Tower - Start the Fire

One day in 1976, Jeremiah Tower was leafing through some old cookbooks, seeking inspiration for the next in a series of French regional menus at Chez Panisse, a modest restaurant in Berkeley, California, where he was the chef. In a turn-of-the-century collection of recipes by Charles Ranhoffer, the French chef of Delmonicos in New York, Tower encountered something unexpected....

I saw the title of a soup, Crme de Mais Verte la MendocinoCream of Green Corn la Mendocino, he writes in Jeremiah Towers New American Classics, published in 1986. Why, Tower wondered, did a recipe from a French chef in New York refer to a Northern California town? Like a bolt out of the heavens, it came to me: Why am I scratching around in Corsica when I have it bountifully all around me here in California? The recipe, Tower discovered, was nothing but American ingredients prepared according to French cooking principles. I could not contain my exhilaration, he wrote, over what I beheld as the enormous doors of habit swung open onto a whole new vista. And I began to compose an American regional dinnerCalifornia, not Corsica. Chez Panisse had been open for five years. No one had yet uttered the term California cuisine. Proprietor Alice Waters and her friends were just cooking the way Americans do at home, using American ingredients to make recipes from classic cookbooks. They took a lot from France, the occasional dish from Italy or elsewhere in the Mediterranean, and a little from mom. But the elements were there, and inspiration met opportunity. Chez Panisses previous menus had been written in French, but this one Tower couched in English. Significantly, the wines offered were from California as well. The menu crystallized Waterss vision of the sort of food Chez Panisse should servegreat local ingredients prepared classically.

Wine Spectator,2001

To all the people whose backs I climbed over, and all the players who made this history.

Especially Lucius Beebe, my hero since college days. If anything is worth doing, he once said, it is worth doing in style and on your own termsand nobody goddamned elses. I wanted to be as James Villas described him in a Gourmet magazine article called Lucius Beebe: The Last Magnifico: the randy and dandy boulevardier, the eminently polite, generous, witty, and kind gentleman, who was not out to impress anybody and simply relished a civilized evening on the town over a hot bird and a cold bottle.

To Kit Wohl of Wohl & Company in New Orleans, who urged me to rewrite it and showed me the way. To Linda Ellerbee, who pushed her to ask me. To Dan Halpern at Ecco for saying yes as well as Kimberly Witherspoon at InkWell Management for urging them to. Especially to Anthony Bourdain, who made this rerun possible, and who, with Kitchen Confidential, let me know I wasnt the only one.