Book Reviews

Fanny at Chez Panisse

by Alice Waters

Several months ago I had the pleasure of going to Chez Panisse with my friend Nancy Denney-Phelps to meet Alice Waters, the queen of California cuisine. Nancy, a board member at KALW, the PBS station owned by the San Francisco School Board, had hatched a brilliant idea for the station's daily reading of the school lunch menu, included by the necessity of relating the broadcasting program to the schools. She has solicited readings from a fascinating group of willing volunteers, from the lesser known local chefs to the stars like Alice Waters, and including unexpected participants like Father Guido Sarducci and Studs Terkel.

Nancy always schedules these recording sessions in the mornings, before I will rise from bed unless I must absolutely cater a lunch. A few days before she was going to Chez Panisse, she called to invite me to join her, prefacing the invitation with "I know you'll get up early for this..." and she was right.

We arrived at the restaurant at 10 a.m., and after a pleasant introduction, Nancy wisked the gracious Ms. Waters off to tape the reading. Still somewhat asleep, I spent a dreamy half-hour in the kitchen watching the staff prep for the day, talking with them as they sorted through the produce, picking out any not-beautiful bits, if they could find them. I had read that the staff at Chez Panisse is a group of friends, all engaged in their tasks with obsessive pleasure; it is no wonder that their food is so fine, and it was an honor to be around it, and quite fun, even if I was slightly in the way.

After their recording session, Alice Waters told us that she was particularly interested in reading the KALW lunch menu because she is passionately involved in the way children eat. "Well," she said, "you are what you eat," and so she's become involved with improving the cuisine in our school system.

As we were leaving, Alice Waters gave each of us a copy of her new book, Fanny at Chez Panisse, and Nancy and I looked at each other, laughing, and whipped out our pens. Gracious to our good-bye, she signed them for us, and I was, by that time, ecstatic to have gotten out of bed. When I made it back into bed that night,. I brought the book with me, and could not go to sleep, the early rising notwithstanding, until I had finished it.

Fanny at Chez Panisse is written from the point of view of Ms. Water's lucky little girl, Fanny, who has grown up from infancy in the world of her mother's world-famous restaurant. Fanny tells us what it's like to be part of that world, from the baby who hides in a stock pot playpen in the kitchen, to the bigger girl who will go in to help the dishwasher hand wash the dishes when the power is out and business goes on by candlelight, and who helps with the gathering of ingredients, including the covert picking of wild fennel and mustard in Berkeley lots. She tells us about special events, like the annual Bastille Day dinner, full of garlic, at which everyone is very French and kisses each other. Of course she tells us about the foods she loves, and gives the recipes for them; each dish is easy enough for a child to prepare, and yet worthy of a sophisticated palate.

As I read through the book, I could not help but recall the narrator of Remembrance describing his childhood days in his aunt's kitchen in Combray. He, like Fanny, grew up in an atmosphere in which the best of food was served, looked forward to, and eaten in convivial mutual enjoyment. And long before the food had reached the table, young Marcel, like Fanny, had hung around in the kitchen to watch the preparation, and was familiar with the source of each ingredient, and the reasons for that dish appearing on the day's menu.

The charm of Fanny at Chez Panisse has stayed with me, inevitably. I knew how much the other day when I found myself staring at the wall of breakfast cereal in the local market, trying to decide which one to bring home. Off to the side I saw these tiny boxes of expensive granola, labeled "Chez Fanny" and gravitated to them. Beneath the boxes, a staff person had affixed a hand-written sign: "Alice Waters makes this, so you know it's got to be good." I took it home, and it, like her restaurant, her books, and her warm personality, most certainly is.

"...a brill because the fish-woman had guaranteed its freshness, a turkey because she had seen a beauty in the market at Roussainville-le-Pin, cardoons with marrow because she had never done them for us in that way before, a roast leg of mutton because the fresh air made one hungry... spinach by way of a change, apricots because they were still hard to get, gooseberries because in a fortnight there would be none left, raspberries which M. Swann had brought specially, cherries, the first to come from the cherry tree which had yielded non for the last two years, a cream cheese... an almond cake... a brioche because it was our turn to make them for the church." -Swann's Way

The Memory Triggering Book

by Robert M. Wendlinger

While I was on the phone one day, a major preoccupation, my housemate John came in and threw the book review section of the Sunday paper on my desk, pointing forcefully to a review for this book, published, as I read, by Proust Press. The person at the other end of the line lost me for a minute as I read excitedly about this work, and my very next call was to the office of Proust Press.

Mr. Wendlinger very kindly sent me a copy of his book, and I went through it in the manner suggested, doing the exercises, drawing the maps, making the lists, at least for the first half of the book. A huge spate of the catering lifestyle made indulging in the hugeness of memory an impossible luxury, but I followed the evolution of the process in fits and starts, and found myself living once again in those early, fascinating, difficult years of youth.

I have been blessed all my life with a remarkable memory. When I was five years old, I was cast in a role for a local San Francisco television show, written, produced, directed and acted in, and sets designed by friends of my father's, and my father himself. The wonderful woman, Anna de Metrio, who spearheaded this project, was an old character actress from Los Angeles, who my father met when he worked as a foreign language dubber for MGM. Between the scenes when I would appear myself, I lingered close to the set and whispered forgotten lines to the panicking actors.

In my wild post-university days in Los Angeles, life and its characters had a most literary quality. Everyone said I should write a book about it, and perhaps some day I will. The memories of our lives together were considered my province; frequently friends would say to me "You'll remember this, won't you?"

As a writer who's kept journals from childhood (although mostly in the years when I was unhappy) and who has spent more than one period of my life discussing the details of the past on an analyst's couch, I found the exercises in The Memory Triggering Book remarkably easy. Every now and then I would be stumped by things that I was horrified not to have at easy reach in the memory banks: the position of certain things in the kitchen of one of our houses, or the name of my first heart-throb in college. Following the author's advice, however, I brought them back in short order, and felt relieved.

I must say that in my own life, I am inclined to give much more thought to the present and the future than I give to the past, those years when I suffered a great deal more over emotional traumas. My childhood, however, was a rich education, and I am glad to have it conveniently within reach. What has really slipped into oblivion is the list of professors I had in college, but they, for the most part, were simply unmemorable.

The Memory Triggering Book is a valuable resource for any writer who suffers from writers' block, or for any individual who has not spent years in the care of a therapist. The memories we hold within us are the stuff of which we are made, and by re-examining them, we give ourselves a better self-awareness, the prospect of a richer future.

Proust Press, 6239 College Avenue, #303, Oakland, CA 94618

Telephone: 510.845.5551

"Then a recollection that had not come back to me for a long time -- for it had remained dissolved in the fluid and invisible expanse of my memory -- suddenly crystallised." -The Fugitive

P Segal