Food Trends 2008
Toronto: January 2008
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The Master of Simple Food
by Malcolm Jolley

Saint Alice they call her, or just Alice. And everyone who cooks on the coasts of the United States, or its mid-country culinary outposts like Chicago and New Orleans, and everyone in Vancouver and Toronto, and now London, know exactly who Alice is. She pretty much invented local food, at least as it’s practiced in English. Even the most xantham gummed molecular gastronomist wouldn’t dare speak against her creed of the freshest, most perfect ingredients – all pay lip service, if not strict homage.

Food people know Alice Waters because she is the First Foodie. She turned her dinner parties into America’s most famous restaurant, Chez Panisse, and invented its most famous cuisine: Californian (the mesclun salad version, not the Wolfgang Puck chicken on pizza version – though Puck did get his pizza oven from her supplier). From across the continent they make the pilgrimage to her arts and crafts temple on Shattuck Avenue and look nervously into the open kitchen hoping that she is there that night tasting the soup or will emerge to chat with a table of grey haired Berkeley professors with their elbows on the table.

Then, there is the Edible Schoolyard and The Chez Panisse Foundation. This is the true Saint Alice, digging deep into the soil to nourish the children. This is Alice The First Food Advocate, if not strictly chronologically, then at least most followed. Not to mention Slow Foods pioneering leader in America. There is much to revere. So much, in fact, that there is (and seemingly always has been) a bit of a backlash. “That’s not cooking, that’s shopping”, huffed a French chef watching The Saint at some benefit in the 70s. The remark is often attributed to Julia Child wrongly, but understandably as Child thought Chez Panisse un peut de trop with its house forager.

At the heart of the backlash, or the resentment, or tiredness with Waters is the charge that she is not a really a chef. Her restaurant has nearly always had someone else cooking in it. Most famously Jeremiah Tower, whose over the top Gallicism was way more Escoffier than escarole and whose 2004 autobiography Dish makes it clear who he thinks wore the toque. Waters’ counter was Thomas McNamee’s very, very much authorised biography Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, which while defending Waters’ chops, made it clear her true mission was to extend her Montessori training to gastronomy, teaching the masses the sensual pleasures of food from the front of the room. A balanced, if bitchy, view came between the two books in David Kamp’s The United States of Arugula. Kamp’s Chez Panisse chapter (excerpted in Vanity Fair here) makes it clear that Alice Waters was at the centre of the scene, whether her hand was on the stirring spoon or not.

All of this is to say that Alice Waters is a very famous (at least by bourgeois standards) food person, who most agree has made a terrific impact on the way we eat. But – and this the question that entered my head the moment I saw the yellow and red book cover – does this mean you would want 400 pages of cookbook from her? Especially when she has been involved (if not completely author of) eight previous cookbooks? It’s not a shoppingbook right? (Actually, it sort of is.) And what does she mean by the title Art of Simple Food? It sounds pretty grandiose and somewhat undercut by it’s more modest subtitle: Notes, Lesson, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution.

Oh dear, I thought as I leafed through the first chapters with titles like 'Getting Started', 'What to Cook? ' and 'Four Essential Sauces' (can you guess which four?) She’s gone full circle and written the baby-boomer Joy of Cooking. Patricia Curtan’s pencil sketch illustrations didn’t dispel the idea that this is what you would give your kids when you packed them off to College. And there is quite a bit of that in this book. For instance, this classic sentence: “Sautéing is an exciting cooking experience.”

But once you get past the ‘how to stock your larder’ stuff (which seems to be required in a cookery texts these days anyway – may as well get it from America’s greatest sourcer), you get into the food and the technique. As much lip service as there is to simple food, and easy recipes, there is little in the current literature that bears it as beautifully as The Art of Simple Food. The woman gets it. She gets it in ways that made me rethink what it means to get it. Simple food isn’t food made by simpletons, it’s Zen. It’s not just ‘Rocket Salad’ it’s ‘Rocket Salad with Parmesan’.

The art, which her recipes so ably demonstrate, is to achieve a complexity of flavour through restraint. There’s no point adding 20 more ingredients to a plate of perfectly ripe heirloom tomatoes (or anything to the perfect peach she famously served Bill Clinton), but so many chefs and home cooks who claim to be her disciples, at least in spirit, seem to miss this. Or make the parallel error of thinking that simply made broccoli is limited to a drip or drizzle of olive oil. Waters shows us that the art is in the garlic, butter and lemon with the option of chili. Or the orange zest in the beef stew, or the sage leaf pressed into the pork chop.

The last entry in Holly Hughes annual compilation Best Food Writing 2007 is from another master, John Thorne. In ‘Simple Cooking, Then and Now' he resolves to be a "single kitchen artist-monk": not to be a slave to passing trends or browsing tastes and books, but to look for connections and continuities in what he cooks every day. In this way, Waters’ Art of Simple Food is a virtuous system as much as a collection of recipes. But the system isn’t closed. You can do what you like with her notes, lessons and recipes. There is simple satisfaction in merely reading a master, maybe even delicious revelation.

Malcolm Jolley's Food Trend Predictions for 2008 can be read here.