Alice Waters is a living legend of the American restaurant industry. When she opened her restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley in the early ‘70s, her approach to food was game-changing. She helped push chefs in American fine dining away from a century-long obsession with western European foodways, showing that Americans don’t need to focus exclusively on imported delicacies and techniques to make good food when there are farmers growing delicious ingredients in our own backyard that we can enjoy by presenting simply.
I’ve spent a lot of time with Waters’ books and I actually also studied Waters’ career and influence to write my undergraduate thesis, so I have a lot to say about her. (Full disclosure, my last job was at a nonprofit in NYC inspired by the one she founded in Berkeley.) So this feature is going to be in two parts: this week I’ll review the cookbook, and next issue I’ll talk more about Waters’ philosophy and legacy. My hope is that by exploring Alice Waters’ impact on American food culture I can lay the groundwork for you of my general attitude about both food and food media.
The Art of Simple Food was my first savory cookbook, so I might be biased, but I really do think it’s an excellent starting place for anyone really excited about cooking. The book is organized in two sections, “Starting from Scratch: Lessons & Foundation Recipes” and “At the Table: Recipes for Cooking Every Day.”
The first section is broken up into chapters like “Into the Oven,” “Slow Cooking,” and “Tarts, Savory and Sweet” which feature a few dishes in the title category. But rather than just recipes, these chapters include in-depth descriptions of how making the recipe should go. The recipe then follows. For example, the chapter on tarts includes a multi-page description of how pastry making works: why the dough should be worked minimally (to limit gluten development, leading to a more tender final product), why the butter should be kept cold (so it melts in the oven, creating air pockets that lead to flaky layers), and even how to roll out the dough successfully. Only after all that do you get the actual recipe for the tart.
The second section, “At the Table,” is more like a normal cookbook, with chapters based on different dish categories. Now that you’ve learned the basics of chicken broth from “Broth and Soup” in the first section, you’re ready to make chicken noodle soup in the second section. The book has a great breadth of basic recipes like biscuits, mashed potatoes, roast beef, and chocolate cake. I also appreciate that it’s not totally obsessed with only French and Italian styles of cooking (which are pretty popular among ingredient-focused chefs): there are very American recipes like pork spareribs; Mexican dishes scattered throughout, which makes sense for a chef based in California; and a few cameos from other cuisines.
The book does have a few other unusual characteristics outside its structure. The cool one is that recipes are written in the action form, which means that rather than a list of ingredients and then a set of instructions, the ingredients are included in line in the recipe, bolded. This prevents you from having to look back and forth between the ingredient list and instructions and lends itself to a more fluid cooking experience. The other thing you should know is that the book has no photos, just some illustrations throughout (but not how-to ones). With the long technique explanations, you’re basically getting the thousand words rather than the picture.
All that being said, I love this book. I’ve made the aforementioned chicken noodle soup recipe many times when I was sick (but without noodles because I’m a pasta-hating freak). My partner and I have also made the risotto recipe in this book so many times the book opens to that page on its own: it yields a creamy, soft, and comfortingly cheesy rice that we make constantly in the winter months. I learned how to make reliably flaky pie crust from this book, and what a braise was and how to make an easy and delicious one with chicken legs.
The way the first section of the book lays out techniques across different types of dishes helps you understand why recipes you encounter out in the world ask you to do certain things, and also gives you baseline information a less thorough recipe writer might expect you to already know. And the second section of the book is so comprehensive that you could probably cook exclusively from this book for a year and not feel like you had to go out of your way to source unusual ingredients or learn really difficult techniques.
The Art of Simple Food is a great cookbook for someone who wants to develop a well-rounded knowledge of cooking techniques and learn a wide range of basic dishes. It will give you the confidence to tackle all kinds of cooking projects, big or small.
In the next issue, we’ll dive into Alice Waters’ cooking philosophy, its status as the mainstream gospel among chefs and food writers, and what that means for home cooks.
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