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Amazon.co.uk Review
Alice Waters is one of America's best known chefs. First noticed in the 1970s, she inspired a generation of food lovers with her passion for freshness and the best ingredients. Her influence helped infuse menus all over the US with dishes rooted in Mediterranean cooking, often with a sunny, Californian twist. Dishes at the casual café, located upstairs in the same enchanting house as Chez Panisse, her more formal restaurant in Berkeley, California, include Wood Oven Baked Porcini Mushrooms, Tuna Confit and Meyer Lemon Éclairs. Waters suggests making the mushrooms in your fireplace if you can, although recipe directions are for a conventional oven. Typical of the ingredient-driven cooking Waters encourages, the stunning tang of the éclairs requires Meyer lemons: a cross between a lemon and an orange, which are now exported beyond their native California. However, the fresh tuna steak gently simmered in olive oil with garlic, fresh thyme, and fennel seeds and served with barely cooked green beans and aïoli, a pungent garlic mayonnaise, is sublime even made in an apartment kitchen. Her point is that you should use her recipes as guides, letting them inspire you to make the most of locally produced, seasonal foods in your area.
Alice Waters is an enchanting raconteur and an activist as well as a chef. In The Chez Panisse Café Cookbook, she weaves her beliefs about food as pleasure, sustenance, art and politics with over 200 recipes. Bringing you into the community she has been instrumental in creating to preserve the earth's resources as well as to provide great ingredients, Waters tells about the producers who share her passions.
They respect the environment, using only sustainable production methods while delivering the freshest possible product, be it free-range poultry and eggs, acorn-fed pigs, impeccable oysters or organically grown fruits and vegetables.
Jewel-coloured Art Nouveau-style illustrations by David Goines give this book the same distinctive look as earlier Chez Panisse cookbooks. --Dana Jacobi
Review
Waters shares her Chez Panisse vision: that all of the restaurant's ingredients be certifiable as "organically grown" by the year 2000. A culinary purist, Waters devotes herself to cooking with fresh, seasonal, organic ingredients, relying upon a choice network of purveyors, producers, farmers, fishmongers, and ranchers. The clear and incisive recipes range from simple (Fresh Mozzarella Salad) to elaborate (Headcheese, a jellied meat dish with one small pig's head and two pig's feet) and time-consuming (15-day Home-Cured Pancetta), with an emphasis on incorporating seasonal bounty--for example, Minestra Verdissima (spring); Venetian-style Pickled Sand Dabs (summer); Wild Nettle Frittata (autumn-winter); Spicy Baked Crab (winter). Despite Waters's militant stance on using organic ingredients and her exquisite attention to ingredient details, she suggests only two pantry essentials: kosher salt and quality olive oil. Aspiring to achieve a higher food karma, Waters successfully delivers a charmingly erudite yet accessible reference.Publishers Weekly, August 16, 1999Casual, unpredictable, delectable--so run the recipes offered up in food visionary Alice Waters's latest confection. With chapters on everything from vegetables (Artichoke, Cardoon, and Endive Salad) to fish and shellfish (King Salmon in Fig Leaves) to sweets (Mulberry Sherbet), Waters's inspired tome comes generously accented with lively, useful notes on the farm-fresh fare she helped pioneer.ELLE magazine, September 1999
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Lovely recipes of varying complexity that are well explained in a lovely edition. The book is divided into sections on Vegetables, Pork, Shellfish etc. While I certainly won't be trying all the recipes any time soon I've found the book immediately incorpoated into the kitchen where it's serving me well. Since Berkley, California, is several thousand miles from home it's the best way I've found to enjoy some the wonders of Chez Panisse (if you do find yourself In Berkley or San Francisco it's well worth a visit). The only downside to the book is the lack of photos. if it hadn't been for this conspicuous abscence I'd have given it 5 stars!
9 of 20 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Although some of the recipes are a little intimidating, this is a fun cookbook that makes you feel like you are cooking like one of the best chefs of the bay area.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
16 reviews
83 of 89 people found the following review helpful
You Didn't Expect To Cook With This, Did You?
27 Dec 2003
Format:Hardcover
My foodie friends in Berkeley jokingly refer to Alice's books as "food porn". I have actually cooked a couple of the recipes and, while they are correct, they are exhausting. In Berkeley, CA, where the author's restaurant is thriving, it is easy to get the interesting and seasonal ingredients that are described in the book. However, the complexity of preparation of the recipes makes the book less acessible to most readers and home cooks.
The illustrations are lovely, as are the narratives. It is fun to just read the book and fantasize about being a hemp-clad, kinder version of Martha Stewart. However, it is not the most practical cookbook to stick in the cookbook holder when putting the family's meal together.
The real lesson behind this book is that foods that are in season taste better, are less expensive, and are fun to eat. Changing the menu as the seasons change keeps the experience of dining and cooking interesting and entertaining. Also, buying seasonal food is better for the environment than flying foods out of season from another hemisphere.
Take that wisdom, go to your store and get seasonal fruits and vegetables and use an easier and more accessible cookbook like, "The Joy of Cooking". But do keep this one on the coffeetable for those days you want to fantasize about being a world class hippie chef.
69 of 75 people found the following review helpful
Chez Panisse Cafe Cookbook
11 Oct 2000
Format:Hardcover
I was beyond excited to receive this cookbook after my wife and I had the intense pleasure of dining at Chez Panisse for our anniversary. However, while it contains fascinating background information on both the history of the Cafe and its purveyors, its recipes seem unduly impressed with themselves and somewhat precious. The esoteric nature of many of the ingredients provokes a cumulative eye-rolling effect, and to tell the truth, some recipes (Spaghetti with Herb Meatballs) that you would expect to elevate the mundane end up tasting... well, mundane. Great for reading, so-so for cooking. I love you Alice Waters, but I think I'll stick to eating your food.
82 of 91 people found the following review helpful
Disappointed
12 Jun 2001
Format:Hardcover
I have a lot of respect for Alice Waters. She plays a positive, constructive role in promoting excellent,healthy food in this country. I wish, however, she had take more care over the quality of the product that has her name on it, The Chez Panisse Cafe Cookbook. Obscure ingredients intrigue me and, because I live in northern California, I'm likely to find a lot of them. What annoys me is sloppy editing that can lead to their wastage. Too many of the recipes are unclear. My complaint has nothing to do with my experience as a cook. The flours in the pizza dough recipe could have been described more clearly. Where was the editor? Why didn't Ms Waters' read her galleys closely? I want to point out one more recipe to show how the small things matter. In the recipe that calls for bottarga (dried tuna or spelt roe that comes in small quantities, costs a fortune and can only be found at an Italian supermarket in Sacramento, as far as I know), saffron and lemon over spaghetti, the directions are to shave the bottarga over the spaghetti. Now that I've made bottarga with spaghetti and lemon (but not the saffron) several times, there is no way that shaving the bottarga (at $40 for a couple of ounces!) helps melt it over the spaghetti. Why wasn't grating called for? It's a minor detail, but when expensive ingredients are involved, I'd like to have confidence in the cookbook writer when I try it.
So, go back to Jean-George, Marcella, Lynn and even Jamie. Leave this one behind. Alice's food is best experienced in her restaurant.
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