Fabulous Cookies of Good Fortune

If you were truly lucky in the late 1970s and early 1980s, you were invited to Forneau’s Ovens in the Stanford Court Hotel to dine with its extraordinary owner/manager, Jim Nassikas. Likely to be at the table was one or more of Jim’s buddies—Danny Kaye, Jim Beard, Craig Claiborne—and an assortment of similarly smart, wicked, down-to-earth people for whom food, wine, and friends were all-important. For a novice Chinese cook, it was heady stuff.

The food was fabulous—little potato shells stuffed with American golden caviar, toasted hazelnut soup, tiny oysters flown in daily from Washington, and local birds and game roasted to perfection. This was California-American cooking before either came into vogue. But the thing that always touched my heart was the tray of miniature cookies brought to the table at the end of the meal. Filled as I was with conversation, food, and fine wine, they were irresistible. The flavors were so intense and the care in crafting each one so exact that they ended the evening on a spectacularly effervescent note—like a shower of exquisite fireworks.