MY NEW BOOK AND SOME OLD ONES

When asked last night by some friends what I was now ‘cooking up,’ I said a new book. More than 60,000 words on the successes and failures of cooking and traveling worldwide. To which they replied “Well what other books have you published?”

I had to stop and think. 

But first some bio:

“In 2001, Wine Spectator, describing Tower’s stint as the co-owner and first chef of Berkeley’s nascent Chez Panisse, called him “the father of American Cuisine,” as he was largely responsible for the restaurant’s early rise to fame, for its famous menu nights, and for initiating the now-common practice of replacing fancy culinary and menu nomenclature with plain English.

In 2000, he moved to New York City and wrote several books, including California Dish, his page-turner of a memoir, and Jeremiah Tower Cooks. It was then excerpted in Vanity Fair with a double-page spread of Jeremiah sitting by his pool in Mexico where he now lives – writing and pursuing his passions for both scuba diving and architecture.”

Chef Zach Engel, James Beard Rising Star Chef 2017 of Shaya, New Orleans, James Beard Foundation best restaurant in America, 2016: “If you’re a cook go read his books and then his cookbooks. Because knowing where we came from helps us to move to where we need to be.”

Facebook entry: “The idea that cooks may be coming in to work these days and not understand who Jeremiah Tower is and what he accomplished worries me. I try to teach cooks about who our predecessors are because they are the ones who have given us the opportunities to shine in a modern age of cuisine. I even went and worked for a guy because he worked at JT’s Stars just so I could be connected to his pedigree.”

Here is some of it.

BOOKS

Jeremiah Tower’s New American Classics. 1986

Jeremiah Tower Cooks: 250 Recipes from an American Master. 2002

The Great Book of French Cuisine: Revised Edition: by Henri-Paul Pellaprat and Jeremiah Tower. 2003

America’s Best Chefs Cook with Jeremiah Tower. 2003

California Dish: What I Saw (and Cooked) at the American Culinary Revolution. 2004

A Dash of Genius. On Auguste Escoffier. 2012

Table Manners: How to Behave in the Modern World and Why Bother. 2016

Start the Fire: How I Began A Food Revolution In America. 2017

A best cookbook James Beard Award.

ALAIN DUCASSE: “Jeremiah Tower has been a cornerstone of American cuisine for the last twenty-five years; his standard of excellence and his imagination serve as examples to us all. Jeremiah Tower Cooks is not only a visionary reflection of today’s cuisine, but it brings together the essence of this culinary maestro’s excellence!”

DANIEL BOULUD: “This book provides the reader with a wealth of information, and I enjoyed the delicious recipes as well as the wry explanatory text. Jeremiah Tower’s erudite references to other cookbooks and gastronomic luminaries have made me rethink my entire culinary library—this book will be one of its cornerstones.”

JACQUES PEPIN: “From Chez Panisse to the Santa Fe Bar & Grill to Stars – my favorite brasserie in San Francisco – the food of Jeremiah Tower has always satisfied my belly and my soul. He was there from the start and is more qualified than anyone else to tell the story of the American food revolution of the past thirty years.”

DANNY MEYER: “I am glad to have this riveting, frontline perspective, which is at once fascinating, illuminating, and poignant. Those of us who have built American hospitality careers over the past couple of decades owe a major debt to this bush-whacking pioneer of product, pleasure, and promotion.”

GOOGLE BOOKS: “In this companion volume to the PBS series "Cooking with Master Chefs," Julia Child introduces sixteen of America's talented chefs from different parts of the country and interprets their recipes for the home cook. With the help of more than eighty color photographs we see the chefs at work in home kitchens and we learn the individual techniques that make their signature dishes so delicious -and so workable. For example, from Jeremiah Tower (Stars, San Francisco), three innovative ways with chicken.

PUBLISHER JOHN WILEY: “This companion book to the landmark twenty-six-part PBS series America’s Best Chefs Cook with Jeremiah Tower presents a candid portrait of fourteen James Beard Award—winning chefs as seen through the eyes of Jeremiah Tower, the legendary chef, author, and acclaimed pioneer of American regional cuisine. He takes a fascinating culinary journey around the country, visiting celebrated chefs to reveal how they work with ingredients and techniques to articulate a culinary style and sensibility that is uniquely their own.”

Excerpt:

“I have been obsessed with Escoffier since I was sixteen at King’s College School in England. My drama teacher gave me Ma Cuisine for having played Algernon Moncrieff in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest. I thought it a curious choice, but I read it every night under the bed covers with a flashlight after lights out. And was entranced. Later, in Harvard College and cooking for friends, I graduated from Ma Cuisine to Le Guide Culinaire. I worked through it enough so that when I moved to a little house in Cambridge in my senior year, the first dinner I gave was pure Escoffier.

Dinner for Friends, Cambridge, 1965

Caviar Blinis

Frozen Zubrovka

Consommé Madrilène

Salmon en gelee aux truffles

Pouilly-Fume 1962

Filet de Boeuf perigourdine

Chateau-Neuf-du-Pape 1957

Peches Rose-Cheri

Asti Spumante

Coffee

Sercial Madeira 1884

On graduating in 1965 I bought the Vyvyan Holland English translation of Ma Cuisine. I thought it fitting that its translator was the son of the author of the play in which I appeared eight years before and for which I had been given the original book. Now I could read and understand all the technical bits in French that I had not understood before.

When upon my return one afternoon in February 1970 from the Harvard Graduate Design School, I received a two-hour notice that ballet stars Margot Fonteyn and Richard Cragun were coming to dinner at my house. I was ready to meet the emergency. My brain was already filled with Escoffier. I had read the books. I knew that the Sunday on which Escoffier hade taken over the Savoy kitchens, all the ingredients he thought were there had been destroyed by the outgoing chef. He didn’t panic. So neither would I. There was no food in the house and no time for sauces except fast ones. I rushed to the store. The menu became smoked salmon rillettes with toasts (fifteen minutes), roast ribs of beef (shove it in the oven) with Escoffier’s creamed spinach, green salad, raspberry and lemon sherbets (bought), butter cookies (also bought), coffee, and chilled Cointreau, both by itself and poured over the ices. The sauce for the salmon was a mayonnaise (very fast to do) with the fat from its skin and lots of black pepper. The sauce for the beef was merely its roasting juices, defatted, reduced with some stock I had in the freezer, and perfumed with old Madeira.

Several lunches and dinners followed while I finished graduate school, and it is with memory of the power, impact, and simplicity of those classic dishes that I now start these articles about Escoffier. Still unanswered, however, is the question, why anyone would want to read about a chef who wore formal wear and high heels in the kitchen.  Or who modernized restaurant kitchens while bemoaning the disappearance of wood in their stoves.

Since Escoffier revolutionized and modernized menus, the art and practice of cooking, and the organization of the professional kitchen as well, the answer is as simple: because cooking and restaurants in America would not be what they are today without him. Because the principles he taught, lectured, and wrote about in Europe and America are the foundation of all that is taught in culinary schools and their best restaurants. And also, because he taught the English to eat frogs and Americans to turn from T-bones to filet of sole with lobster sauce, Tournedos Rossini, and Peche Melba.”

PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY: “Like a culinary Zelig, Tower seems to have popped up during key moments in modern food history. He was chef at Chez Panisse in the 1970s and is often credited with inventing “California cuisine.” This Renaissance man of the culinary world has an opinion on everything, from frying eggs to aging game birds. An initial chapter of basic instructions is appropriately titled “Delights and Prejudices.”

BARNES & NOBLE: “Thoroughly updated by James Beard Award-winning chef Jeremiah Tower, this is the Le Cordon Bleu founder’s classic cookbook and guide to French cuisine.

In the nineteenth century, Henri-Paul Pellaprat founded Le Cordon Bleu. In the twentieth century, his landmark cookbook, L’Art Culinaire Moderne, was translated into English and acclaimed as the most comprehensive and authoritative book on French cooking and gastronomy ever written. This complete revision and updating by James Beard Award-winning chef Jeremiah Tower is a reference cookbook that continues to shape great chefs and great cooking in the twenty-first century.

Included are 2,000 recipes covering every aspect of gastronomy from sauces, soups, fish, grillades, and salads, to soufflés, cakes, and traditional French desserts. This new edition includes more than 600 easy-to-follow techniques and timesaving tips, and a complete lexicon of French cooking terms. Unparalleled in its scope and the authenticity of its information, The Great Book of French Cuisine remains a definitive work, the perfect reference for both amateurs and professional chefs, to be treasured and consulted throughout a lifetime of cooking.”

DWIGHT GARNER, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW: “An amiable and frequently witty guide to dining room etiquette.”

Excerpt:

“Whenever you dine with others, if the purpose is to enjoy the conversation and company, the food can be just okay. It really isn’t about what’s served, but, rather, the guests, the décor, and the conversation. If the conversation is lackluster, you might as well eat alone off a tray in front of Game of Thrones. When the conversation sags, there are always these three topics. Long considered taboo, they often make for the most interesting conversations. But dive in at your own risk.

Politics: It can be fascinating to discuss affairs of state—if you are sure that everyone has the manners to stay calm. If you’re at ease with your beliefs, let others be with theirs. And unless you are certain you are surrounded by others who like heated conversations, abort if things turn nasty. It’s a dinner, not a debate; a time to learn, not to lecture.

Religion: As with politics, if you are content in your religious skin, let others be in theirs.

Sex: Sex is an acceptable subject when it is about other people, kind, funny, and spoken of with an air of astonishment.”

AMAZON REVIEW: “Widely recognized as the godfather of modern American cooking, Jeremiah Tower is one of the most influential cooks of the last forty years. In 2004, he rocked the culinary world with a tell-all story of his lifelong love affair with food [California Dish] and the restaurants and people he encountered along the way.

In Start the Fire, this revised edition of his memoir, Tower shares with wit and honesty his insights into cooking, chefs, celebrities, and what really goes on in the kitchen. No other book reveals more about the seeds sown in the seventies, the excesses of the eighties, or the self-congratulations of the nineties.”

FILMS

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: “He was the original. He was the first chef in America that you wanted to see in the dining room. He was the guy who transformed American menus from what they were to what they are now. He’s a hugely compelling personality, a dangerous man.

He’s the history of everything. I mean, cautionary tale, inspiration. It’s all there. It’s a great story as well as an historical correction that needs to be made.” Jeremiah Tower’s larger-than-life personal presence belies his poetic talent.”

“We’re talking about a pioneer. He changed the world already. Remember, we’d been playing catch up with Europe for a long time. Here’s the first guy to say, “We’re as good as them; in fact, in many ways we’re better. We can do this, we can attribute ingredients and recipes to regions of America.” No one had done that before. I just think that combination of iconoclastic, driven — seducer, creator, innovator, ego — as well as the times he lived in, I don’t see that repeating.”

LUCKY PEACH magazine, 2016: There is almost no more compelling man than Jeremiah. He’s like James Bond. He’s really sexy; he’s really smart; he’s really educated; he’s a really good cook. When his restaurant Stars was at its peak, Jeremiah would walk in and people—boys and girls—swooned. When he would come over and talk, he was clearly sexy and important and international and fresh.”