My Recipe Book (part 2)

Part 2

More yellowed pages from my recipe book. Some of the recipes made it into my cookbooks.

When I worked at Chez Panisse in the 1980s and ‘90s, people would call us in the kitchen with questions about recipes in the restaurant’s cookbooks. In retrospect, it’s rather charming. I’d be working, rolling dough and peeling apples, and the phone would ring, and someone would ask me a question about making an almond cake or or wondering about the quantity of lemon filling in a lemon tart recipe.

Back then, people weren’t focused on substitutions or changing things, etc., as they are today. They just had baking questions, and we answered them. Although, sometimes the phone would ring at 8am in the kitchen, and I’d mistakenly answer it (back then, when people used regular telephones, we had phones that were connected to four different telephone numbers), and the person on the other end would be calling for a reservation. Since the restaurant only had a hundred seats, and since the restaurant is in an old house, there was no way to add more tables. That was when we started having a table in the kitchen so our friends could eat there (or sometimes, people would invite their gardener, their cousin, or once it was Jackson Browne and Daryl Hannah). I could write a whole book about that table…but since the table was next to the pastry department, whoever got seated there would spend the night offering a running commentary to what we were working on and continue to ask questions all evening long. It was a tricky balance to provide entertainment to people while making desserts for six hundred people.

People on the other end of the line were frantic, then relieved, that they got through…only to find out they’d reached the doughboy, not the reservation person. One person insisted I take their reservation, “But we’re calling from Australia!!” But I was busy churning ice cream, rolling out tart dough, melting chocolate, candying violets, peeling peaches, toasting nuts, and pureeing strawberries and didn’t have time to add “reservationist” to my job description. So I gave them the times the reservation lines opened, and went back to work.

Anyhow…

Before I wrote my first cookbook, Room for Dessert, I’d originally proposed to owner Alice Waters for me to do the next Chez Panisse dessert book, since Lindsey’s now-classic book, Chez Panisse Desserts, had been out a few years, and we had expanded our repertoire of desserts quite a bit since it was published. And people kept asking, er…calling for recipes. When I brought it up to Alice, she said, “You’re very different than us. Go do your own book.”