Seeking the Magic of Alice Waters: Bookmark

By Jill Rosen, The Baltimore Sun

Oct. 3–>>>The Art of Simple Food

By Alice Waters

Clarkson Potter / 2007 / $35

If it weren’t for Alice Waters, would “organic” be a household word? Would restaurants be boasting about their locally caught salmon, their heirloom tomatoes, their artisan cheese?

Waters, the chef behind Berkeley, Calif.’s Chez Panisse, is credited with launching what has become a national awareness about where food comes from and how it’s grown.

With The Art of Simple Food, Waters has created not so much a cookbook as an introduction to her philosophy of food, a clinic in what she considers to be “the underlying principles of good cooking.” Eat locally and sustainably. Plant a garden. Conserve, compost and recycle. Remember food is precious.

“When you have the best and tastiest ingredients,” she writes, “you can cook very simply and the food will be extraordinary because it tastes like what it is.”

Unlike her previous books, Waters aims this one at the home cook — at beginners, even.

While at Chez Panisse she recently served dishes such as sea scallops and Manila clams in sweet herb brodo; cucumber gelee with tomatoes, chervil and tarragon; and plum ice cream profiteroles with plum caramel, here she scales back — way back.

It’s everyday stuff — spinach lasagna, beef stew, succotash, coleslaw, strawberry shortcake. Not at all ooh-and-ah fare.

And the book, with its simple layout and absence of photos, looks like a textbook and reads like Waters is teaching.

It flows like a 101 course, opening with fundamentals — how to stock a pantry, what equipment a kitchen shouldn’t be without. Then it’s on to building-block recipes — “essential” sauces, basic salads and broth — and suggestions on how people can incorporate these various concepts into everyday dishes.

Of the recipes I tried — ratatouille, crab cakes and butter cookies — I really only felt anything close to Alice Waters’ magic with the ratatouille.

I went to the farmers’ market the morning I cooked, and I hand-picked everything the recipe called for. I felt good about buying from local farmers, and geekishly enjoyed the whole coming-home-with-harvest-bounty thing.

When I made the crab cakes, I’m ashamed to say that I failed miserably at Waters’ order to make mayonnaise from scratch. I cheated with mayo I had at home (at least it was organic!) and the result was crab cakes that tasted quite nice, but didn’t hold their shape at all. I felt like I flunked Chez Panisse.

With the cookies, I slavishly followed Waters’ suggestions for unbleached flour — “far superior in flavor,” she says — and I avoided ultra-pasteurized milk because she won’t cook with it. I ended up with buttery, dainty — almost elegant — cookies. And even better, the dough can be frozen so I can bake fresh ones in 10 minutes.

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