Always Home

December 1, 2019
Alice Waters' daughter recalls growing up with an abundance of food, beauty, and warmth. 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. Although sweet confections sometimes appeared for dessert--there are recipes for persimmon pudding and quince meringue ice cream--more likely the end of a meal was "the most perfect handful of raspberries" from their own garden or the sweetest fig. Only a perfectly ripe fruit met her mother's exacting standards. 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; her father, she adds, is "a committed oenophile and professional wine merchant." 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. Her mother, writes the author, "is at once a kind of spiritual compass and a salve." An intimate homage to an iconic restaurateur.

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Starred review from January 13, 2020
In this wondrous memoir-cookbook hybrid, Singer (My Pantry), daughter of Chez Panisse founder Alice Waters, recalls her upbringing in the restaurant business. Above all, she writes, the book is a celebration of her mother. Waters’s signature passions are highlighted: the Edible Schoolyard Project, open-fire cooking (whether inside the restaurant or the governor’s mansion), and the Chez Panisse children’s book (which featured an eight-year-old Singer). Waters’s quirks are revealed: her tendency to drink from bowls rather than mugs and to “jettison her silverware and delve in with her fingers,” expressing “a primal impulse to be closer to the thing she was eating, to be more sensuously acquainted.” The appreciation of beauty, “the total fabric of my existence,” and flavor, “the prism through which most things were seen or dissected or understood,” guide their summers in Provence, food-and-wine tours of the Pyrenees, and a “special tasting in the caves of Krug, the illustrious champagne house.” A final mother-daughter road trip from Telluride, Colo., to Berkeley before graduate school has them bonding and collaborating on impromptu meals (a recipe for egg fettuccine boiled in river water and tossed with tomatoes and parmesan is one of dozens throughout the book). Singer’s language is read-out-loud luscious, and her culinary coming-of-age story savory and sweet.

February 1, 2020

Equal parts memoir and cookbook, this new book from Singer (My Pantry) offers a loving tribute to her influential mother, Alice Waters, a James Beard Award winner and executive chef at Chez Panisse. Through intimate family stories and recipes, Singer recalls growing up in the family-centered atmosphere of Chez Panisse, where mingling in the kitchen with cooks and their children was the norm. She revisits her parent's separation around age ten when her mother provided comfort through her school lunch: a homemade, elegant meal always accompanied by a bouquet of flowers and herbs evoking a spring garden. Unsatisfied with Yale's food accommodations, her mother installed a chef's starter kitchen in her daughter's dorm room, subsequently establishing the university's first sustainable food program. Much attention is also given to the family's frequent culinary travels in France; going from Paris to rural locales, from vineyards to top restaurants, staying with friends and learning about terroir. Included are 60 recipes. VERDICT This heartwarming, feel-good, highly recommended memoir will appeal to fans of cooking, culinary travels, and family ties.--David Miller, Farmville P.L., NC

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