Lunch With Alice Waters, Food Revolutionary
TOP PICK Alice Waters, at the Union Square Greenmarket, wants to bring her message to novice cooks.
WHEN Alice Waters is coming over to cook lunch, the first thing you do is look around your house and think, I live in a dump.
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Times Topic: Alice WatersDiner's Journal: Special Post
Alice Waters responds to readers' comments about Farm Aid in her first blog post.
GATHERER Alice Waters selected food from the Union Square Greenmarket.
With the food from the Union Square Greenmarket she made a compote of fruit.
Then you take an inventory of the pantry. The bottles of Greek and Portuguese olive oil, once a point of pride, suddenly seem inadequate. And should you hide the box of Kellogg’s Raisin Bran and jettison those two cans of Diet Pepsi?
At the end of the afternoon, when the last peach was peeled and my kitchen was stacked with dirty pots, it didn’t really matter. Ms. Waters was either too polite or too distracted to mention what was in my cupboard. It turns out she travels with her own olive oil, anyway. And homemade vinegar. And salt-packed capers.
Ms. Waters had agreed to spend a hot September day shopping with me at the Union Square Greenmarket and schlepping back to my first-floor apartment in brownstone Brooklyn to make lunch.
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More Video »The menu was dictated by two things: the market’s offerings and the recipes in her forthcoming book, “The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons and Recipes From a Delicious Revolution” (Clarkson Potter, October).
The book is more to Ms. Waters than an instructional guide. It is her attempt, through recipes, to save the American food supply. She wrote it because she still believes a plate of delicious food can change everything.
“We’re trying to educate young people and show them how to use that lens of ingredients as a way to change their lives,” she said. “Otherwise, it would be just another cookbook.”
The book is Ms. Waters’s ninth since she started Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, Calif., 36 years ago. Unlike the others, the new book does not use the name of the restaurant. It reads more like an organic “Joy of Cooking,” designed to instruct novices on how to make a perfect vinaigrette but also intended to be as essential to experienced cooks as the final Harry Potter installment was to 12-year-olds.
“Food can be very transformational and it can be more than just about a dish,” she said. “That’s what happened to me when I first went to France. I fell in love. And if you fall in love, well, then everything is easy.”
(Currently, Ms. Waters is not in love, though she longs for “a good pal to be in the world with.”)
By all measures, Ms. Waters should be relaxing at this point in her life. She is 63. She has held court with princes and presidents. A year ago, with some prodding from her partners at the restaurant, she pulled back from the daily work at Chez Panisse. Now she is trying to become better at leveraging her role as the high priestess of the local, sustainable food revolution.
Although she is enthusiastically mocked in some circles for the impossible goals she articulates in a wispy cadence, chefs who once sniffed that her methods were more about shopping than cooking now agree that the heart of great food is selecting the best ingredients.
So why does Ms. Waters still seem so restless, so unsatisfied, so unrelentingly demanding that she can’t show up at someone’s house and trust that they might have the right olive oil?
Because true, radical change — a country full of people who eat food that is good for them, good for the people who grow it and good for the earth — is simply not coming fast enough.
She is dismayed by the presidential candidates and said she has vowed not to vote for anyone who does not talk about the awful state of the food system.
Her pioneering Edible Schoolyard project, in which schoolchildren grow their own lunch and teachers use gardens for science lessons and recipes for social studies, is thriving in Berkeley, has been planted in New Orleans and may expand to Pittsburgh and Brooklyn. But in more than a decade the concept has not permeated the nation’s thinking on education.
Although many school districts are trying to improve the food they offer, the results have been unsatisfying, she said. It’s useless to coat frozen chicken nuggets with whole-wheat bread crumbs and fill vending machines with diet soda. Only a complete and radical reform will do, and it must be led by the president of the United States.
“These are little Band-Aids,” she said. “The whole body is bleeding and we must stop it. We simply must.”
A revolution in how we eat means respecting food and the people who produce it, she said. In her world, every aspect of this revolution, be it related to agricultural policy, the environment or obesity, must begin with a plate of lovely, locally produced food and work backward from there.
She’s also concerned about whether the Slow Food organization, which began with protests of a McDonald’s in Rome, will ever become as influential here as it has been in Europe. Although she has helped the United States organization grow to 171 chapters since its inception in 2000, she would like Slow Food and the concept of eco-gastronomy to be as much a part of the political discussion as foreign policy.
Earlier this year Ms. Waters announced an ambitious gathering called Slow Food Nation, planned for next May in San Francisco. She wanted it to be the Woodstock of food, drawing people from around the country. Slow Foodies would erect architect-designed street restaurants and green kitchens serving low-cost food. There would be a film festival and, if all went well, the dedication of a wholesale sustainable farmers’ market on a city pier.
Much of the work of raising the estimated $5 million budget fell to Ms. Waters, who is not great at it. And like many of her visions, it ran up against the reality-based system under which much of the world operates. So, earlier this month, the Slow Food organization decided to do a little less.
“We all looked at each other and said, Why don’t we just do a picnic?” Ms. Waters said.
That kind of compromise — a word she hates — is rare.
“I am an optimist of the first order,” she said. “I just got dipped in Berkeley in 1964 and I believe.” Of course, now she envisions a national picnic, maybe, with a blanket that stretches across the country. (The Slow Food organizers who will be doing the work are scheduled to meet this week to determine exactly what the public event will look like.)
Ruth Reichl, the editor of Gourmet, said the remarkable thing about Alice Waters is that she simply doesn’t stop: “She’s relentless in that way revolutionaries are.”
Ms. Waters’s biggest flaw, Ms. Reichl said, is that she doesn’t always take advantage of her strength and that she still operates in an old-fashioned, Berkeley kind of way. For example, Ms. Waters wants Farm Aid to hold a concert in San Francisco, working with Slow Food. To help make that happen, she mailed a handwritten note to Willie Nelson’s wife, Annie.
“She is a major power who still operates in a lovely, minor way,” Ms. Reichl said.
Which is probably why she was in my kitchen, stumping for her book like a first-time author.
The book is deceptively simple. As she writes, “Good cooking is no mystery.” Most recipes seem to be built on salt, black pepper, olive oil, fresh herbs and garlic. But they have to be specific kinds, like chunky gray sea salt for boiling water. “If you are not buying the right ingredients, this is going to taste like any other food,” she said.
The attention to detail is maddening and enlightening. She offers lovely notes on cooking eggs, and her passage on serving fruit for dessert is so thoughtful and useful it reads like gospel. She devotes a page and a half to making bread crumbs properly.
But in parts of the book she veers past purity to madness. Halfway into a recipe for gazpacho, while soaking ancho chili, grating tomatoes and mashing it all in a mortar and pestle, you start to look at the blender with longing.
Ms. Waters doesn’t like machines much, although she is partial to the toaster oven. She doesn’t use a computer and has only cursory knowledge of her cellphone. She wrote the book largely by dictating her notes to Fritz Streiff, her longtime co-writer, and collaborated with Kelsie Kerr, who has cooked at Chez Panisse, and Patricia Curtan, who also illustrated the book.
But she knows almost all the recipes by heart, which made it easy to figure out lunch.
Walking through the Greenmarket with her is an exercise in excess. She has never met a fresh herb she didn’t like, and I still have plenty of hyssop in my refrigerator to prove it.
Her good friend Doug Hamilton, a film director and producer, came along to help carry our reusable cloth shopping bags. He was a godsend. When you visit farmers with Alice Waters, you come home with a lot of stuff.
Farmers kept trying to give her baskets of food, but she insisted on paying because she believes contributing money to family farmers is a moral obligation. (In this case, The New York Times paid for everything.)
People literally started shaking when they realized they were shopping next to Alice Waters. When she offered to visit the Queen’s Hideaway, a homestyle restaurant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the owner, Liza Queen, waved her off, already nervous at the thought of it.
“Please don’t,” Ms. Queen said. “If you come in, we’d probably lose it.”
Back at my place Ms. Waters insisted we unpack and spread out everything on the dining room table, to take stock of what we had and to make a plan. It took almost every dish, basket and bowl I had.
Ms. Waters just sat with it all for a while. When things become discouraging, she said, she dreams of escaping to Sicily to sell produce from a little table that might look just like this one. Then she called her daughter, Fanny Singer, to tell her how pretty it all looked.
Once that was over, we got down to cooking.
Ms. Waters may not call herself a chef, but the girl can cook. She quickly pared small, late-summer artichokes and braised them in olive oil, thyme and water. She simmered sausage-shaped La Ratte potatoes and blanched three kinds of beans.
She threw the eggs into a strainer, then submerged them in the blanching pot, timing it so beautifully that the yolks just barely hung together when we sliced them open.
We warmed some olives with chili, olive oil and garlic while she got busy whisking her own personal stash of olive oil into what would become the centerpiece of the meal, an aioli made with garlic she smashed with salt in my mortar and pestle.
Truthfully, she’s a little messy in the kitchen. She’s firm, too. She chastised me for not having a spider to dip out the blanched vegetables. And she made me start a compost bucket, even though I have precious little dirt around my patio and a continuing battle with thuglike squirrels.
What ended up on the table was a platter of vegetables and eggs with heirloom tomatoes she deemed way too watery, all to be dipped into a big bowl of that glimmering green aioli. We heated some olive bread in the toaster oven and brought out a little plate of lemon cucumbers Mr. Hamilton had cut up.
It was a simple and beautiful thing.
Then she got up, sliced some peaches into a bowl with perfect late-season strawberries and blueberries she said reminded her of times she spent as a child in Maine. Over it all, she poured a syrup made by cooking down sugar, water and golden raspberries.
It was a hot day, so we headed into the air-conditioning to drink lemon verbena and mint tisane. She was sweaty, splattered and, she told me, quite happy to have been surrounded by good food all day. Because that’s how change starts.
“This kind of little gathering in the backyard is what reinforces our dedication,” she said. “That we can do something simply and easily with an unlikely group of people and all be in the same place because of the food on the table is how it happens.”
Her literary agent and her book editor eventually picked her up. I went to the back porch, ignored my urge to crack open a Diet Pepsi, and tried to figure out where I was going to put the compost pile.
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