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Chez Panisse Café Cookbook is the one among the restaurant's books that you can actually cook from, and that comes down to which floor it is about.
Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley in 1971 and, for all practical purposes, founded both California cuisine and the entire farm to table philosophy. The expression has become so overused today that it is easy to forget someone had to come up with the idea in the first place, and this is where it happened. Downstairs, the restaurant serves a single set menu that changes every day. In 1980, the café opened one floor above, with à la carte dining, a wood fired oven and a considerably more relaxed approach. That is where most people eat, and it is the café that this book documents.
Waters wrote it together with David Tanis, who was chef at Chez Panisse for decades and for many years divided his time into two halves, six months in Berkeley and six months in Paris. He has since become a notable figure in his own right, with a column in the New York Times and several books of his own.
The 144 recipes are organised by season, which is the only logical way to do it in a kitchen where the menu is written according to what arrives in the morning. There is pizza from the wood fired oven, house cured pancetta, salads built around a single excellent ingredient, food grilled over fire and desserts such as apricot bread pudding. The level of ambition is consistently pitched so that a reasonably experienced home cook can manage, unlike restaurant books that are mostly there to be looked at.
The illustrations are by David Lance Goines, who has designed a poster for every anniversary of Chez Panisse since 1971, creating one of the most recognisable graphic identities in the restaurant world in the process.
If you want to understand where the modern approach to ingredients and seasonality comes from, this is the source, and unlike most sources, it is actually useful.
Number of pages: 288
Number of recipes: 144
Co authors: David Tanis, Fritz Streiff
Illustrations: David Lance Goines
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 9780060175832
Language: English
First published: 1999
The Kitchen Lab Selection
Alice Waters was 27, had studied French cultural studies at Berkeley and had no restaurant experience whatsoever when she opened Chez Panisse in 1971. The hard part was not wanting to cook with what was in season, plenty of people wanted that. The hard part was getting hold of it in seventies America, where food was more industrialised than anywhere else in the world. The supply chain did not exist, so she built it herself. She sought out growers, paid them to grow particular varieties and put their names on the menu.
How much that mattered is clearest in who has passed through that kitchen. Judy Rodgers, who later wrote the Zuni Café Cookbook, learned there. Samin Nosrat started out clearing tables there. Both are among our selected titles, and they are two of many.
Nor did she stay in the restaurant. In 1995 she started the Edible Schoolyard, a school garden programme where children grow and cook their own food, now running in several countries. In 2014 she received the National Humanities Medal, that is to say an award for cultural achievement and not for cooking. That lies outside what a chef normally does, and it is why she is hard to compare with anyone else.
There are direct lines of descent from her to the whole of modern New Nordic cooking, where the ingredient from close by is allowed to decide, even though Alice Waters did as little as possible to the ingredient and the Nordic version is about transformation.
