Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook
Alice Waters, 2017
Potter/TenSpeed/Harmony
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307718280
Summary
The long-awaited memoir from cultural icon and culinary standard bearer Alice Waters recalls the circuitous road and tumultuous times leading to the opening of what is arguably America's most influential restaurant.
When Alice Waters opened the doors of her "little French restaurant" in Berkeley, California in 1971 at the age of 27, no one ever anticipated the indelible mark it would leave on the culinary landscape—Alice least of all.
Fueled in equal parts by naivete and a relentless pursuit of beauty and pure flavor, she turned her passion project into an iconic institution that redefined American cuisine for generations of chefs and food lovers.
In Coming to My Senses Alice retraces the events that led her to 1517 Shattuck Avenue and the tumultuous times that emboldened her to find her own voice as a cook when the prevailing food culture was embracing convenience and uniformity.
Moving from a repressive suburban upbringing to Berkeley in 1964 at the height of the Free Speech Movement and campus unrest, she was drawn into a bohemian circle of charismatic figures whose views on design, politics, film, and food would ultimately inform the unique culture on which Chez Panisse was founded.
Dotted with stories, recipes, photographs, and letters, Coming to My Senses is at once deeply personal and modestly understated, a quietly revealing look at one woman's evolution from a rebellious yet impressionable follower to a respected activist who effects social and political change on a global level through the common bond of food. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—April 28, 1944
• Where—Chatham, New Jersey, USA
• Education—University of California-Berkeley
• Currently—lives in Berkeley, California
Alice Waters is the visionary chef and owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California. She is the author of four cookbooks, including Chez Panisse Vegetables and Fanny at Chez Panisse.
In 1994 she founded the Edible schoolyard at Berkeley's Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, a model curriculum that integrates organic gardening into academic classes and into the life of the school; it will soon incorporate a school lunch program in which students will prepare, serve, and share food they grow themselves, augmented by organic dairy products, grains, fruits, vegetables, meat, and fish — all locally and sustainably produced. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Casually and conversationally, the book relates [Waters's] education as a sensualist. The book is a prequel, the story before the story everybody knows, an account of what she was doing before she was bitten by a radioactive spider and began to exhibit strange new powers.
Pete Wells - New York Times Book Review
(Starred review.) [An] intimate and colorful memoir.… Readers will be charmed by Waters’s … anecdotes and her descriptions of friends and customers … [which] bring the era and the restaurant to the mind’s eye in vibrant detail.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) The author writes vividly about the major influences in her life…, the artistic circle of friends she surrounded herself with in Berkeley, and the roles they played in her life and business.… An engaging and entertaining memoir. —Phillip Oliver, formerly with Univ. of North Alabama, Florence
Library Journal
[Waters] does an artful job of showing how even the most apparently unrelated experiences helped lead her to her profession. She is also quite frank about her failures; her relationships…. An almost charmed restaurant life that exhales the sweet aromas of honesty and self-awareness.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for Coming to My Senses … then take off on your own:
1. What impression of Alice Waters have you come away with after reading Coming to My Senses? How would you describe her: her personality, drive, creative impulses? What do you find most impressive? Did anything about her disappoint you or irritate you?
2. If you're old enough to have lived around the time Waters was growing up, say within 15 years or so of her time (before the culinary arts exploded in this country), were your experiences of homemade cooking similar to Waters' — the use of canned and frozen vegetables, bottled dressings, iceberg lettuce?
3. Talk about Waters' awakening in France after her sophomore year in college. Did you ever have the kind of eye-opening (or taste-bud exploding) moment that she did?
4. Waters writes of her dislike for "the hippies' style of health-food cooking." Why? Considering that both were striving for healthier food and earth-based produce, how did Waters see her own style as different from theirs?
5. Talk about Waters' somewhat "irregular" youth. How would you describe it — the drinking, backseat sex, cutting classes, basically flaunting the rules of discipline. How much do you think that background prepared her to go up against the prevailing stodgy, hierarchical culinary culture?
6. Discuss the inspiration — both the people and ideas — behind Chez Panisse and the way in which Waters eventually realized her vision. In other words, talk about how Waters got the restaurant up and running. What most surprised you … and what did you most admire in Waters' story?
7. If you've read memoirs by other culinary greats, perhaps, Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, how does this book compare?
8. What influence has Alice Waters had on how we Americans think about food and cook it, both professionally and at home? Consider your own personal culinary style and food preferences, too.
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)