Preface

I started my cooking career in 1972 as chef of Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California. After two years I had landed on my feet and, looking around for ways to challenge the restaurant, I started a series of special monthly dinners, each one featuring a menu from a region of France. When, after a year, most of the regions had been used up, I turned to Morocco (we did two of those) and finally to Corsica, with great difficulty in finding anything Corsican that anyone wanted to eat. In those days Chez Panisse was a French restaurant, if with the stirrings of the as yet unborn California movement. So it was not unusual for me to be reading French or a book like The Epicurean, a “Franco-American Culinary Encyclopedia” by Charles Ranhoffer, which contains recipes he used at Delmonico’s in New York from 1862 to 1894. There I saw the title of a soup, Crème de mais verte à la mendocino— Cream of Green Corn à la Mendocino. What struck me about the recipe was that it took its name from a town up the coast from San Francisco. What, I wondered, were chefs in New York doing thinking about Mendocino in the 1890s? And then, like a bolt out of the heavens, the realization came to me: Why am I scratching around in Corsica when I have it bountifully all around me here in California? I looked further into the chapter on soups and saw the words “Cambridge” and “Portland,” and next to “Dubarry” and “Sévigné” I saw “Franklin” and “Livingstone.” We used to live in General Livingstone’s house in Brooklyn Heights, and could the “Franklin” be Benjamin?