One of my first cookbooks, Irving Davis’s A Catalan Cookery Book: A Collection of Impossible Recipes, was printed the year I bought it in Paris in 1968. Only 165 copies were printed, so it could not have turned out to be very influential, but it was for me. It gripped me then as totally as it does now.
During my first years at Chez Panisse, I relied a lot on this book for inspiration, and from it I developed the recipe for
