Eating - Jason Epstein [47]
Alice came to the table—a glowing half-pint, as she seemed in those days, with a huge smile—but I also sensed a wariness: the principled Berkeley purist, aglow with organic purity, girding herself against the corporate publisher from New York. Over soufflés and coffee, we agreed on terms that I wrote out on a scrap of paper. When I asked Bob Scheer about this recently, he said I might have used a paper napkin, but paper napkins were not Alice’s style. Two years later, we published Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook, its handsome design supervised by Alice as meticulously as she plated her entrées. Her professionalism made her a joy to work with. With this book and those that followed, Alice redefined American culinary culture, French-inspired but based on fine local ingredients from artisanal producers with straightforward preparation and fine presentation.
We became and remain friends. On a summer weekend a few years later, she visited me in Sag Harbor, carrying a large transparent plastic box neatly filled with rows of peeled red, yellow, and green bell peppers in oil. She had been invited to Craig Claiborne’s grand summer lunch party, to which each guest was asked to bring a dish. Since she could not safely have checked the peppers through to New York from San Francisco, she must have carried them on her lap all the way east, an indelible image of Alice in my mental scrapbook.
Craig Claiborne, the late food editor and restaurant critic of The New York Times, lived in East Hampton in a house that consisted almost entirely of a single large room with a restaurant kitchen at one end that opened onto a vast dining area—in effect, a private restaurant. Craig’s bedroom was a cubicle behind a flush door at the far end of the dining room, and there were similar cubicles in the basement for his overnight guests. Craig liked to entertain, and twice a year he invited his favorite chefs, food writers, and friends to his house for large parties. His house was deep in a scrub-pine forest, and on New Year’s Eve, his guests in formal clothes, and the chefs in toques bearing pots of cassoulet from their New York restaurants, made their way through the snow to be greeted by Craig in his blue-and-white-striped apron offering Dom Pérignon and Krug at the kitchen door. The deeper the snow and the colder the night, the more cheery the party became as Craig’s guests settled gradually into a champagne buzz over their caviar, cassoulet, roast goose, and soufflés. By midnight, most of us were too far gone to drive home, but somehow we managed. I checked the East Hampton Star later that week to see which of us had landed in jail the next morning, but no one had.
Alice’s invitation to Craig’s annual summer party meant that she had been accepted into his pantheon. On the day she arrived, we had lunch in my garden: Gardiner’s Bay oysters on the half-shell, and lobster rolls with curly potato chips, in dappled sunlight under my frail old cherry tree. This was her first experience of a Maine lobster roll, and she was suitably impressed. The following day, we drove over to Craig’s, and soon I lost track of Alice in the crowd. Finding an unoccupied space on a couch, I asked the handsome woman with snow-white hair who had already taken refuge there whether I could join her. She was Maida Heatter, whose dessert cookbooks I had collected and treasured. I have forgotten what we talked about, but when I got up from the couch to find