Always Home: A Daughter's Recipes & Stories: Foreword by Alice Waters

Sandy: This book is perfect for a foodie in your life - maybe you! Most lovers of food know of the Berkeley chef Alice Waters who almost literally created the restaurant farm-to-table movement with her unalterable insistence on fresh-grown and sourced ingredients.  Not only is her restaurant Chez Panisse famous, she’s created educational gardening programs for schools across the country and penned and cooked her way to over a dozen cookbooks. This is her story seen through the eyes of her only child, Fanny.  It is tender but true, and packed with recipes and art-worthy photographs. I loved it - and you and your foodie will too. The perfect WOW gift.

Swaddled in dish towels and set inside a huge salad bowl, newborn Singer (co-author, with Waters: My Pantry, 2015) was a regular visitor at Chez Panisse, her mother’s famed Berkeley restaurant, while Waters conferred with the manager or tasted dishes. “I don’t remember this, of course,” Singer writes, “but I feel like my disproportionate love of salad might have something to do with my early kitchen cribs.” Singer’s charming narrative, interwoven with Lacombe’s painterly black-and-white photographs, bursts with sensuous descriptions of tastes, fragrances, and textures as she recounts her “very rich and full and just a little bit unconventional” young life. Her remarkable school lunches featured greens with vinaigrette, kiwi in orange juice, and garlic toast that her classmates coveted. At home, even breakfast was transcendent: “a perfectly soft-boiled blue Araucana egg, with a marigold-hued liquid center into which I would delight in plunging buttered toast ‘soldiers.’” Instructions for making this dish, along with 59 other recipes—her mother’s garlicky noodle soup, her grandfather’s special pancakes, and, not surprisingly, several salads—add delectable details to the colorful narrative. Singer’s culinary adventures with her parents took her to the south of France as well as on a research trip of France’s great restaurants and wineries and because neither parent spoke French, Singer, who went to a bilingual French school, served as official interpreter at age 9. Waters, who has been the subject of much media attention and multiple books, including her own memoir, Coming to My Senses (2017), is lovingly portrayed throughout Singer’s book.