LOS ANGELES – On June 27, 2022, Barbara Hansen featured this recipe at TableConversation.com, her international food blog. Hansen was a James Beard award winner and one of the first food writers to bring attention to international cuisines in Los Angeles through her years of work at the Los Angeles Times. She covered everything from Thai, Armenian, Japanese, Korean, French, Italian, Greek, Indian, Oaxacan, Mexican, and Salvadoran food, and published a cookbook on California cuisine. In 1969 alone, she wrote about Israeli consulate dinners, soul food, Egyptian cuisine, Colombian food, the regional antojitos of Central America, and Filipino restaurants, to name a few.
Hansen died at the age of 90 on January 28, 2023 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center following a fall she had suffered earlier.
A supporter of Mexican and Asian cuisine, she said. “I love these other cultures and cuisines. We are lucky in Southern California with the variety of amazing, diverse ethnic foods available.” She shopped all over for fresh fruits and vegetables, from local farmers markets to supermarkets, where the produce was always fresh. She kept a carton of gochujang, a red pepper paste, on hand in the kitchen to spice up dishes, and added hong cho, pomegranate flavored vinegar, to her drinking water. (Note: gochujang and hong cho are both Korean ingredients).
Born in Hollywood on October 30, 1932, she lived in Hancock Park, in the same house she grew up in, for her entire life. After earning a B.A. from Stanford University, she went on to earn a master’s in journalism at UCLA before joining the Los Angeles Herald-Express, where she was relegated to writing in the women’s section. Her six best-selling books include: Mexican Cookery; Southeast Asian Cooking: Menus and Recipes From Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines; Cooking California Style; Good Bread, and a revised edition of the Southeast Asian cookbook with new format and recipes. By request, she wrote Korean Restaurant Guide: Los Angeles. She was an avid world traveler and considered an authority on Indian and Mexican food. She wrote two blogs, www.tableconversation.com and www.eatmx.com, that is dedicated to Mexican food.
In the mid ’60s, Hansen was recruited by Los Angeles Times food editor Jeanne Voltz to help out with the section. Hansen’s insatiable curiosity predated even the arrival of cilantro in Los Angeles, an ingredient she eventually found in Chinese markets labeled “Chinese parsley.” In the decades that followed, Hansen’s precise, deep reporting documented waves of immigration to Los Angeles: Thais, Armenians, Koreans, Indians, Oaxacans, and Salvadorans, whose cuisines she embraced.
She was a keen admirer of easy single bowl meals: “With everyone’s busy schedules today, these dinners are simple to shop for and make. You layer everything you need for a complete meal in a single bowl, in this case, a starch (rice), protein (shrimp) and veggies (baby bok choy, mushrooms) combined with a sauce. Cook the rice, and keep it warm while stir-frying the shrimp and choice of veggies. Put the shrimp and vegetables on top of the rice. It’s that fast.”
