Cooking
Whether browned in butter and stuffed with cheese or, as in this mushroom and eggplant yassa, simmered with caramelized onion and brightened with lime.
Did you think I was going to go away after one newsletter? LOL.
Today I’d like to explain my crush on white button mushrooms. To do that, I need to tell you a story about the friendship between Alice Waters and Marion Cunningham.
Alice Waters, as you probably know, started Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., and, basically, is the reason we can buy local, organic produce almost everywhere. Marion Cunningham was James Beard’s longtime assistant, a cookbook author and a champion of the home cook. Her target audience was people who thought that when a recipe says to toss apples in a bowl, they should stand across the room like cornhole players.
Marion brought James to Chez Panisse in 1974 and insisted the two meet. He wrote about it. It became famous.
Marion loved heavy heads of iceberg lettuce from the grocery store. This, as you can imagine, frustrated Alice. That kind of lettuce, Alice told me, symbolizes all that is wrong with modern American food production: “It’s omnipresent. It doesn’t have a season. It doesn’t have a sense of place.”
One year, Alice gave Marion little heads of crisp lettuce grown from French seeds as a birthday present. She knew Marion was clinging to a taste and a texture she remembered from childhood.
Marion was moved, but her stand on iceberg wasn’t.
“All you have to do is eat at Chez Panisse and you know you aren’t doing it right,” she told me when I was a reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle. “But iceberg is meaningful to me. Alice has tried to reform my eating and buying habits in very tactful ways, but somehow I haven’t changed very well.”
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.