In this text, Alice Waters and her cooks take the reader upstairs at Chez Panisse, to the casual cafe. Many recipes from the cafe menu are collected together in this text for the home cook.

Reviews

Waters shares her Chez Panisse vision: that all of the restaurant's ingredients be certifiable as "organically grown" by the year 2000. A culinary purist, Waters devotes herself to cooking with fresh, seasonal, organic ingredients, relying upon a choice network of purveyors, producers, farmers, fishmongers, and ranchers. The clear and incisive recipes range from simple (Fresh Mozzarella Salad) to elaborate (Headcheese, a jellied meat dish with one small pig's head and two pig's feet) and time-consuming (15-day Home-Cured Pancetta), with an emphasis on incorporating seasonal bounty--for example, Minestra Verdissima (spring); Venetian-style Pickled Sand Dabs (summer); Wild Nettle Frittata (autumn-winter); Spicy Baked Crab (winter). Despite Waters's militant stance on using organic ingredients and her exquisite attention to ingredient details, she suggests only two pantry essentials: kosher salt and quality olive oil. Aspiring to achieve a higher food karma, Waters successfully delivers a charmingly erudite yet accessible reference.Publishers Weekly, August 16, 1999Casual, unpredictable, delectable--so run the recipes offered up in food visionary Alice Waters's latest confection. With chapters on everything from vegetables (Artichoke, Cardoon, and Endive Salad) to fish and shellfish (King Salmon in Fig Leaves) to sweets (Mulberry Sherbet), Waters's inspired tome comes generously accented with lively, useful notes on the farm-fresh fare she helped pioneer.ELLE magazine, September 1999