Deep-Fried Brains with Sherry Butter Sauce and Fried Capers

One rainy April evening in 1986, Alice Waters, Jonathan Waxman, Mark Miller, Bradley Ogden, and Lydia Shire crowded into the tiny, ill-equipped kitchen of the Cafè de l’Acadèmia on a cobblestoned side street in the Barri Gotíc in Barcelona to improvise a dinner for about forty of the Catalan capital’s most prominent restaurateurs, winemakers, and journalists. Assisting the five chefs in the kitchen were two food writers from Los Angeles, Ruth Reichl and Charles Perry. I was there, too—but I