipe from the time the Clark Library was founded. Participants should be prepared to follow along on a personal device like a laptop or tablet that can be set up somewhere out of the way, but still visible, in their kitchens.

Chef Julia Rhoton is a chef instructor and Culinary Arts Coordinator at UCLA. She leads the Teaching Kitchen Collaborative at UCLA, an interactive food education hub that teaches students culinary and nutrition skills. Chef Julia trained at Le Cordon Bleu California School of Culinary Arts and has worked in catering and baking in Los Angeles for the last twenty-two years. She received her degree in elementary education in 2018. She has been helping to instruct and manage the UCLA Teaching Kitchen programs since 2019, which have included workshops that support nutrition education for David Geffen School of Medicine students and UCLA Nursing students, classes in collaboration with the Food Studies Minor and Graduate Food Studies Certificate programs, outreach services in support of the Community Programs Office, and extracurricular activities for students through Recreation.

This event is free to attend with advance registration and will take place via Zoom. The registration form will be posted here approximately one month in advance of the program.

Image: On the left: Chef Julia Rhoton is the culinary arts coordinator of the UCLA Teaching Kitchen. Photo by Diana Koenigsber. On the right: California Home Economics Association, Southern Section. Luncheon, Tea and Party Suggestions. Los Angeles: [California Home Economics Association, Southern Section], 1927. Clark Library Press Collection; Press coll. Browne 081.